Phaenomenta: Flensburg, Germany

Phaenomenta is a small but highly inspired and growing science center in the seafaring city of Flensburg (population 86,000), located on a beautiful harbor just south of the Danish border.

The origin of Phaenomenta is telling: Prof. Fieser, a professor of education at the University of Flensburg, had become concerned over the increasing disconnectedness between people and the phenomena of nature around them. So he began having his students build phenomena-based hands-on exhibits as a way to get them closer to concepts of natural science and to help them learn how to teach their students more effectively. The students helped public visitors use the exhibits, and soon the concept became so popular that the university said “Enough!” They told Prof. Fieser that the exhibits had to go because of the noise and commotion of increasing numbers of visitors clamoring to see the exhibits on campus.


The city of Flensburg saw value in the educational and tourism value of the exhibits and provided space for the next phase of Phaenomenta. Meanwhile, a group formed to build more exhibits, all with the philosophy of direct contact with real phenomena. The project grew and grew, and small buildings adjacent to the first were acquired and connected together. Today, the center has about 15 regular staff, 25 part-time students, and 4 interconnected houses full of exhibits plus a storage space across the street and additional space in an adjacent masonry tower remaining from the wall that once surrounded the city. A major addition is in construction that will add more exhibit space.

The building is one block from the harbor on a narrow cobblestone street, and parking will likely be an increasing issue as attendance grows. Inside, the building is a labyrinth of floors and ramps that invite playful discovery. Lighting is for the most part natural, and despite the small rooms, exhibits are placed around the floor in a way that encourages multi-sided group interaction and learning.


The exhibits are for the most part simple and an important aesthetic here is that they are built on simple gray bases that reduce the attractiveness and visual impact of the cabinetry and instead attempt to focus visitor attention on the phenomena themselves. Most exhibits are built on-site in a tiny shop (with some special services outsourced).

Exhibits are offered for sale on an informal basis to support the budget, which is supported 70% by admissions and memberships, 25% from sale of exhibits, and 5% from corporate sponsorship support.

The walls are used to good advantage for perception and optical exhibits. Exhibits are specifically not arranged in thematic groups because the museum believes that real phenomena and science are themselves not grouped by subject. There are so many combinations and overlaps in nature that educators here want visitors to experiment and discover that an exhibit on mechanics may just as well provide opportunities to experiment with perception, light, sound or other phenomena.

There is a small outdoor science park with a massive build-it-yourself ball raceway (using 100-mm-diameter PVC) and a clever water play area in which the water is pumped by visitors spinning a hamster-wheel.

Demonstrations are offered at noon and 3 pm by staff. These shows use everyday materials such as extinguishing a short candle in a bowl by adding vinegar and baking soda. The activities are presented on a simple table to small intimate groups in one of the galleries. Because visitors are standing right next to the presenter and the presenters are enthusiastic and friendly, visitors can really connect with science at these shows.

Phaenomenta has 2 small clubs for science enthusiasts ages up to 14 (one for girls, one for boys) that meet for 3-4 hours one night a week. Two students from the university in town staff the groups and help them with projects ranging building small exhibits to developing soap-box racers for competition.

The atmosphere at Phaenomenta is enthusiastic and dedicated, with a strong emphasis on its founding principles of hands-on learning, a focus on direct experience with phenomena, and the use of simple materials wherever possible. The center reflects an organization that is still young at heart, growing, and proud of its reputation.

Interestingly, several other groups in Germany have adopted this model and have spawned a “Phaenomenta” of their own. The network is loose and informal, and there are no central administration or regular network meetings. However, to use the name, a center must adopt the pedagogical principles of discovery learning and simple exhibits that focus attention on phenomena.

Museum of Natural History, Berlin

The Museum of Natural History, a unit of the Humboldt University in Berlin, is housed in a large, old building built to store and display the museum’s collections. A portion of the building was destroyed during World War II, and the temporary wood trusses and roof, built by Russian troops following the war, are still visible on the top floor, where they protect a collection of 6 million beetles.

