Explore @ Bristol in Bristol, England

This science center, generally referred to as simply "At-Bristol," was funded primarily by the Millennium Commission and opened in its current form in 2000. It is located in a former rail transfer warehouse at the waterfront in Bristol. The building is one of the world’s early reinforced concrete structures and is on the historic buildings list (and is therefore difficult to modify structurally).









Originally, there were two additional venues: an IMAX theater and an outdoor environmental venue “Wild Walk,” both of which closed in April of this year because they were not financially viable.

The center has a unique series of exhibits that are for the most part unlike those of most other science centers. The exhibits are grouped into several themes that include the human body, structures, Exploratorium-type physics, optics, and perceptions exhibits, and a few others. It seemed initially as if 30 minutes might suffice for the first floor, but two and a half hours later, it was time for lunch and there was still a lot more to see and do.

The human body exhibits were particularly interesting in that they provided interesting challenges that involved the senses and in some cases took data that could be used by researchers for further study. In one exhibit, for example, visitors watch a video clip that involves a crime and are then challenged to recall various details, ranging from the color of a woman’s hair involved in the story (blonde) to what a running man had in his hand (a cell phone). At the end, visitors see a line-up and are asked to pick the right person. Many of the individuals look very similar, and the exercise immediately made very real the uncertainties associated with police line-ups.

A feature of most of these health-related exhibits was that they provided useful and interesting information on portions of the body without being overly wordy or didactic. One possible exception was a series of exhibits on the brain, which are planned for replacement as soon as funding is lined up.



The center has an area in the corner of the first floor devoted to birth and targeting youth. Museum staff report that this area is of great interest to teens because much of the information in the exhibits here is not readily available elsewhere. Where else can one stand in a squishy, pulsating womb and watch a birthing video, replete with the screams of labor?

Another area on this floor featured exhibits on water engineering and structures, including some excellent opportunities for water play.


The now-closed Wild Walk venue had a number of exhibits related to climate change and global warming. Some of these exhibits, now in storage, will be brought into the science center in the future to help visitors become more aware of trends in the climate and to encourage them to become more curious about the science of climate change. These exhibits ranged from very simple (magnetic poetry on real refrigerator doors) to a computer simulation of world environmental policy in which visitors took the role as decision maker and were able to experience the interconnectedness of the systems that make up our world.

At-Bristol provides regular museum floor programs for visitors. I watched a cart science program in which visitors try to built a boat of tin foil that will hold the largest number of marbles. This type of cart-based floor program is not as common in European museums as in U.S. museums. Programs such as these are wonderful in they engage people of all ages and backgrounds, from 4-year-olds to engineers with PhDs. In this case, the 4-year-old scored more marbles than the engineer...



Some of the exhibits here appear to be Exploratorium knock-offs. In several cases, however, these exhibits, including "Cafe Wall," were actually developed at Bristol by Professor Richard Gregory. In this case, Prof. Gregory noticed this pattern and the optical effect while at a small cafe in Bristol and turned it into the now-famous exhibit that we all have somewhere in our museums and centers.

The center also houses the only one of 8 national teacher training institutes that is located in a science center, and the center places a high priority on teacher education as part of its mission.

Financially, At-Bristol has an interesting financial model. Located in the heart of a newly revitalized waterfront district that was once very rundown, the area is now full of restaurants and nightclubs. The center was given overall management of the local parking garage as well as some of the adjacent real estate, so it receives income from parking at the waterfront as well as a portion of the rent paid by adjacent businesses through sub-leases it offers to them.

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Natural History Museum in London, UK

The Natural History Museum is housed in a nineteenth-century building that could probably double as a cathedral. Its interior has beautiful arched passageways and a vaulted main gallery with spectacularly decorated ceilings.





















The museum itself is a study in contrasts: in some places the old, churchlike environment has been hidden by ultra-modern, high-tech neon-adorned façades, passageways, and galleries.





















For example, the museum’s new ecology area seemed oddly out of place, with ultra-modern lighting and harsh, almost disco-like design elements that seemed out of character with the exhibition’s environmental theme and seemed more in keeping with the Hard Rock Café not far away.












