Biomedicine on Display

After more than half a year of budget negotations, Medical Museion is now officially part of the EC 7th FWP programme-financed project StudioLab.

Inspired by the merging of the artists studio with the research lab to create a hybrid creative space, STUDIOLAB proposes the creation of a new European platform for creative interactions between art and science. STUDIOLAB brings together major players in scientific research with centres of excellence in the arts and experimental design and leverages the existence of a new network of hybrid spaces to pilot a series of projects at the interface between art and science.

Science Gallery in Dublin, Le Laboratoire in Paris, Ars Electronica in Linz, Royal College of Art in London, and MediaLab Prado in Madrid are the five major partners — and the rest of us, including Medical Museion, are six associated partners (which means we get less money — but also have less responsibility).

StudioLab will involve activities along three key dimensions: incubation of art-science projects, education and public engagement. Medical Museion’s part of the contract is to create a public engagement-oriented installation and event about synthetic biology (i.e., the next hot topic in the life sciences).

So now we are on the outlook for good ideas! And I thought we might get some inspiration from the seminar titled ‘Organizing collaborations: Synthetic biology, social science, art and design’ that Jane Calvert from INNOGEN, Edinburgh, is giving here in Copenhagen on Thursday:

Something that makes the emerging field of synthetic biology particularly interesting is that diverse groups including social scientists, ethicists, lawyers, policy makers, artists, designers and publics are becoming involved in the field from the outset. In this presentation, Jane Calvert explores the opportunities and challenges provided by these new forms of collaboration, drawing both on her own experiences as a social scientist studying synthetic biology, and on the Synthetic Aesthetics project, which brings synthetic biologists together with artists and designers.

This is very much along the lines we’ve been thinking in the StudioLab context.

The seminar takes place Thursday 22 September, 3-5 pm, in room K4.41, Kilevej 14A, Copenhagen Business School. Be sure to register for the seminar by email to cf.ioa@cbs.dk before 19 September.

A quick quote from Isabelle Stengers interesting book Cosmopolitics I (published in the series Posthumanities), which I feel sums up some of what we try to do at the Museion when we integrate aesthetics, politics, science communication and material culture:

“The sciences, as they are taught, that is, as they are presented once their results are unlinked from the practice of science “as it is practiced,” do not have a meaning that is appreciably different from a religious engine of war, poiting out the path to salvation, condemning sin and idolatry.”

This idea of science as ‘a religious engine of war’ is crucial in understanding some of the denialism and science-scepticism that exists all around us – people are getting weary and wary with the ever-changing landscape of scientific ‘facts’. Showing science as embodied and material practice – science in the making – is, I think, one way of re-linking science as it is taught to science as it is practiced, and thereby hopefully deepening the understanding of what science is/can be.

A few weeks ago, Paul Ginsparg, founder of the immensely popular (among physicists) preprint publication archive ArXiv, reflected on the future of scholarly communication (Nature vol. 476, pp. 145-147, 11 August 2011).

He wrote what many of my generation colleagues in the medical faculty consider outlandish, but which is self-evident to everyone who has some experience in online communication — namely that configuring the next generation scholarly communication infrastructure ”requires getting into the heads of current undergraduates and graduate students”.

Because, as he noted, the life experience of todays students “is of immediate online availability and global search engines, and they arrive imbued with the social-network mentality of sharing links, photos, videos and status updates”.

In other words, if you’ve been brought up with Facebook, you will expect scholarly communication to work the same way. And to add to Ginsparg’s reflection: you will probably assume that scholarly and public communication can be done on the same platform.

Here’s my abstract for a panel on the role of the humanities in science communication that Joan Leach in the Science Communication programme, U Queensland, is putting together for the PCST-12 meeting in Florence next spring:

Mundane Design vs. Fine Sci-Art: Two Realms of Aesthetic Practice in Science Communication
Sci-art has become an increasingly important dimension of science communication through printed media, museums, science centers and the web. Ranging from beautiful images on scientific journal covers to tissue-engineered wet-art installations, sci-art has become a recognised subgenre of the contemporary fine arts; it has entered art schools and caught the interest of gallery owners and art reviewers. It has also drawn the attention of major funding agencies, like the Wellcome Trust, as a means for strengthening public engagement with science. However, the popularity of fine sci-art risks eclipsing another, and perhaps even more important, realm of aesthetic practice in science and science communication, viz., mundane design (everyday aesthetics). In this presentation, I shall reclaim everyday aesthetics and the sensory qualities of research as a central aspect of science and, as a consequence, of science communication.

