Impossibly, excitingly, this week was about to see the launch of Project What If at my old workplace, We the Curious, in Bristol. It’s a new exhibition experience entirely driven by the curious questions of a city. The new lockdown means it’s going to have to wait just a bit longer before it lands in the world. So in the meantime, I thought I’d share a little of the backstory to the project, because how we made it and what it stands for in the world, is just as important as the shiny new stuff you’ll see when you finally get to visit.

This is the first of four blogposts, to keep them digestible, and hopefully there’s enough here too for any museum folk who’ve been interested to hear more about the process.

I’m beyond proud of the project and everyone involved. It’s a huge privilege to have been able to say some brain scribbles out loud often enough to brilliant people who can make a thing like this come to life. Oh, and it takes a spot of luck, as these things always do. 

The opening of Project What If is the culmination of a story of change that I told last year at a conference called Museum Next. And of course the launch of the exhibition is also the start of a new story, it isn’t truly alive until it’s in the hands and minds of many more people, with new tales to be told.

what if….we pollinate the atmosphere of an old painting with a contemporary collection of questions?

That’s a ‘what if’ question I can identify retrospectively. It wasn’t one we articulated like that at the time. But I think an important cloud of conceptual dust, that settled on me years ago, comes in the form of a painting.  Joseph Wright of Derby’s An Experiment on a Bird with an Air Pump.

It’s not in the exhibition, you can find it at the National Gallery in London. But it’s one of those background threads that I realise has influenced my thinking over the years.

It’s a scene from the time where alchemy is becoming science as we know it. A travelling communicator is demonstrating the latest technology, an air pump, with an unfortunate cockatoo passing out in a glass jar from lack of oxygen.  There’s a sense of theatre about it all. We see all the different types of audience responses to the demonstration - it’s a space where all reactions and feelings, questions and also disinterest, are held together. The expert is at the centre, and yet something to do with the intimacy of the setting and the way the demonstrator is looking straight at the viewer, means I don’t get a 100% troublesome dose of knowledge hierarchy going on here. I feel like this painting suggests to me what’s been lost in some of the world of science communication.

a currency of questions

Five years ago, I took up the role of Creative Director of At-Bristol with a remit to bring the arts into a science centre. I realise now that this was driven to some extent by finances - might an ‘arts approach’ bring in the sort of blockbuster exhibitions that work for venues in the culture sector?  It’s not a bad question, but it delights me that we found a way to translate a value system measured in visitor numbers, into ambitions for an organisation running on a parallel currency of questions. (Thank you John Polatch for so brilliantly coining (ha!) that phrase.)

It was the curious people visiting us that provided the mandate for us to shift our economics, and really kick off the idea for Project What If.

On the 1st floor there was a space called News and Views. There was in fact neither. But visitors were writing questions on index cards and adding them to the wall, handwritten in pencil in often wonky, occasionally perfect handwriting. Some would put their name and age too, which added something personal and made us connect with them. The questions were quirky, existential, open ended, touching, and they made people reading them smile. Our Live Science Team would reply to them, but by the time they’d written up a response, the visitor who’d asked had gone home. Joyfully, sometimes other visitors would write responses too, and a conversation would build up on a card over time.  

Do frogs have chins?

Of course not.

Or necks?

One of my favourites from the archive of questions was : If I take myself apart atom by atom, when do I stop being me?

Like a lot of the most interesting questions this doesn’t have one single answer. You could bring physics into answering this - how many atoms are in us anyway, how many of them could you lose and still exist?  Can you even take one atom at a time? Or physiology and biology, or social identity - what makes me, me?

 The most interesting answer would use all angles and all disciplines to explore this question, but a museum or science centre is usually arranged and indeed separated by discipline. You’re in the space zone, or the human body zone, but almost never in the, ‘what happens if I take myself apart atom by atom’ zone. 

where is the invitation to not know?

None of the exhibits and programmes at that time really addressed any of the sorts of things that people were asking on this question wall. They were mostly based on known phenomena, stuff you can literally demonstrate physically. They did not tackle the existential parts of science, the edges of knowledge - the stuff that, to be honest is the REALLY EXCITING BIT. The bit where if you’re a kid getting curious about it all, you feel like there’s room for you to participate, to ask questions and maybe even work it out yourself one day.

There was something going on in the sector that had a whiff of being protective of a body of knowledge and status and only letting people in on it in very specific ways.  Where was the invitation to NOT know? And even better, to not know along with a bunch of other people who are really good at not knowing, and designing experiments and theories to find things out. 

So - back to the questions on the wall. I remember the first time I saw them, shouting to myself and very possibly out loud ‘THIS IS WHAT THIS WHOLE PLACE IS ALL ABOUT’. This organically growing collection of people’s curiosity was the central engine for what a science centre should be for in the world. And yet we were doing very little with it, we weren’t honouring the curious offerings of our audiences.

valuing questions as much as answers

We needed to value people’s questions as much as our own expertise, show them a space in which they can be part of finding out the answers. This is much more likely to generate more scientists in the world AND, more importantly, a whole society of curious citizens with the agency to ask questions and to feel like science is for them, and part of culture.

It was clear that the most generative questions we were asking were not about arts in a science centre. They were about the role of science centres in a contemporary world of digitally accessible information, and the responsibility and privilege of a being a big building in the middle of a city. We were exploring how to create equitable spaces where everyone has a voice in our collective futures. We were asking who gets to ‘do’ science and where.

We were all entering a brave new world of organisational change, of a shift in values and identity. It was not at all easy. But building on what we’d already been doing in work around the city, and inspired by the work of many – notably the Participatory Museum by Nina Simon, arts and science fusing in very different ways in The Exploratorium and Science Gallery, and the manifesto of Knowle West Media Centre in Bristol - we wrote our own Manifesto, for building a Culture of Curiosity.

I won’t divert into the wonderful world of curiosity any further here, but if you’re interested, you can watch my TEDx talk on it here.

So - the seed of Project What If had been planted, thanks to the curious visitors to At-Bristol. The space and place in which it would grow is within the context of a science centre and culture sector facing urgent questions of inclusion and democratisation of knowledge. And a city, Bristol, full of inequality as well as inventive, activist, creative communities.

We’ll get into the process of bringing Project What If to life in my next blog post. In the meantime, a provocation:

what if…you check in with what audiences/visitors/clients might be bringing to your organisation that could be a driver for a new adventure?