What if….part 2

a mandate for change

If you missed my first blog on Project What If, step back one page. If you’re here for the next part, thanks for being interested!

So, 3 years ago, we were deep into curiosity and culture change and it was both hard and exciting.  It’s not always easy to introduce change without the urgency or clarity of crisis as a driver. We weren’t in crisis, our visitor numbers were growing, with positive feedback about our offer. But we did have an exciting mandate for change from the city. A survey of nearly 1000 people – members, visitors, non-visitors, people who’d never heard of us – gave us a really clear ask….to be for everyone, as well as for kids, to be more collaborative, and to be more challenging.

This all fed into our transformation from At-Bristol into We the Curious, and the brand company we were working with responded to the survey and our manifesto with an organising thought for our working practices.

‘What If’

It perfectly embodied the freedom and non-judgemental possibilities of curiosity.

So now we were able to frame a useful question. What if….we designed a curious exhibition from people’s questions…..and What if….we truly redistribute who gets to decide what goes in the exhibition?  This was a big challenge. It was about re-distributing some of the institutional power of skilled and experienced people in an organisation, ensuring they still felt valued, while introducing a good deal of uncertainty into a well-honed process of exhibition design.

Here’s where a dose of luck and serendipity came in. Two things happened that made Project What If possible – finding a creative partner that really ‘got’ what we were dreaming of, and a funding opportunity that enabled us to do it.

First, at ECSITE, an always energising conference of all the science and discovery centres in Europe, in a lunch hall of hundreds of delegates, I accidentally found myself sitting next to the CEO of a top exhibition design company in Amsterdam, who it turned out, not only shared some of my questions about the aesthetics of science centres, but also a fascination with curiosity cabinets and Wunderkammers, as they had just completed a Cabinets of Wonder exhibition at the Kunstmuseum in the Hague, in which the audience are active participants in the end experience.  It remains to this day the best exhibition experience I’ve ever seen that combines deep learning with creativity and discovery. It’s beautiful.  And so it was that Kossmann de Jong landed on our list of potential design companies to consider for Project What If.

Second, the Wellcome Trust and what is now UKRI, launched the Inspiring Science fund. It’s a major capital fund designed, unusually in our sector, to support organisational change in the way that science centres connect with and reach new audiences. We could hardly believe the timing. It was the perfect opportunity to start turning our Manifesto into something tangible, a real project.

no turning back

Long story and a ton of work short, we smashed our manifesto values into the ‘What if we build an exhibition from people’s questions’, question, and landed the full 3 million pounds of funding from Inspiring Science.

And there was no going back once we’d called ourselves We the Curious and put our name upside down over the front door. Now we just had to work out how to do what we said we’d do in our Project What If proposal. So we were trying out new ways of working, and finding new collaborators and worrying about how to do all this alongside the daily business of delivering a great experience for our visitors. We were doing a lot of learning as went along.  This quote kept me going at the time.

"When I have an idea I ask myself, do I know how to do this? And if the answer is yes, I don’t do it –we've done that, so let’s not bother". 

David Lan, when he was Director of the Young Vic, from a Guardian article on cultural tastemakers.

collecting and curating questions

Here’s some of the things that Project What If required us to experiment with and do differently. Although it very definitely was not always easy, the teams embraced, amplified, and energetically ran with and embedded these practices into the organisation.

• Instead of our small exhibitions team sitting in a room and picking some post-its from the big internal ideas wall we had, and deciding to do an exhibit on say, magnets, because we think people like them, the process was radically redistributed.  With a Curious Cube for conversation starting, a website inviting questions, and a cube of What If in the venue, we gathered 10,000 questions from every postcode of Bristol. We ran sessions in the prison, the hospital, the park, shopping mall and community centres. 

• The curation and decision making process was then shared across departments, and with our communities. We invited literally everyone working at We the Curious to review sections of the question database and rate them against a set of criteria. For the first time, everyone in the organisation was involved at the start of a new exhibition concept. Their subjective interests as humans were valued in the longlisting process.

•  The criteria we used for longlisting questions were developed from reflection sessions we ran on what we’d noticed about the old question archive. We rated for questions that:

-       made us feel ‘ I really need to know the answer!’

-       were open ended, with opportunity for storytelling

-       made us see/feel something new through someone else’s eyes

-       were asked in a way that we wouldn’t have asked it

-       were specific, relating to a moment of revelation in someone else

• Noticing that we were somehow still selecting questions that felt somewhat science textbooky, our then digital manager invoked something he called the chaos monkey, to shake out our institutional biases. Questions that had been rated with the highest possible score and also the lowest possible score by different people, were put back into the pile. Some of those happily made it through to the final exhibits. I’ll leave you to guess which ones.

• We had worked out that our ground floor exhibition space could fit in 7 constellations of exhibits exploring a single question from different angles. So we started to collate the long listed questions into 7 emergent categories, but we found that was really about us trying to default back to age old zones of knowledge and it wasn’t useful – so we ditched these old categories.

 god, poo and the universe

Working in this new way brought so many new discussions into our working practice. Like, whether we should use questions that weren’t quite ‘correct’ like, ‘how does the Moon fly?’ How do we curate questions so we don’t feature any that might cause offence to any groups of people, but also don’t avoid contested subjects.  Should a science centre take a stand on anything, we just present evidence, right?  #museumsarenotneutral.

Why did we think that questions about religion had no place in a science centre, asked a performance artist who was a brilliantly questioning part of the team for a while. And later, the question about whether science can see your soul took us deep into the uncomfortable fundamentals of how a prioritisation of other people’s starting points and values entirely changes our practice and how we identify as communicators of science.

We argued about whether staying true to spelling mistakes and quirky grammar in questions was important or patronising. And we smiled when for a while the top three areas of interest in our question database seemed to be GOD, POO and THE UNIVERSE.  I still very much want to make an exhibition with this title one day.

A longlist of I now forget exactly how many questions - A LOT - was handed over to different community groups to shortlist down to about 15. This process in itself involved thoughtful workshops, relationship building and finding out about each other.

 The final 15 questions came back to the exhibitions team, because ultimately we did have to pick 7 that we thought we might be able to build exhibits about. And wow, for a moment I did wonder what we’d let ourselves in for. How on Earth will we create a constellation of exhibits to explore “who was the first person to see sand?”! And how wrong that worry was. As soon as we started to explode the questions out into all the possible connections, related questions and areas of interest, it was obvious which ones would lead to brilliant exhibits, and which would be perfect for the programming team to explore in more detail.  

We’d been working with anonymised questions until we picked the final 7. And so what a joy it was when our participation catalyst Amanda tirelessly managed to track down some of the question askers and we found we had a great mix of people represented across the city. And also, the questions all demanded a 360 degree approach to exploring them – just like the ones back on the New and Views wall that kicked this all off. It felt like the time and thought invested in the question gathering and curation of them had worked.

In my third blog post, I’ll talk about how we then went about designing exhibits that explored the collectively curated questions.

Til then, another What If for you:

What If….you could introduce shared curation or decision making with your audiences/visitors? What feels difficult and what feels exciting about that question?