I was particularly interested in how the museum approached the topic of the environment and climate change, and I’ll limit most of my comments to that topic. I found it in three different areas of the museum:

1) “From the Beginning” gallery: In this permanent gallery, climate change was presented as due to natural cycles, represented by an exhibit with a large pendulum swinging back and forth between areas labeled “greenhouse climate” and “icehouse climate”. The time scale taken by the exhibition is geologic and indicates that the cause of these cycles is CO2 put into the atmosphere by volcanoes. At the end, the short-term issue of CO2 was addressed with one sign, stating that atmospheric CO2 has tripled in the past 200 years, that if this continues, areas of the earth will be come deserts and rising sea level will flood many low-lying parts of the world. The final statement: “Greenhouse gases may have devastating effect on climate. But we are due to enter another glacial phase in the next few thousand years, so natural and human-induced climate changes may cancel each other out, for a while at least.”

2) “Earth Today and Tomorrow” gallery. This permanent gallery covered a wide range of earth-science topics, such as mining, geology, and energy. The Energy section covered carbon-based resources such as oil, gas, and coal and showed several alternative sources such as solar, geothermal, wave and wind energy. The exhibition makes the point that carbon-based fuels are putting huge amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere and that this appears to be causing climate changes. According to the exhibition, scientists are studying these changes with computer models and other techniques, and visitors are left with questions about the wisdom of continuing our build-up of atmospheric CO2.


3) “Ice Station Antarctica: Recruits Needed” This temporary exhibition on life in a polar research station was prepared by the Natural History Museum in cooperation with the British Antarctic Survey as part of International Polar Year 2007-8. The scientific content and many of the objects for this exhibition were provided by the Survey, while the museum developed the story line and physical exhibits. The exhibition targets the curiosity children with the line: “Do you have what it takes to be an Antarctic researcher?” and begins the experience with a 45-second immersion in a -10-deg (C) cold room.



Visitors have bar-coded tickets, which link them with various exhibits and provide continued contact and activities at home via the exhibition website. The exhibition showed visitors many aspects of polar research, from clothing antarctic researches need to sampling water, riding a snowmobile, eating, first aid, and even sampling penguin droppings. The environment was immersive, with inflatable igloos and plywood shacks, plus many of the trappings of polar research. A particular strength of the exhibition was the frequent use of stories of real researchers.



At the end of the exhibition, visitors had a fairly good idea of what life is like for researchers in Antarctica, and I almost felt as if I knew some of the people there because of the personal stories they provided to visitors. There was relatively little information about climate change (which has been magnified at the poles compared with temperate regions), except a few statements that the temperature is rising, and that it will threaten the existence of some animals adapted to the cold climate in Antarctica.



At the main entrance was a large desk with 2 staff and 6 sets of red backpacks, each filled with family-friendly activities related to specific galleries. These backpacks are well-used and obviously well-loved (about 30 uses per day, or 10,000 uses in the museum per year). Each backpack contains simple matching, discovery, or art-related educational activities, with concise instructions and support for adult caregivers in helping children. Backpacks are becoming more common in museums as a way to engage younger children with objects in the galleries, and the concept appears to have been implemented successfully at the Natural History Museum.

Science Museum in London, UK

Visiting the Science Museum in London was something of a pilgrimage. It is one of the largest science museums in the world and also one of the most innovative. It is also a museum of remarkable contrasts that constantly invite visitors to ask questions about science, technology, and the world around us.

For starters, the exterior of the building is fairly traditional and in the style of an old city museum. There is little from the outside to spark the enthusiasm of a curious child. But once inside, the museum opens up to a tall, naturally lighted atrium that invites exploration.

The first exhibits that greet visitors are huge old steam engines of various types. Some are quite old, but they are presented in an open form that invites browsing, with colorful labels that tell an interesting story about each one, setting them in a context where visitors can get excited about the past.

