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SPOKES #74

Science centres and research: part of the same ecosystem?

Can science centres and museums really contribute to cutting-edge research? Matteo Merzagora investigates.

Estimated reading time: 24 minutes

Can science centres and museums really contribute to cutting-edge research?

Since their origins (whenever you want to place them) science museums have combined at least three roles: they exist for preserving and exhibit collections, for doing research, and to inform and educate (today we would say “engage”). But the meaning of these keywords is not stable in time and neither are the interactions among them.

Today, for example, it is quite clear how the public engagement component can benefit from research: linking with current research allows a science centre or museum to present and discuss with the public up to date, solid, meaningful science.

The reverse is less straightforward, and thus more interesting. Today we are witnessing an emerging need to (re)invent the way in which research can benefit from public engagement: that is, how public engagement venues or initiatives can become useful and productive for scientific research. We are not talking here about how collections in a natural history museum can be useful for studying biodiversity, or collections of scientific instruments for studying the history of science, neither are we referring to research in science education or public engagement done within museums.

We want to explore how public engagement and science communication, the fact of opening up to a diversity of publics and stakeholders, can become a valuable tool for research at large.

There is an emerging need of productive interfaces between research institutions and other social actors [Merzagora, 2007 and Spokes], and such interfaces are becoming an intrinsic feature of knowledge production for the XXI century.

Can science centres, science culture venues within universities, and public engagement activities become such productive interfaces? Is there an active role for them in the process of production of knowledge? Can we imagine science culture venues as research infrastructures, capable of improving social awareness among scientists, as much as they improve scientific awareness in society? Do we have examples that prove that such spaces or activities can lead to better (original, robust, relevant, ethical,...) research? Are cultural activities within universities part of the research strategy, and not only of the outreach strategy? Does the traditional definition of "public" still hold, or should we think of a continuum between “public” and “stakeholders”? Art-science, citizen science activities, living labs are obvious candidates for fostering this role: can we identify new, trend making, initiatives?  

In simpler terms, the hypothesis we want to test here is that science centres and public engagement are becoming (or could become, or should become) a natural component of the research ecosystem.

We are proposing this open question to several thinkers and practitioners in our field, starting from Ken Arnold (Wellcome collection, London and Medical Museion, Copenhagen), Michael John Gorman (Biotopia, Munich and formerly Science Gallery, Dublin) and Asma Steinhausser and Camille Zamant (Museum National d’Histoire Naturelle, Paris). They share the common traits of navigating at the interfaces between scientific research and public engagement, and they are currently leading pioneer experiments in this grey zone. We asked them to discuss the above question from the perspective of both their professional journey, and their current professional engagements.

This Spokes “Lookout” is just a step in our journey: we would like to experiment while reflecting, in community-based research within our own community. Several sessions at previous Ecsite Conferences have sparked this exploration, and we will use the inputs from this “Lookout” to spark discussions and reactions in a session at this year's Ecsite Conference in Heilbronn in June, which in turn will generate new insights and a better framing of the question.

You are all warmly invited to join this journey!

Until March 2022, you split your time between the Medical Museion in Copenhagen and Wellcome in London. In both roles, you blend history, art and science, as well as past present and future. Can you help us in finding the coherence there? 

At Wellcome I’ve had numerous roles over three decades, including helping to set up and run Wellcome Collection. For the first decade of this new museum, I directed the curation of wide-ranging exhibitions, events, publications etc. Then around 2015 my role changed, and I oversaw cultural partnerships, developing links among researchers and cultural practitioners, as well as with government and other stakeholders, such as the WHO and the World Economic Forum. The other half of my time is in Copenhagen, at the Medical Museion which is at the same time a university museum and a research institution (I am a professor in Copenhagen University). We bring together colleagues from sciences, humanities and the arts to work collaboratively to develop ideas that we think are enriched by the fact of being set in a public context.

So how and why, in your view, a public venue can enrich research?

I think museums are very good places for collaborative research, in which you want to bring together different voices and different perspectives. It’s not the only way to do research, but it’s an interesting one.

A first reason why public venues can enrich research is that the public is less concerned about the differences between people's expertise than experts are. In fact, as experts we spend an amazing amount of time to decide why we are different! In a public context this looks less relevant: the public is more interested in ideas, and in how ideas links together. In a public venue we are all facing the same direction, rather than facing each other across a table, and this can be an easier way of having a cross disciplinary conversation.

A second reason is the value of having a public goal and a time constraint. For the exhibition we curated "The world is in you" (currently running at Kunsthal Charlottenborg). We spent two or three years collaborating with scientists and artists, always having in mind that we were going to open at a specific time and in a specific place. The discipline of having strict deadlines and a commitment for sharing in a public environment reshapes the process of doing collaborative research.