The museum recently re-furbished its exhibition on dinosaurs, and the entrance queue was 4-6 people wide and at least 100 meters long. The wait time was 60-90 minutes, and I was thankful for the ICOM card that the Deutsches Museum had given me, which allowed immediate entrance for museum professionals.

The museum houses a large collection that includes a mixture of traditional mounted animal specimens collected from all over the world, dioramas, and a series of new exhibition galleries. Of particular interest was a large new gallery called “Evolution in Action,” which contained a dense collection of well-displayed specimens showing principles of evolution. This exhibition was enhanced by very readable text panels in both German and English and had labels describing a number of key aspects of the theory of evolution.

Small video screens were embedded in key exhibit labels to provide layering of information: pressing a hypertext link on a graphic label would bring up short text or video explanations in a small monitor in the label.

One particularly interesting gallery was devoted to showing how the museum processes and preserves its specimens. Displays illustrated, for example, the steps in preserving a bird, a mammal, a fish, a fossil, and an insect.

Another gallery devoted to earth systems had a 4-m-diameter globe in the center with a pair of large flat-panel monitors that moved around the equator, playing short videos on topics like plate tectonics that were linked to the location of the monitor at that moment.

An astronomy gallery included a large, round padded couch-like pod where several dozen visitors could lie on their back and watch a video on a round screen overhead. The first half of the 7-minute video (no narration) showed the formation of the universe from the big bang through time, ending up zooming into roof of the museum in Berlin. The second half of the video switched from time to scale and whisked visitors back out of the museum through the powers of 10 to the edge of the universe. I watched hundreds of visitors view the video each time it ran through its cycle.

The dinosaur hall is 4 stories tall and houses what is reputed to be the largest mounted dinosaur skeleton. Several large monitors played animations in which the skeletons morphed into live dinosaurs in their natural habitats and back; these animations were very popular and excellent in showing visitors how the inanimate bones in front of them might relate to live animals in the Mesozoic. Several dozen video scopes at the corners of the gallery had lines 4-6 people deep.

A moving exhibition of large mounted photographs, called “Nature: Our Precious Network,” showed images of human impact on the landscape and was developed to raise public awareness of biodiversity in preparation for the 9th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (to be held in Germany in 2008).

This exhibition, which was located in a remote side gallery that was not heavily trafficked, included a text discussion of global warming and the potential impacts of human activities on climate change. This poster and its message, however, were pretty much lost amid of the captivating images displayed in the room. During about 15 minutes spent in this gallery, I saw less than half a dozen other visitors and none with children.

As we left the museum at 2 pm, the queue was still 50 meters long…

The next stop was a short section of the Berlin Wall that had been left intact at the edge of a cemetery in Berlin. At ~2.5 m tall, it’s hard to imagine the profound impact this flimsy structure had on the world between August 13, 1961 to November 9, 1989. However, having been interrogated at machine-gun point in a concrete bunker after an East-German guard found several cassette tapes I had mistakenly left in a car-door pocket on the way through Checkpoint Charlie, this recent visit brought me right back to my experience of October 1987 and memories of the no-man’s-land on the East-German side, where attempts to cross were generally met with shots from ever-present guards.

Spectrum at the German Technical Museum, Berlin

Spectrum is a relatively recent, hands-on venue that was added to the German Technical Museum. It is housed in an old, former railroad administration building and has several floors of about 20 small rooms with about 250 interactive exhibits. The rooms are organized by subject (electricity, optics, astronomy, physics, etc.), and essentially all of the exhibits were built at the museum. Most are mounted on relatively simple wood benches or frames and the mechanical parts were robust and had just enough of a homebrew flavor to look experimental. I was reminded of the early Exploratorium aesthetic, where the exhibits were designed so that visitors felt as if they were in a laboratory environment.

Because of the large number of exhibits and the small rooms, many of the exhibits were placed next to each other and against the walls. This meant that visitors could not easily congregate around them easily in family groups; visitors often circulated by moving along the rows of exhibits, rather than lingering and discussing what they were seeing and doing.