The museum houses some astounding collections that, for an aficionado, can easily raise the heart rate a few points. Examples include the original detector used by Marconi to receive the first transatlantic wireless spark signal in 1901 and the telephone used by Alexander Graham Bell to call the Queen in 1868 to persuade her that the phone was the wave of the future. The Apollo 10 command module is there (this was the flight prior to the first moon landing) as well as

Stephenson’s Rocket – the steam locomotive that achieved a world record speed of 29 mph in 1829, convincing investors that steam locomotives were a better bet than cable-drawn rail systems.

But, in my mind, what is most remarkable about the Science Museum is their commitment to getting people to think critically. Many science museum supporters would like to think they are promoting it, and many science museum directors and staff would jump at the chance to do more of it. Here are some examples of how critical thinking is being encouraged.

1. Antenna Science News. This program brings current science to the public in several ways. A) A new informational feature story is posted every 6 months on a large 4-sided kiosk (current story is about the new collider being built at CERN in Switzerland). B) a pair of smaller kiosks present a controversial topic and invite visitors to learn more, compare their response with those of others, and to enter comments to be read by others (a new feature is posted every 1-2 weeks). C) a website provides a portal to all previous topics and currently is responsible for 25% of all hits to the museum’s web site.









2. Energy Area. In contrast with most museum energy areas, this exhibition does not go into different forms of energy, kinetic and potential energy, source of energy, or other basic scientific concepts such as converting mechanical into electrical energy. Instead, this area focuses on energy choices. In one computer challenge, for example, you are the country’s energy czar and must choose the type and location of power plants to keep up with increasing demand. Given a palette of types (coal, gas, solar, wind, etc.) you plunk down your choice and receive instant feedback from your boss (e.g., that photovoltaic power plant you installed has caused a major stink because of the land area that had to be taken out of agriculture). This area was constzntly in busy and I observed thqt visitors were really engaged with making choices about energy.

3. Issues and Ethics. Another area features several large round tables, each with 8 stations where visitors can interact with a push button and wheel (very iPod-like). A projector from above permits visitors to select an issue ("Should we be able to choose the sex of our children?") and then provides a 10-15 minutes interactive experience where visitors answer questions, receive information, and respond to challenges. Families, single adults, tourists, and teens step up to a station and quickly find themselves engaged into substantive discussions about difficult topics with total strangers who may come from a very different demographic.

An interesting (and very red) exhibition on plastics takes visitor thru a wide variety of types and uses of plastics, including printable plastics, such as are currently being researched at Cornell University.

There’s more: evening science cafes, live science shows, school-based programs. But the thread that runs through much of this is the attempt to encourage visitors to articulate their own views and continue to inquire after the visit.

Siemens Forum in Munich, Germany

The Siemens Forum is a showcase for Siemens technology. It includes the history of electrical, electronics, medical, and communications developments since the company’s founding in Berlin in 1847 by Werner von Siemens. The museum is free and targets corporate visitors and business partners, potential recruits, as well as the public. As described in a gallery devoted to the company’s leadership, Siemens places a high value on loyalty and long-term thinking and has had only 10 CEOs in the 160 years since its founding.

From its earliest days, the company has focused on innovation and bringing great ideas to market. The main exhibit hall provides a display of representative products ranging from a generator that powered the first lights in Berlin to the first implantable pacemaker (1958 - see photo) to cell phones, computers, telephones, consumer electronics, and appliances. There is also a model of the first electric rail car, developed by Siemens in 1879. The one drawback of this gallery is its dreamy but annoying sound track that repeats every few seconds.

Siemens, like many corporations in Europe and elsewhere, is clearly seeing green technology as good corporate public relations. Many displays promote the ways in which Siemens has worked to increase efficiency or reduce energy requirements for its products and thereby reduce both the cost of energy as well as the load of CO2 on the environment.

The energy area clearly states that CO2 in the environment will be the primary limit to the growth of energy, as the world advances toward 8 billion people in 2030.

One lesson to be (re)learned from this museum is the difficulty of maintaining a display of cutting edge technology. One conspicuous display near the cafeteria, for example, highlights the latest developments of Siemens technology, with various devices spotlighted on pedestals in a well-lit cabinet. The notebook computer in this display boasts a “6 GB hard drive and up to 192 MB of RAM.” In comparison, the laptop I’m currently using has 120 GB of hard drive and 1024 MB of RAM (and is by no means high-end).