There is something really interesting about the space in between the public and the academic

And the third element is that there is something really interesting about the space in between the public and the academic. The way I describe Medical Museion is a vessel with twin engines. On one side the public, on the other the academia, and the challenge is: how do we make a circle? How do we link what we do in public to our research and then back to the public? After a while, I realised that maybe we shouldn't jump across the gap too quickly. Maybe there's something like a third engine, and we are now imagining a space within Medical Museion where we can experiment with it. A space which is not just an exhibition, not just a research project, but something in between the two, where we bring researchers and other people from society - from foundations, industry, government - and we host activities in the name of being a cultural institution. The events last from few hours to a couple of days, they are subject focused, and we make best use of our curatorial skills to organise them. They are a way to activate deep conversations, sharing knowledge, being humble, getting exciting ideas, and doing all that as part of what museum work should be about.

Will you make this “third engine” visible to the public?

We are in a process of definition: in the next six months we will work with an agency to build a clear vocabulary and an identity – so I do not have to spend 30 minutes to try to explain what it is... The space will be located within the Medical Museion, and so it will be part of the general brand, but we want to make clear that we are doing something that's in between research and general public engagement.

Going back to London: you mentioned a shift in your role, which mirrored a shift of priorities in the institution. What is happening and why?

Wellcome has gone through a big change in the last year, a change that will continue for at least another year. Wellcome is a huge player in the world of medical research, the second biggest after the Gates. But it realises that just giving scientists money is not the only way of helping the world to change: they're actually using relationships with government and relationships with stakeholder organisations as a way of adding impact.

Culture is a fantastic place that can allow people to share their experiences in interesting, unusual ways

As a consequence, the work I do slightly shifted. I sit in a department called ‘government relations and strategic partnerships’: the reason I am there is the conviction that culture can be an interesting addition to this art of engaging in conversations that eventually will make people help develop ideas beneficial for the mission of the organisation.

For me, the role of culture is also to recall that a rich organisation such as Wellcome has a lot to gain in listening to other actors. Culture is a fantastic place that can bring people with different perspectives together, and can allow people to share their experiences in interesting, unusual ways. So that's where we're repositioning ourselves: it has less to do with public understanding of the medicine, and more with making interesting connections, and surprising, mutual discovery.

Do you really need a physical space for this role?

Actually, what I do in London is international cultural programming – in this moment for example I oversee a project called Mindscapes about mental health. But I am also overseeing a transdisciplinary research space, called The Hub. Every two year, we give a million pounds to a group of researchers who will involve scientists and humanities, researchers, community organisations, artists, radio producers: they have a topic and we give them a space for two years to develop it, and this involves several public engagement activities in order to involve larger segments of the public.

Do you see a recognition by research institutions of this role for culture that goes behind outreach and becomes a way to enrich research?

Organisations change: in this moment I see a healthy need of finding a slightly different language, and to re-articulate and realign missions. Unfortunately, the world of research is so pressurised that everything that helps to broaden views, that deliberately wants to complicate things, is sometimes perceived as a waste of time, that diverts away from being effective and efficient. So there are struggles there.

I can give you an example from Copenhagen. An important part of our funding there comes from the Center for basic metabolic research, a very large and renowned research centre within Copenhagen University. They are increasingly asking that we support them on their inreach as much as on their outreach, so we help them think about how they work together, and how they might engage with other sectors of civil society: not just for sharing information, but for working collaboratively. The fact that we're always half in a university and half outside is crucial: we bring back at the university what we know about the world outside.

We have very strong support from the institution on this aspect, and I think that's a really interesting new role for us: how can our public engagement activities be played back and enrich the university culture?

In Heilbronn, at the 2022 Ecsite Conference, we will have a session using this paper as a starting point. What is the question you would like to discuss with the public engagement community there?

My key question would be the most commonly asked one of the moment: “how do we make the world a better place?”. But given a different twist. Because I think we still need to find our unique voice in this area, without throwing away our past. So my question is probably “how can we be faithful to our history and our values, and at the same time properly engaging with current, pressing issues?”

You are well-known in the public engagement community for your work at Science Gallery Dublin, and now at Biotopia in Munich. But when retracing your professional journey, we have the impression that you always walked at the frontiers between research and public engagement. 