The full title of the proposed panel is ‘The Role of Humanities in Science Communication: Axiology, Epistemology, Aesthetics’, which connects nicely to the theme of the conference: ‘quality, honesty and beauty in science and technology communication’. It’s a great theme, very anti-mainstream-STS’ish! Besides me and Joan, Steve Fuller (Warwick) and Alice Bell (Imperial) are taking part. But, you never know if the programme committee likes this kind of approach or not. Let’s see. That said, the deadline for proposals is 30 September, and the final programme will be announced in January 2012.

Even more thoughts after reading How We Became Posthuman (other posts are here and here). I think part of my fascination with the book is that it inadvertently articulates what I see to be a watershed change that has happened in the past ten years or so – the change from an informational paradigm to a new, more material one. And working with science communication now, the need to articulate the contours of this change seems urgent.

One of the key elements in Hayles’ book is the detailed analysis of how information lost its body. Information, she argues, gained an almost transcendental status, as something that could move more or less unaffected through different media. It was as if the world was given a new realm of being, a pure digital substratum where information cascaded through different material substrates, changing everything as it went along. This, Hayles argues, lead to vacating an old model of understanding the world based on presence and absence, in favor of a new digital world where informational terms such as pattern, randomness, signal and noise were key. We thought we would leave the flesh behind and submerged ourselves (or at least our brains) in the digital sea.

But it just did not turn out that way. We are now standing on the shore, wet and freezing, attempting to refigure our senses to a new reality (much as Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht suggests in the quote in this post).

This is (amongst other things) why I believe science communication is becoming a political and theoretical focal point. Our understanding of communication itself, how ideas, emotions and affects are spread, is morphing. We need new tools with which to communicate in this new reality; or rather, we need to figure out what this new reality is like and how we should maneuver in it. The contours are at best blurry. If science communication was predicated on a specific understanding of information (signal to noise) and that mode is no longer as valid and obvious as earlier, where does that leave us? If there is a return to presence and absence as a communicative model, where does that leave science communication?

It is symptomatic that Matthew Nisbett (of Framing Science-fame) renamed and relaunched his influential blog as Age of Engagement. The is good reason for attempting to develop new, more material conceptualizations of science communication right now, me thinks.

Sometimes conference announcements only become interesting in the very last sentence. Like this one for “Frenemies: The love-hate relationsship between science and society”, taking place at Universiteit Twente on 14 September.

Science is put in the dock, so it seems. Experts are under attack, there is public agitation on the internet. Yet we cherish expertise as never before, and cite expert sources whenever they suit us. Are we friends, or enemies, or both? [...] This symposium looks at the dynamic role of expertise in our society. How should we understand the notion of expertise? What operates as credible expertise, and when? Is scientific expertise overrated, and are other forms of expertise too easily dismissed? Or is it precisely the other way around?

Seems like any other conference on scientific expertice to me. But then comes the interesting part:

And what, if anything, does this mean for communicating science and technology?

If you plan to attend, send an email to pauline.teppich@utwente.nl with subject REGISTER #FRENEMIES.

My impression of the first and only Public Communication of Science and Technology (PCST) conference I’ve attended (Malmö in 2008) was quite mixed. The academic quality wasn’t particularly high, there were pretty few theoretically interesting talks, not much surprising stuff, almost no nerds around, no sudden bursts of creativity — and new media were (with few exceptions :-) totally absent. The whole thing was smoothly organised but there was an aura of a public and business management hanging over the conference venue. I think these biannual meetings are a major hang-out for science communication managers.