An interesting challenge is that the floor staff at Spectrum are provided by an outside agency and rotate between this center, the main museum, and other sites. Training is difficult because of the large number and rapid rotation of staff provided, and the museum itself has relatively little control over floor staff. At one point, while experimenting with an exhibit on spinning motion, I discovered that, depending on how I rotated a crank, I could produce several distinct modes of motion. At the point where I had activated a second mode (which not in the signage), a guide came by and corrected me, demonstrating how to crank the exhibit to produce the motion shown in the label.

The parent museum has plans to build a large, dramatic interactive science center called “Technoversum,” which will be thematically arranged (energy, communications, transportation, etc.) and will likely replace the somewhat funky “Spectrum.” Significant funds and other support must be raised, and because the city of Berlin currently has a large outstanding debt and other issues, a timetable for the project has not yet been possible. Fortunately, the museum has site control and can proceed with broad planning without concern over the timing or acquisition of the necessary land. As in most of the museums I have visited so far, I was impressed overall with the enthusiasm of the staff I met and their dedication to science and education.

German Museum of Technology, Berlin

The German Museum of Technology is located in an area of the Berlin that was damaged during World War II and then further neglected during the Cold War that followed. The museum is in two parts: the larger part is historical and contains primarily non-interactive exhibits on the history of technology. A smaller part, located several hundred meters away in another building, is called “Spectrum” and houses an interactive science center. This first report focuses on the larger main museum (history of technology).

The building has an impressive street presence, with a high, glass skin reminiscent of the Rose Center at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. An airplane sits atop the roof, creating a dramatic entrance. The museum consists of two interconnected buildings; the older building has displays on as transportation, textiles, etc. while the new building has a dramatic, multistoried section with much of the area devoted to the history and design of ships. The building is itself an exhibit on technology, with exposed structure and utilities and dramatic spaces on multiple levels. There are many full-sized boats as well as many ship models, cutaway sections of ship hulls, and other objects connected with shipping throughout the ages.

A changing exhibition area of about 300 sq m featured a panel exhibition called “Energy @ Home,” which included information on home heating, power, energy use in the home, windows and heat loss, and renewable energy. The exhibition, developed by the consumer protection board, takes a strong stand against human activities that lead to global warming. The exhibition advocates that consumers reduce their CO2 emissions as an important component of a sustainable future.

The exhibition, while primarily a panel display, includes several interactive components to help visitors engage with the text material. For example, one graphic panel on heating included a small piece of clear plastic with horizontal, triangular ribs on the outside and a small laser pointer on a movable arm (the Sun). Moving the laser to simulate a high sun angle (summer) the light is reflected by the panel, whereas rotating the laser down to simulate a low sun angle (early in the day or winter) the light passes thru the panel. According to the display, such panels can dramatically reduce the internal heating of spaces and reduce air conditioning loads at very low cost, while still allowing natural light in.

In addition to the ever-present energy-cycle (this one was hand-operated), a small chest freezer with its top tiled with foam insulation, wood, stone, and metal showed differences in thermal insulating properties.

Pamphlets provided consumers with tips on what to do to save energy, how to evaluate the pros and cons of installing a photovoltaic system, how modern windows work to save energy, and how to reduce CO2 emissions through replacement of light bulbs, air-drying laundry, etc.

Phaeno - Wolfsburg, Germany

Wolfsburg, perhaps best known as the home of VW, is also home to a remarkable new science center called “Phaeno.” Opened in November 2005, Phaeno is located adjacent to a huge VW power generating facility in a dramatic concrete structure which has few right angles or straight walls. The center is a dramatic piece of sculpture in itself and creates an atmosphere that is distinctly playful, hi-tech, and just plain different.

From the washrooms to the omnipresent projections of quotes and schedules on walls and floor, everything is hi-tech. The atmosphere inside is high-energy; the concrete floors and hard surfaces ensure lots of noise and action. Few people walk around with their hands in their pockets.