I suppose I've always had a foot in both worlds. Originally, I came from physics, then went into history of science, working on 17th century science, and after that I worked at MIT and Stanford on Science, Technology and Society. But then I realised that it is really exciting to do projects with the public, in particular connecting science and the arts, so I organised a number of art-science festivals, before initiating Science Gallery in Dublin. Science Gallery was a bridging experiment between the world of the universities and the different creative communities that surround it. One of the key ideas in Science Gallery was to make the university more porous to the outside world: on the one hand, inviting the public and people from different professions and with different perspectives to engage with researchers, but also inviting the researchers out of their comfort zone, to experience different perspectives on their area of research. Five years ago I moved to Munich to develop a new project, Biotopia, right at the interface between research and the public: if Science Gallery was in some sense a new vision of the science centre, you could say that Biotopia is a new vision of the natural history museum. 

Did you find yourself in these hybrid zones by chance, or it has been a deliberate choice? 

I've always found it extremely stimulating to create such ‘edge spaces’. In nature, there are zones in which different ecosystems meet, like the savanna and the forest or different ocean ecosystems: it is in these amazing confluence points that you have the greatest variety of new species and new forms of life. I think that's what happens when you bring together the ecosystems of research and the public. Rather than science centres or science museums, we need to think of ourselves as places where people can explore wicked problems: problems that by their nature require approaches from different perspectives and disciplines, and where the contributions of different publics are essential. Wicked problems – we think of  quantum computing, AI, microplastics, biodiversity… - are problems that involve a scientific dimension, but also social dimensions, policy dimensions and design approaches: problems which science alone cannot solve. 

Science needs the public as much as the public need science

Our community has always focused on public engagement with science, based on the assumption that the public and society need science. When addressing such wicked problems, I think science needs the public as much as the public need science. And that's why these boundary spaces, these porous membranes between research and the public, are so important right now.

These boundary spaces where science need the public, are they ubiquitous in science, or specific to certain disciplines? 

Neri Oxman, a very interesting designer working at MIT Medialab, suggests that we've moved from the age of enlightenment to the age of entanglement. The enlightenment was like a salad, where all of the ingredients come together, but they still have their individual integrity: you can always recognise the tomatoes, the cucumbers, the lettuce. Whereas the age of entanglement is more like a soup, where you can no longer distinguish each specific ingredient. A lot of the interesting research at the moment is highly transdisciplinary and it converges around these wicked problems: the pandemic has been a great example of the radical collaborations that had to emerge between different disciplines. It is perfectly fine if some scientists are happy to stay in their research institutions isolated from the public, but I think that's increasingly becoming an endangered species. I think that we need to design a new kind of science engagement for the age of entanglement.

Let’s go back to natural history museums: these are institutions that do combine a research and a communication mission… in which sense Biotopia will be different?

Natural history museums have a deep tradition of being research institutions themselves. For example, the American Museum of Natural History in New York considers itself first and foremost a research institution, and only in a secondary capacity a public museum. This idea of museums as places of learning and investigation has deep roots. Science centres somehow went in a different direction, towards the playful hands-on interaction, but now we're witnessing a real comeback to the interaction with current research. At Biotopia we are now in the planning process: while waiting for the new building to open in a few years, we are experimenting new approaches. Rather than focusing on research going on behind the scenes, we want to do research with the public in new, interesting ways, particularly around life sciences and the environment, including through a series of public collaboratories. 

What we need is a sort of a reinvention of the natural history museum, suitable for wicked problems

Natural history museums are at the heart of great contemporary challenges, like climate change and the biodiversity crisis, but also what Craig Venter has called the biological century – when biology becomes a tool for creation as well as a science of analysis. However, their model was born in the 19th century. What we need is a sort of a reinvention of the natural history museum, suitable for wicked problems, with a much more transdisciplinary approach, and where the dialogue with the public is central. There are a lot of natural history museums around the world that are undergoing reinvention: this is true in Berlin, in Frankfurt, at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, and in many other places. 

At Biotopia we will have a bio lab as well as a bio art and design studio, where we look at how biological materials can be used in art and design. People can explore, for example, mushroom leather, seaweeds, spider silk as new materials. This is involves working closely with researchers who are studying these materials, but at the same time allow people to experience the new possibilities of creating sustainable materials for tomorrow’s fashion industry. 

We've just started a new project, called the Munich science communication lab, with a focus on communicating planetary health. This is a new research project funded by the Volkswagen foundation and involving Biotopia, the Deutsches Museum, the Helmholtz center for environment and health and the two universities in Munich, LMU and TUM. The goal of the lab is to conduct research in science communication, and public engagement around planetary health – the interplay between human health and ecosystem health, which is clearly a wicked problem in the sense I discussed earlier. We will bring together researchers in health or ecology, researchers in STS, but also practitioners in science communication. One of the interesting things of doing this in Munich, is that we are able to think beyond our own institutions, and look at how the research ecosystem and the public engagement in science ecosystem connect together.