But things can change for the better. And even better if researchers and curators from science, technology and medical museums were to attend (there was almost none in 2008). The next meeting will be held in Firenze in April 2012, and the programme will include themes such as:

• What does quality mean in science communication?
• Evaluating public communication of science
• Art and/in science communication
• Ethics and aesthetics of science communication
• Reflexive challenges: communicating PCST?
• Emerging trends and issues in science communication
• Changing media, changing formats, changing science communication models?
• Public communication of technology: the ‘Cinderella’ of PCST?

In other words, a lot of themes that are central to curators and researchers in museums of science, technology and medicine. Deadline for proposals is 30 September. More here http://www.pcst2012.org.

“Why Proteins Have to Die So That We May Live”. This was the title of the talk given by Nobel Laureate Dr. Aaron Ciechanover at the international symposium entitled Protein Chemistry: Applications to Combat Diseases held at the University of Copenhagen earlier this week. Three days packed with talks from the world’s leading protein chemists and researchers. The focus of the conference was the life of proteins from their synthesis to their degradation. This was highlighted by talks from three Nobel Prize laureates: Ada Yonath, Avram Hersko and Aaron Chiechanover – each of whom have contributed immensely to our understanding of these processes.

The symposium featured talks from invited speakers only, and as such the quality of the talks reflected this in being very high. The papers presented were mostly already published, but some did include unpublished data (although I’m sure these were already on their way to being submitted). Each speaker was given twenty-five minutes to present their papers, and unfortunately due to a complete lack of control by the chairs, this was exceeded over and over again. Annoying. Not only are breaks important when you sit through three hours of talks, they are also where a lot of the magic happens! They must be respected and cherished! Thumbs down, organizers!

The conference format for communicating science is interesting. It takes the researchers out of their daily routines (well, more or less), and to some extent forces them to listen in on subjects that they otherwise wouldn’t have paid the slightest attention. This is good. Even the most experienced researchers cannot keep up with all the data being published. Meeting colleagues in an informal setting and discussing work over food and wine also works great. It’s brilliant for networking! However, this must happen organically and cannot be forced. The organizers attempted to schedule informal meetings betweens speakers and audience during breaks (“science dating”), but I think that defies the point of informality. In this case, a lot of empty slots emphasized this. Or maybe it was just the lack of breaks?

What about social media? I’ve been going to a number of medical conferences over the past few years, and to be honest I haven’t really noticed anyone actively using it. My first conference in the museum world was very different. Granted, it was a conference about the web, but everyone was tweeting throughout the entire event. Online forums were being used actively for discussions. And (of course) all information about the conference was available online. Including all abstracts. This is very far from the case at medical meetings I’ve attended. Where the rest of the world is moving towards Web 3.0, they remain an early beta. And this is sad. It seems there is too much focus on controlling information rather than letting it flow free. Sharing. Engaging. Not only for the benefit of the meeting attendees, but perhaps also the rest of the world? Am I being naïve?

Score one for the usefulness of facebook in science. In January and February, a group of scientists, led by Dr. Brian Sidlauskas, assistant professor of fisheries at Oregon State University (OSU), had been conducting the first ichthyological survey on Guyana’s Cuyuni River. The purpose of the study was to find out which species of fish live in the Cuyuni and get a good estimate of their abundance. After two weeks of fishing, the team had more than 5.000 specimens in their nets. But then trouble came:

“In order to get the fish out of the country,” says Bloom, “we needed an accurate count of each species.” The team’s research permit required them to report this information to the Guyanese government. “We couldn’t leave the country until we turned over our data to the authorities.” Time was of the essence, as Sidlauskas, Bloom and OSU graduate student Whit Bronaugh had to return to North America as soon as possible. But how could a handful of people possibly identify 5,000 fish in just a few days?

The answer became facebook. A Ph.D –student suggested uploading the fish to facebook, and within 24 hours the 5.000 fish had been identified with the help of a network of ichthyologically-minded friends.

This story made me think of the points that Andy Clark makes in his book Supersizing the Mind – Embodiment, Action, and Cognitive Extension about the functioning of what he calls the extended mind. Facebook and other social web media has the same potentials as other tools in our cognitive environment -  like pens, smartphones, computers, fingers or calculators – to become part of our extended mind. And a powerful one at that, given the distributed power of a network of that size.  This raises serious questions about how social web media will influence the way our extended minds work. How will it impact scientific production and what new forms of life will it produce? Crowd sourcing certainly opens for scientific experimentation in new and interesting ways – www.fold.it is one of my favourite examples.

