Abstract In October 2010, the Science Museum in London held a three-day international workshop to discuss how science and technology museums use their collections and represent the history of science, technology, and medicine for today’s audiences. This was the first outward manifestation of the museum’s Public History of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Medicine (PHoSTEM) project, and was designed to launch discussion of its main themes. At the heart of the workshop’s concerns was the kinship of two phenomena: public history and co-curation. In broad terms, “public history” can refer to the ways in which lay people pursue historical interests—whether that be family and local history, collecting, consuming historical magazines and television programs, or museum visiting—for fun. Co-curation and similar techniques gathered together under the umbrella of “participation” describe a range of practices in which lay people work to develop displays and programs within museums.1 The workshop was convened to explore—via a series of sessions, plenaries, and “provocations”—the relevance to the history of science of public history and co-curation used together. The gathered audience of international and British delegates and Science Museum staff debated different facets of these core ideas, in the context of the history of relations between science and the public; experiments with new media; and especially reports of co-curating experiments and practices at home and abroad.
The Long View
If we want to enhance the effectiveness of museums in the coming decades, we will do well to reflect on how—in a dynamic interplay of context and developing practice—museums have changed over the last generation. In the case of the Science Museum, London, it is notable how the representation of contemporary science was transformed in this period, as exemplified particularly in our Wellcome Wing. The museum’s staff achieved this in large part by getting closer to audiences in two ways: by taking part in the then-new university subject of science communication studies, and by adopting the techniques of audience research (Boon 2010). Looking back over that period raises questions about how the museum will have changed in another quarter century, and what new techniques may turn into something really significant in the decades to come. At a time when virtual and digital media have increasing presence within culture, many museum staff members seem to be begging the question about the comprehensibility and value of museums’ collections of physical objects. For science and technology museums in particular, collections may be becoming more remote from audience experience. Many visitors no longer possess the familiarity with machines that was commonplace in the nineteenth-century world that gave birth to the great technical museums. On the other hand there is
- Tim Boon (tim.boon@sciencemuseum.org.uk) is head of Research and Public History, the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD.
DOI: 10.1111/j.2151-6952.2011.00102.x
© 2011 The California Academy of Sciences