The entry lobby featured a special exhibition called “Megatrends in China” that depicts the ways Siemens has assisted with the development of Shanghai. This display is particularly engaging, with many large panoramic photos, as well as stories of how new products are being used and how they are changing the way people do things in China.

A new Siemens-developed mag-lev train installed in 2004, for example, whisks people 33 km to the Pudong airport from Shangai in 8 minutes at 430 kph – the currently fastest non-plane vehicle on earth.

To help tell the story of China and set a context for the introduction of new technology in Shanghai, a half-dozen displays sprinkled around the exhibition area show cultural objects from Chinese life and explain their significance. I found these displays interesting and highly readable.

I suspect that many visitors to science museums might find historical objects more interesting if we were to adopt an approach that, like these labels, minimizes text, eliminates information few visitors need (such as inventory numbers and other purely descriptive details), and instead focuses on the object’s relevance to a typical visitor.

Aviation Museum in Oberschleissheim, Germany

This relatively new museum – a branch of the Deutsches Museum – opened 15 years ago in 1992 and houses dozens of aircraft in a series of large halls. The site itself has a fascinating history: it is located only a few hundred meters from a set of 3 palaces with formal gardens inspired by those at Versailles. But more interestingly, the site was in many ways the center of German aviation from its beginning through the 1970s.

The airstrip was a hub for early commercial aviation in central Europe (see the poster left, showing the expansion of routes between 1919 and 1931), and during both world wars, key activities took place here. Following WW II, the U.S. used the base for several decades, and it was the only American aviation school off U.S. soil until its closing in the mid-1970s. The noise became an ever-bigger problem for the increasingly urban population, and at this point, the airfield is used only occasionally.

Many interesting aircraft are on display, from models of earlier human-powered kite-like devices to gliders, military aircraft, helicopters, and small commercial planes. Visitors can see various engines from throughout aviation history, and there is even a complete, pre-transistor Link flight simulator made in Binghamton, New York (see photo right).

One interactive exhibit lets visitors experience the jet effect by sitting on a swiveling seat and pedal a large fan; the reaction of the wind from the fan spins the pedaler, as in the photo.

For me, the most interesting parts of this museum were the stories about the significance of the site and the objects on display. Several wall panels told about the entire history of the Oberschleissheim site, including early aviation experiments, the commercialization of flight in Germany, and how the airfield became a magnet for American bombing raids in WW II. One photo shows the entire site looking like a chunk of Swiss cheese (see photo left) because of the high density of bomb craters. The airstrip is at the bottom of the photo and the palaces, fountains, and gardens are at the top).

Jewish laborers from the concentration camp in nearby Dachau were forced to fill in the holes and make the airfield operational again after each Allied bombing. All of the signage in the museum was in both German and English.

My one wish would be for reader-friendlier labels, with larger typesize and perhaps an occasional splash of color. All in all, however, there are many fascinating stories experienced within this collection, plus some additional ones that are just waiting to be told.

National Museum of Science and Technology ‘Leonardo da Vinci’ in Milan, Italy

Having helped to develop the Sciencenter in Ithaca, NY by incorporating the buildings of a former wastewater treatment plant, I can appreciate the challenges of this museum in Milan, which is housed in a former 16th century monastery. Many of the galleries consist of long, narrow spaces, with masonry walls that can not be moved both for practical, as well as historical, reasons.

The building, as old as it is, is actually new construction, having itself been built on the site of an earlier 4th century walled area and church. Its interior courtyards are crossed by historic foundations (which also can’t be disturbed).

The museum was started in 1953 to foster democratic knowledge and to circulate scientific and technological culture. Visitors are greeted at the entrance to the exhibit area, for example, by this 184-kW steam-powered generator that powered 1,800 looms in a silk factory from 1895 to 1954. This is a huge, impressive machine, with a 5-m-diameter flywheel. But it is literally stuffed into the space it occupies, and visitors must view it in sections through openings in the walls on 3 sides.