The announced talk by Andy Williams (Cardiff) about “A crisis of science journalism?” at the next London Public Understanding of Science seminar, made me think about why science journalism actually is declining in quality — and not only in the UK, but also here in the Scandinavian countries.

Based on internet surveys and interviews, Williams suggests (in his abstract distributed on the Mersenne list) that the current decline in science news journalism is due to staff cutting and rising workloads and concludes that “As long as science reporters’ everyday routines leave ever-diminished time and space for finding their own news stories and writing them rigorously, the prospects for high quality, independent, science news in national mainstream media are diminished”.

The economic situation for science journalists is surely one of the reasons for the decline. There still exist some excellent science journalists, who combine knowledge about science with critical acumen. But their numbers are shrinking when ressources and work conditions deteriorate. Only very large newspapers can afford having high quality science journalists on their payroll.

One shouldn’t underestimate the ongoing moral  and cultural decline in science journalism, however. Uncritical journalism and snippety stories are not the inevitable results of a bad economic situation in mainstream media; it’s also a question of deteriorating professional norms. This became embarassingly obvious in the uncritical way most mainstream media handled the Mono Lake arsenic life story last December. The NASA bait was swallowed quite uncritically. It was bloggers, not professional journalists, who most fiercely exposed the weaknesses of the story.

Andy Willams opens his abstract with the obvious statement that “Science news is not formed in a social, economic, or cultural vacuum”. The consequences of this commendable contextual analytical credo is to bring the total moral economy of science communication into the picture — both paper and electronic media, both journalist-based media and scientist-driven social media:

• Which media do members of the public choose to consult when they want to learn more about what goes on in science?
• Which media attract young critical minds?
• Which media give science communicators the best tools for expressing their skills?
• Which media will scientists prefer to engage with?

I would like to see the answers to these and similar questions in order to better understand the shifting trends in different science communication platforms.

(The seminar takes place on Wed 23 February in room S314, third floor of St. Clements building on the London School of Economics campus, which can be accessed through the entrance on Houghton Street)

Today’s good news from the science communication world is that the editors of the Journal of Science Communication are inviting papers for a special issue on the future of science journalism, knowledge and power.

As the editors point out, the consequence of the internet is that today “science journalism finds itself in the middle of a deep cultural, economic and political change in which technological evolution has a prominent role”. Traditional journalism is threatened and the social and professional roles of communicators need to be re-defined “in order to avoid a loss of the journalism’s democratic, social and cultural function”.

The aim of the planned special issue is to investigate how knowledge and power are being re-distributed among different communication actors, for example, how participatory practices of the Web 2.0 are changing science communication and how these practices are “re-orienting social, cultural, political and economic powers”. More here.

This is an exciting initiative, which means that the Journal of Science Communication is eventually bringing the social web into focus. They are also to be applauded for bringing issues of knowledge and power into the discussion.

My only caveat at the moment is the editors’ peculiar use of the metaphor “new ecosystem of information”. What does the notion of ‘ecosystem’, borrowed from systems ecology, actually add to the analysis of the new consequences of the internet and the new communication order, compared to the plethora of other macrosocial concepts on the concept market?  

That said, if someone is interested, you should submit an extended abstract of 1000 words to jcom-eo@jcom.sissa.it by 31 March 2011.

Like biography, autobiography has always been an important genre for science communication — like Francis Crick’s autobiography What Mad Pursuit (1988).

A couple of decades ago, only a tiny scientific elite had, in practice, access to present themselves autobiographically in the form of book-length memoirs and interviews in newspaper and magazines.

Science communication through self-presentation was thus largely restricted to famous life scientists, medical doctors and their famous patients.

Now, thanks to the web, and especially social web technologies, public self-presentation has become an opportunity for the global biotechnoscientific multitude.