In Heilbronn, at the 2022 Ecsite Conference, we will have a session using this paper as a starting point. What is the question you would like to discuss with the public engagement community there? 

I have one that is at the same time simple and fascinating: “how can an exhibition become a research experiment?

Citizen science and participatory research is undoubtedly a fast-growing approach which is transforming the relationship between public engagement and research. You are members of a team dealing with a variety of citizen science activities at the French National Museum of Natural History (MNHN), in Paris. How did you end up there?

Asma - I have had classical training in biology. When I was a girl, I used to watch the Telethon (a yearly fundraising event to raise money for research into muscular dystrophy and other rare genetic diseases - Ed) and I wanted to become a geneticist, understand how living systems work, cure rare diseases and save children. Then I actually went into fundamental research in genetics, and at the same time I joined an association for science popularisation, Les Petits Debrouillards. Later I joined Universcience for a project, ESTIM Governance, that allowed me to meet and understand the problems of many diverse actors of the public engagement scene. It was a wonderful experience, but I was missing the link with research. When I saw that the National History Museum in Paris was looking for a coordinator of citizen science initiatives, I thought it was just what I was looking for: a link with research and a link with citizens.

Camille - I am actually new to the field. I was always interested in museum on one side, and the environment on the other. After studying political science, I wanted to be sure that what I was doing had an impact, so I started studying science communication, while working with an association, GIS3M, doing research on cetaceans in the Mediterranean, involving professional scientists and volunteers. It was this experience that convinced me that citizen science was a wonderful way to advocate for biodiversity. After a Master in museology I started working at Vigie-Museum, the institution within the Museum that ensures that all citizen science activities – from biodiversity to anthropology and sociology – share dialogue, and at Particip-arc, a recent national initiative that focus on participatory research in the cultural sector, thus involving not only science museum, but also art and history museums. 

Are the reasons to engage in participatory activities the same for a science museum or for other cultural venues? 

Camille - There are several differences. First of all, natural history museums had always taken advantage of citizen contributions collecting specimens, while this is less true for art museums. Also, protocols in science are often replicable: this makes it easier to design a citizen science initiative. What I am also observing thanks to the Particip- arc project is that science museums tend to focus on data, while other museums (art museums, society museums, etc.) would focus more on people: groups of citizens, that have a specific experience or knowledge to share. In “cloud curated exhibitions,” that are more and more mainstream now in art museums, citizens are mobilised to provide content. The interest of their knowledge is revealed by the exhibition, and then becomes valuable for the researchers involved. A great example was the “Click!” exhibition that took place at the Brooklyn Museum in 2008.

The public is so diverse that you always find relevant expertise on socially relevant issues

Is citizen science a new way of achieving the traditional missions of the Museum, or is it an entirely new mission?

Asma - The missions of the MNHN are very diverse, involving research, education, collections but also expertise, accompanying political decisions, etc. There are many possibilities to participate at different levels, and many different ways of doing research: my job is actually opening up these possibilities, ensuring that they are all open to society. This opening is the condition to set up new collaborations among research and the public. The demand is clearly there on the public side: the public is so diverse that you always find relevant expertise on socially relevant issues!

Is it rather a demand from the public, a need of researchers, or an offer of the Museum?

Asma - It is impossible to clearly separate the demand from the offer… A citizen science project can start from a research project, or from the need of an individual researcher, or from a network of amateurs or engaged citizens, or from a science communication initiative…  What I learned after many years is that the diversity of these starting points do not preclude any pathway: a project can start from a citizen demand and end up as a research project, or the reverse. Quite often, citizen participation opens up sub-projects, that are considered as marginal at the beginning and then, since we set up the conditions for unexpected exchanges and dialogues to occur, gain importance and take centre stage.

Do you have an example you want to share?

Asma - I like the example of meteorites. This is a field in which the contribution of lay citizens has always been important. There are plenty of stories of farmers finding weird rocks, bringing them to the church or to the local authority and thus contributing to precious collections. Today at MNHN we have five projects related to meteors, meteorites and impact craters within the Vigie-Ciel programme (related to the sky) and one within the Vigie-Terre programme (focusing on the Earth). In all of them, researchers were at first passionate by sharing their knowledge: they participated in festivals, presentations and exhibitions. This allowed them to appreciate the richness of the contributions of the public, so they were able to imagine many collaborative possibilities, which eventually ended up in designing innovative citizen science projects. It is important to underline that the projects I am mentioning could not exist without the participation of the public, either because they imply a collection of great amounts of data, or of data that are too dispersed in space or time, or that need to be extremely reactive (the sooner a meteorite is analysed, the more accurate the information that we can extract).

