September 24, 2012 3:16 pm
Are Science Museums Going Extinct?
Image: Science Museum London
Think of the biggest discoveries in science in the past few years. The Higgs boson probably comes to mind, maybe. Or perhaps getting Curiosity on Mars. Now think of science museums. Their bread and butter is skeletons, fossils, animals and plants—things we can see. Will these museums survive when the science is invisible or impossibly far away?
Ian Sample asked that of a few people in The Guardian‘s science podcast recently. Ian Blatchford, the director of the Science Museum in London says that they’re doing all they can to “bring the ephemeral Higgs boson to life for the public in an upcoming exhibition.” But the challenges are huge, and some museums are turning to sponsors (like Shell and BP) to keep their exhibits alive. That decision, of course, has its own set of complications.
At the blog Museum 2.0, Nina Simon asked Eric Siegel, the director of the New York Hall of Science, why museums aren’t more innovative. His answer? “He commented that as non-profits, museums are built to survive, not to succeed. Unlike startups and rock stars, museums aren’t structured to shoot for the moon and burn up trying. They’re made to plod along. Maybe it’s time to change that.”
At the American Association of Museums they recognize that funding and participation are hard to gain in an increasingly online world. But despite financial woes, museums have persevered. In 2009, during the very worst of the economic crisis the AAM wrote:
My observation, after thirty years of working in the field, is that museums have an amazing ability to survive in the most adverse environments. They are the cockroaches of the nonprofit world–sometimes it really does seem like you can’t kill them with an atomic blast. Most of the time some improbable deus ex machina saves the day: for example an unexpected cash gift or a free building. Mind you, this often only saves the distressed museum from closure—it does not cure the underlying dysfunction. The museum may simply struggle along for another ten years before the next potentially fatal crisis.
Earlier this year, AAM published a report called TrendsWatch, which covered “museums and the pulse of the future.” They noted that museums are trying out new ideas, from social media to pop-up food-truck like experiences. They give some examples of successful techniques for future-minded museums:
- The New York Public Library’s citizen cartography tool “that lets the public take information archived on digitized historical maps and use the data to tag a searchable interface built with Open Street Map”
- The San Francisco Mobile Museum’s “touring exhibit that fits in the back of a car” and lets participants ”explore their local communities through personal narratives (including the creation of personalized shadow boxes and shrines) and then share them with neighbors”
- “Wikipedians in Residence” at a number of museums (including the Smithsonian) “push museum data and images into the Wikipedia universe, as well as soliciting and managing content from the wiki-editing crowd.”
In the future of museums, museums might not even really be museums, per se. At The Museum of the Future, Jasper Visser writes:
Boundaries are blurring. I guess they have been blurring for a long time. The label becomes less important. Art fair, museum, library, shop, restaurant, gallery, to most people it’s just a place to go for a good story, entertainment and time to be with friends.
More from Smithsonian.com:
Eight Unusual All-American Museums
Five Funky Food Museums
Sign up for our free email newsletter and receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.
3 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
Hello. As the Eric Siegel (note spelling) quoted in this article, I’d like to clarify a few things. First of all, you took a lot of Nina’s editorializing as my quotation. I’d be grateful if you corrected the quotation to my original “museums are built to survive, not thrive” and identify the rest of that quotation as Nina’s riffing on my original observation.
The conversation with Nina was about the general conservatism and resistance to change of the museum model. Science centers, being among the newest kinds of museums, have the potential to be more dynamic as they are less freighted with received wisdom. That is one reason I love working in science centers.
Museums and science centers are finding ways to transform themselves. Ian Blatchford, who you cite in this article, completely re-invented the Victoria and Albert Museum in London (even its name suggest the hidebound tradition from which it needed to escape). He is now embarked on a similar reinvention of the Science Museum of London. Our field should be watching this with interest.
Similarly, the NY Hall of Science has found ways to reinvent itself through a series of strategies that are beyond the scope of this response. The result has been a dramatic growth in our budget (as one useful metric) of 30% over three years. As your post suggests, there are many similar reinventions going on in the science museum field and in the museum field in general. My list of people and programs to watch and learn from just keeps growing. Changes are wide ranging and unevenly distributed (an innovative set of programs in an otherwise traditional museum, like the design workshops they are doing at MOMA, or a transformed museum like the Denver Center of Contemporary Art and the Oakland Museum). Or collaborations among museums and community organizations, like those that are fostered by the Hive networks in NY and Chicago, or those funded by the Rockefeller Foundation NYC Cultural Innovation program
So, as the saying goes, the reports of our demise are greatly exaggerated. That does not mean we don’t have serious reinvention to do, and my recommendation is that everyone keep their eye on what is going on in the field, and keep a list of people and places that are doing great work. There is a lot of it out there.
Comment by Eric Siegel — September 25, 2012 @ 11:48 am
Hi Eric,
Thanks for commenting here (and apologies for spelling your name wrong, it’s fixed now).
Of course, as part of the Smithsonian (and as a huge science nerd who begged my parents for visits to the AMNH), I’m quite interested in the future of museums in whatever form they might find for themselves. I’m also happy to see that the museum community isn’t just saying “kids these days!” and blaming technology for decreased attention span, and instead trying to use that technology to rejuvenate their exhibits.
Rose
Comment by Rose Eveleth — September 25, 2012 @ 5:24 pm
Hi Rose,
I think that science museums should walk step by step with science developments..fossils,plants and skeletons are important because they represents our origins and our past so we have to remember them and museums have this purpose but we also have to see where are we going with science development.
So the only place where we could touch this progress is with museums because it’s not the same knowing about all developments on websites and tv,we have metaphorically to touch our new reality because in my opinion museums will risk to be so far from reality and people will loose interests in museums
Comment by http://strangestmuseums.blogspot.it/ — September 27, 2012 @ 11:28 am