The museum is undergoing a gradual transformation to bring its science and technology collections into closer connection with the interests of its visitors. In contrast with Technorama (previous blog entry), which changed its name and simply removed its historical, non-interactive collections, this museum plans to keep its collections and use them for accomplishing its dual goals of: 1) connecting its visitors with their scientific and technological heritage while 2) inspiring them for the future.

To help accomplish this second task, the museum has set up 16 interactive laboratories (i.Labs), each with its own space, where school groups or visitors can sign up for hour-long programs. I sat in on a robotics lab, where 4 boys (ages 8-10) and parents sat with an explainer, learning the basics of robotics through a pre-built Lego Mindstorm unit. The explainer was captivating and held the boys’ attention for a full 30 minutes of discussion before starting to add sensors and program the device on his laptop based on the requests of the particpants.

i.Lab topics include energy, ceramics, copperworking, genetics, and many others. These hands-on experiences give visitors the opportunity to taste many different subjects. What is particularly interesting is that the explainers who teach these sessions use an inquiry approach, often starting by asking visitors what questions they have about the topic and then building a custom program around those questions. This means that explainers must be well-trained because they must respond to a wide variety of questions to avoid delivering a scripted demonstration or activity.

These i.Lab sessions are sprinkled periodically throughout the day, and all are not offered each day. Each i.Lab has its own space, however, so that materials and equipment can be left available for next time.

The museum has also mounted an exhibition of many varied items from its collections with the stories of how they were used by people. This photo shows a plow, and other objects range from an early sewing machine to an early car to a beautifully tooled cash register made by National Cash Register.







There are other wonderful stories that this museum can tell about its collections and some are being told. For example, in one basement room, a nail-making machine here has a label that tells about how a beginning blacksmith would take 2 minutes to make a nail, while a highly experienced blacksmith could make 2-3 in the same amount of time. The machine here changed the face of both blacksmithing and construction forever, however, by making uniform nails at a rate of 250 per minute. Unfortunately, these types of stories are relatively rare, and many of the objects have no labels. In a number of other cases, the low or glaring lighting makes it difficult to read labels that are present. There is a huge potential to bring some amazing objects to life for visitors.

The museum places considerable emphasis on Leonardo da Vinci, who is officially part of the museum’s name. One long exhibition space has many models of Leonardo’s machines, ranging from a pile driver to a helicopter to a printing press to various war machines. I particularly liked the model of a double catapult (see photo) which, according to Leonardo’s plan, was to have been built with bows measuring 50 meters in length (!) and would be capable of hurling 20 kg stones great distances. There is an i.Lab for visitors to experiment with copies of several da Vinci machines, as well.

In addition to the main building, there are three additional exhibition venues.

1) a building devoted to rail transport, with a number of locomotives on display;

2) a building with maritime and air transport exhibits, including a full-sized square-rigged ship and an Italian 2-man torpedo (see photo for a look at this ride-‘em-cowboy device)…

3) #506 – a post-WW-II submarine that was decommission- ed in 2000 and brought to the museum with great community interest in August 2005. Curiously, it was dedicated at the museum on December 7th of that year, the anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, the sub also doubles as a full-size exhibit on albedo. Because it sits outside and is black, the sub gets too hot on sunny days for visitors to go inside.

From an educational standpoint, the education staff is working hard to make the collections more intellectually relevant and accessible. In particular, the staff has been at the forefront of transnational collaborations to improve the educational impact of school visits to museums. A major European Union research project, known as SMEC, has produced valuable publications, exemplars of museum programs for visiting school groups, and general experiences that all museums can gain from.

The staff runs literally into a wall at every turn, because of the challenging long and narrow spaces that this masonry monastery building provides. and there are still many holdover objects, such as many religious frescoes that have been removed from their original location, preserved, and displayed in the museum. From the standpoint of curb-appeal, the entrance to the museum is almost invisible because it is small and set back in a side wall of a broad courtyard off a side street. Visitors have virtually no convenient parking These characteristics probably contribute to the annual visitation rate per square meter of exhibit space that is about 20% that of many interactive science centers. However, recent changes have significantly increased attendance in recent years, and the success of the i.Lab program is certainly worth watching as a model for deeper engagement of youth at museums in general.