After admission, visitors ride an escalator up to the start of the exhibit area. Our group was met their by an enthusiastic red-jacketed greeter/explainer. She described the day’s programs and mentioned a few things not to miss. This simple greeting served as a good orientation to the center and left our group ready to get started. Phaeno has 10 explainer-type floor staff at any time.

Phaeno gives the impression of an organization that did its homework, presenting what some might call “the best of the best” exhibits from around the world. They have had their exhibits built to the highest standards of durability and user-friendliness. The exhibits are for the most part traditional and include perennial favorites ranging from the foot-operated Cartesian diver, gyroscopic bicycle wheel, foam arch bridge, and electricity circuit lab bench.

Several observations: First, the exhibits were robustly built and most were in working order. The exhibits were designed and placed for family interaction; i.e, they were multi-sided, were at the right height, and were easily accessible for both children and adult users.

The signage was invariably bilingual (German and English), simple, and imminently readable. Each exhibit label followed a standard formula of what to do and notice, followed by a brief scientific explanation of 2-3 sentences. The signage was clearly placed, and often on a free-standing holder if it was not possible to mount the sign on the exhibit itself.

There were at least a dozen or so exhibits combining art and science. One particularly thought-provoking exhibit involving 25 coupled gears in which the last gear is embedded in concrete. As explained by the label, because of the number and ratio of the gears, it would take 594 billion years for that last gear to make one revolution. So no matter that it can’t move…

Several relatively common exhibits were enhanced in comparison with their usual implementation. For example, the Bernoulli Blower had artfully arranged hoops for users to try to navigate. Because of the design and placement of the exhibit, family groups can easily congregate around it and enjoy the experience, even though only one person can sit and steer the blower at one time. The stream table was one of the best I have seen and used white, artificial sand with a small percentage of colored grains that showed erosion effects well. The material was highly visible and did not get all over the floor the way sand normally does.

The walls, many of which are neither flat nor vertical, were used for kinetic sculptures (one particularly intriguing mechanical device takes 6 seemingly random pieces of wood and rotates them in to form a chair for a brief moment, and then quickly whisks them back out again on long, rotating arms.)

The gift shop was curiously located in a back corner and not near the exit. The food service was friendly, varied, and affordable.

In addition to the exhibits, there were four additional visitor activity spaces. In one, visitors in groups of up to 18 or so can perform simple lab-type activities in chemistry or biology. A second room is flexibly arranged for physical activities and birthday parties. A third space had been recently set up as a workshop where visitors can use simple tools and standard parts to build small devices like a front-end loader or a wind mill. Finally, a 250-seat auditorium is used for stage science shows with audience participation several times daily.

The exhibits workshop was quite small and bursting with machinery. It is used for repairs and staff mentioned that it is too small to build and test new exhibits. Also, because of the design of the building, several key spaces, such as the auditorium and largest visitor workshop mentioned above, are accessible only by going down and out of the museum and traversing across a windy, cavernous area at street level under the main part of the center. Nevertheless, the mid-day science show had standing room only.

Some visitors find the atmosphere at Phaeno busy, noisy, and unsettling. My observations of visitors were that most were fully engaged. I did not see many very young children, but I did see a surprizing number of teens, which might be due to the high-energy atmosphere. Families were experimenting together and seemed to have a genuinely good time. As mentioned by staff, one of the challenges for the future will be to build on the success of the first year and bring in new exhibits to increase repeat attendance, especially for local audiences.

Climate Change at the Deutsches Museum

The Deutsches Museum currently addresses the environment and climate change through a permanent exhibition, a linked school program, and extensive website. One of the first things in the exhibition is a huge graph of population vs. date, which sets the stage for how quickly things are changing.

The exhibition occupies roughly 1,000 sq m and covers a combination of science, impact, and mitigation – the approach advocated by the International Panel on Climate Change and reflected in the structure of its working groups. The exhibition covers a lot of ground, including measurement of environmental variables, population growth, the greenhouse effect, recycling, changes in weather patterns, eco-friendly buildings, CO2, alternative energy, energy-saving appliances, and much more. The exhibition comprises a series of text and graphic panels, with a computer challenge and a few push-button demonstrations. The science shown is relatively well established, and the panels are in both German and English.