Why do you think there is such a growing interest of your institution for citizen science? What are the driving forces?

Camille - The success of the first citizen science programme launched at MNHN, Vigie-Nature, was very much linked with the environmental emergency, and biodiversity loss in particular, that needed urgently a very large amount of data. This triggered the interest of the institution, that realised that in addition of providing valuable data, it was a very powerful way to bring scientists and the public closer to each other. This responded to a second “emergency”: reinforcing trust between scientists and the public. Another factor that is important to underline is the growing competences of citizens: they are more and more aware of the value of their own knowledge, they are increasingly skilled, and more and more programmes are actually initiated by them. And finally new technologies: today, anyone who owns a smartphone is a potential participant.

At present we are launching more and more projects that aim at “transforming” our visitors from spectators to participants. It’s a win-win situation: the museum allows scientists to launch and carry out their citizen science projects, while these same projects allow us to build a new relationship with our audiences.

Asma - In more general terms, there is a sort of convergence between the different functions of an institution like the MNHN, and this bring us back to your original overarching question. Participation and citizen science are a form of public engagement that contributes very efficiently to this convergence, providing points of contacts among research, expertise, collections, education, cultural activities and public engagement. Citizen participation, that we have been building and testing slowly, has offered a framework that facilitated this convergence, which is essential to fulfill the MNHN mission in the XXI century. This, in turn, helps to open physical and virtual doors among the different functions of the Museum, enriching the research activity enormously, and allowing the whole system to innovate.

Software developers, data scientists and web designers ... are often a key factor in the success of the research

An innovation that requires new professional profiles and skills?

Camille - Among the Vigie-Museum coordination and with other coordinators of citizen science programme we decided to design retrospectively our job descriptions, as if we wanted to hire ourselves. We ended up with something at the interface between research, science communication, project management, … In our job it is very important to have a clear idea of how research works, and at the same time being good at animating networks and facilitating dialogues among different stakeholders. Other professional profiles that are becoming essential are software developers, data scientists and web designers. Today they are no longer one-shot freelancers: their role is structural, they participate to the research project in all phases, they need to really understand the needs of researchers and the needs of the public, and they are often a key factor in the success of the research.

In Heilbronn, at the 2022 Ecsite Conference, we will have a session using this paper as a starting point. What is the question you would like to discuss with the public engagement community there?

At MNHN we often work or discuss with, for example, the Société Astronomique de France, the Meteoritical Society, or the Société géologique de France. These are key institutions in the research ecosystem. My question then would be “how can we better work and collaborate with historical learned societies and science-related national academies?”

Spokes is edited by Ecsite, the European network of science centres and museums. 

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Can science centres and museums really contribute to cutting-edge research? Matteo Merzagora investigates.

A dive into the work that the EU project has undertaken over the last three years, and in the recent Workrooms idea-thon. 

Ecsite thanks the writers who have generously contributed to this issue of Spokes. Have an idea for Spokes? Check out the contributors' guide and get in touch.

Spokes is the monthly digital magazine of Ecsite, the European network of science centres and museums. It is put together by the Spokes Editorial Committee:

Maria Xanthoudaki, Head of Education and International Relations, Museo Nazionale della Scienza e della Tecnologia Leonardo da Vinci, Milan, Italy – Chairperson
Helen Wilks, Communications Manager, Ecsite, Brussels, Belgium – Editor
Michèle Antoine, Director of Exhibitions, Universcience, Paris, France 
Andrea Bandelli, Executive Director, Science Gallery International, Dublin, Ireland
Emily Cronin, Partnerships Manager, Cultural & Commercial Partnerships, Science Museum Group, London, UK 
Raquel da Cunha, Communications and Events Manager, Ecsite, Brussels, Belgium
Alex Fairhead, Group Head of Exhibition Services, Science Museum Group, London, UK
Roxanne Gillon, Communications and Events Intern, Ecsite, Brussels, Belgium
Frank Kupper, Assistant Professor of Science Communication, Athena Institute - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Matteo Merzagora, Director, TRACES, Paris, France
Marta Trzeciak, Specialist in Science Events and Programmes, Experyment Science Centre, Gdynia, Poland

Responsible editor: Catherine Franche, Executive Director for Association européenne des expositions scientifiques, techniques et industrielles, aisbl

Frequency: monthly since April 2015 and quarterly from January 2021 - issue 74, February 2022

Copyright: reproduction in whole or in part of any article in this magazine is prohibited without permission from Ecsite