Technorama in Wintertur, Switzerland

Technorama is the result of the re-invention of an historical technology museum into a vibrant science center in Winterthur, Switzerland. It is the only science center in the country, but with 500 hands-on exhibits, there is plenty of opportunity to go around.
The process started in 1991 with the replacement of a group of historical objects with a set of phenomenon-based hands-on exhibits. At the end of the venue, the museum kept the most successful exhibits as permanent. They repeated this process over the years and have now replaced all of the original historical objects (which are still safe in storage)

I was particularly impressed with the robustness of the exhibits. Of exhibits on display, I noticed only one that was out of order. About one-half of the exhibits have Exploratorium origins, but many have been re-engineered over the years. As a result, they are the best-functioning exhibits I have seen in 40 years of visiting science museums.

Technorama has regular floor programs that range from big and impressive (a show on gases that includes a number of big, impressive explosions and a great high-voltage show) to moderate-sized (a Coriolis-effect show delights about 50 visitors at a time, 20 of whom sit inside a spinning carousel and can roll balls to each other and do half a dozen other guided activities that bring the Coriolis effect to life. A scanning tunneling microscope demo produced a 3D atom-by-atom map of the surface of a graphite (carbon) crystal and brought nanotechnology to life.

Another demonstration showed visitors how increased atmospheric CO2 enhances the greenhouse effect by decreasing the amount of infrared radiation (heat) emitted back to space.

Technorama has an interesting area called the Youth Laboratory, which houses exhibits that in general take slightly more time. Many involve measurements or experimentation with parameters or sometimes more dangerous activities (such as heating compost with a flame to determine the residual mass). In this area, school groups can reserve the lab in the morning, and general visitors are free to use the space in the afternoon. The lab also includes a kitchen lab and a chemistry lab staffed by a full-time PhD in chemistry.

This year’s special exhibition is called ‘Atomic Zoo” and will be on display through summer 2008. It includes 29 stations where visitors can experiment with real equipment and direct observation of atomic=scale phenomena.

There is a small outdoor science park which presents many opportunities for the future. Currently the park has a Boyo human yoyo, a set of coupled swings, a 5-ton rock on a swivel, and a wonderful chalet for children’s activities.

It was particularly interesting to see the distribution of visitor ages at Technorama. In comparison with the usual bimodal distribution of ages groups in many science centers (pre-teen children and their parents), there was a significantly higher percentage of teens (often on a date) and older adults (often by themselves). There were few very young children (Technorama doesn’t charge for children under 6), but instead I noticed a relatively uniform distribution of ages, with significantly more teens than one sees in most museums of this type.

Interestingly, there is little outreach from Technorama. Everything is done onsite. To date, there has been strong on-site operating support from the Swiss government, but little funding for educational outreach.

From the standpoint of educational philosophy, Technorama has strict guidelines regarding what it will put on the museum floor. First, it seeks exhibits that are purely phenomenological. Inspired by both the Exploratorium and its artists, and to to some extent by the Science Museum of Minnosota, this museum is really hands-on and proud of it.

If Technorama can’t create a real hands-on visitor experience with a phenomenon, they won’t build the exhibit. You won’t find any ball-and-stick models of molecules, touch boxes, push buttons that light up text, flip-up panels, or other types of gratuitous interactivity. In fact, there are almost no computers except where they are used for measuring/displaying a quantity. Just real phenomena.

As a result, as much as Technorama would like to develop exhibits on nanotechnology, they are playing a wait-and-see approach because of the difficulty they see in bringing real phenomena at the nanoscale to visitors without models, information panels, computer screens, or other information transfer techniques that do not present visitors with real experiences at the nanoscale. They are following NSF’s Nanoscale Informal Science Education (NISE) Network project very closely, along with efforts by other museums to address nanoscale science interactively.