As described by the staff members involved in the development of the exhibition, the exhibition is encyclopedic. By covering a wide variety of topics in great depth, I observed that many visitors seem overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information displayed. It took me nearly an hour to read and absorb about ¼ of the exhibition. I saw many family visitors browsing for a few minutes and moving on to another gallery.

School groups in Germany study the environment in detail starting in the 7th grade. Schools can sign up for a guided program lasting 90 to 120 minutes, which typically includes 45 minutes of presentation (educator talking, children sitting on the floor in the gallery) followed by 45 minutes or so with groups of 4-5 students using the exhibition text to answer questions listed on a worksheet. At the end, students report out to the group so that in principle, everyone gets to hear answers to all questions.

Students at this age are naturally somewhat reticent to report out to their peers, so that the instructor often completes the answers so all students can hear them fully. A role-play post-visit activity is available for teachers wanting to follow up their visit with more depth. This program is fairly new, and about 900 students have done the program since the beginning of 2007.

By the time students have been thru the scientific basis and the impacts sections of the presentation, there is often not enough time or enthusiasm left for the final step, i.e. what actions can a person take to reduce their impact on global warming. Staff find that it’s a difficult topic for many students to get engaged in.

This exhibition provides a wealth of information for visitors who want to take the time to read it. The exhibition also points out the many challenges that museums face in bringing the issue of glabal warming to the public.

• To provide the scientific foundation for global warming, it takes a lot of words.
• Many people are reluctant to engage, where the message is not particularly positive.
• It is not a simple task to generate hands-on exhibits that help visitors to engage in the topic.

Global Warming at Museums in Munich

Surveys indicate that museums are at the top of the heap when it comes to public trust. In comparison with almost all other institutions and professions, such as medicine, law, the media, scientists, politicians, etc., museums stand out in the public mind as places where you can count on getting solid, accurate information.

This places a burden on us, however, to preserve and foster this trust. So when it comes to global warming, museums have a dilemma. At the Deutsches Museum, the largest museum in Germany and ueber-well respected internationally by virtue of its strong exhibitions and scholarly research over the past century, it was a difficult choice as to how to present the issue of global warming.

Some options considered were: Avoid the topic as still somewhat uncertain? Provide just the science to date? Advocate action in everyday life to build awareness and reduce the impacts?

After considerable internal debate, the Deutsches Museum decided to side with the IPCC’s findings – the UNESCO-sponsored International Panel on Climate Change - which is made up of many scientists, policy makers, and others. For nearly two decades, the IPCC has worked to provide the current information on global warming. Three working groups focus on: 1) the scientific basis for global warming, 2) the impacts to society of global warming, and 3) mitigation measures. In a series of increasingly strong reports, the IPCC has taken an unequivocal position that global warming is happening, that humans are the cause, and that we must act now to avoid catastrophic in our own lifetime. Here is a dramatic graph of world population over time near the entrance to the gallery.

In its Environment gallery, the Deutsches Museum has approximately 1,000 sq m of predominantly panel displays with a detailed treatment of the causes of global warming and what everyone can do about it. Students in grades 7-10 can take part in special 90-120 minute programs on global warming in this galley, as shown in the picture.

Another science museum in Munich, the Museum of Mankind and Nature, just opened a new special exhibition last Friday (July 23) called “Climate Protection: Everyone Can!” This exhibition was created by the Bavarian State Consumer Protection agency and funded by the Bavarian Ministry for Environment, Health, and Consumer Protection. In comparison with the permanent exhibition at the Deutsches Museum, this new exhibition bypasses most of the science behind global warming and goes straight to the bottom line, strongly advocating a series of actions that consumers should take now, such as eating locally grown foods, driving less, and buying energy efficient appliances. The exhibition is also panel-based, with doors on the panels providing additional text. There is also a TV exhibit with a long video clip and a computer quiz station, plus free literature and a visitor comment book.