Medical and nursing students, life science PhD students, and all kinds of ordinary patients are blogging, facebooking and twittering accounts of themselves in dialy work in labs and clinics or their experiences of being medicalised.

No doubt, these new practices of communication and self-presentation are contribution to changing public understandings of biomedical culture and its place in culture at large.

This conference promises to inspire to more thinking along these lines.

Patrick Crowley, Kerstin Fest, Rachel MagShamhráin and Laura Rascaroli at the University College Cork are inviting papers about new media, film and “new theoretical approaches to autobiography post-Lejeune“, as they put it, for a conference titled ‘Technologies of the Self: New Departures in Self-Inscription’, which they are organising 2-3 September in Cork, Ireland.

In an era in which self-expression has undergone an exponential growth fuelled by technological innovation, most importantly, perhaps, the creation of an internet that hosts an ever-increasing number of blogs, tweets, personal webpages and other forms of audiovisual self-expression such as YouTube, it seems timely to think again about the phenomenon of writing, filming, recording and, indeed, publishing or publicizing the self: what innovations in self inscription have recent decades witnessed, what continuities and discontinuities can be traced, what changes in attitudes to the self and to self-revelation or exposure have been witnessed, how have developments in the channels of broadcasting altered how, what and why we engage in various, if always elusive acts of self-expression, are there now new practitioners of self-inscription because of these changes, and, finally, with so many outlets and such a market for narratives of self, how is such material consumed?

The organisers particularly welcome 250-300 words abtracts on the following themes:

- new theories of autobiography: thinking beyond Lejeune
- technologies and self-inscription: the Internet and new media innovations
- the avant-garde: experimentation and the changing boundaries of the self
- on-line writing and freedom of expression: the blogosphere as political third space
- auto-ethnographies: new ways of recording the self in its sociocultural context
- issues of veridicality
- consuming selves: the appetite for self expression
etc

Send abstract proposals to self.inscription@gmail.com, before 4 April. And please consult the conference website, http://www.ucc.ie/en/german/events/selfinscription.

Two weeks ago I mentioned that the Museums Journal had published Ken Arnolds and my Dogme 95-style manifesto for creating science, technology and medicine exhibitions, first presented last September at a conference organised by Medical Museion in Copenhagen. We have now received the journal’s permission to publish the full version of the manifesto. Enjoy and/or criticize!

Just over 15 years ago, Danish directors Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg spearheaded Dogme 95, a manifesto to purify the art of film-making.

The aim was to engage audiences more profoundly and make sure they weren’t distracted by over-production. The Dogme manifesto ruled out special effects, post-production changes and other tricks in order to focus on the story and the performances.

Since then, writers, theatre directors and other arts practitioners have all found inspiration in Dogme 95’s back-to-basics philosophy. Dogme has been criticised, as have some of the films made according to its rules, but as exhibition producers, this classic vow of chastity has inspired us as a way of guiding and sharpening the creative practice of making science, technology and medicine exhibitions.

These rules have been written and published with almost indecent speed. They are deliberately provocative prompts for further discussion. This manifesto is not a definitive set of working proposals, but a draft, which will no doubt be modified and sharpened through challenge and feedback.

And anyone who knows the institutions we are based at will be aware that the exhibitions we have presided over have often not followed one or more of these rules.

This manifesto is almost reference-free, but this does not mean we think the ideas are purely our own. There are vast bodies of literature on science communication, exhibition making, art history and museology; we have read some of this literature and been influenced by it. We also have learned much from the museums we have visited.

1. Exhibitions should be research-led, not a form of dissemination

Curators should use exhibitions to find things out (for themselves and for their visitors) and not just regurgitate what is already known. Good curators are inspired and imaginative researchers who find and then build on the investigations of experts and colleagues, juxtaposing varied understandings about their chosen topic. They add their own insights and gradually come up with new ideas and perspectives.

2. A scientist should always be involved in the exhibition, a technologist if it is about technology

Don’t shy away from drawing on real expertise in interpreting a topic or finding exhibits. But this is not to say that the aim of the exhibition is simply to give voice to the views of these experts. They are not, nor should they be encouraged to see themselves as, the curators, but it is vital that their perspectives are present in the final exhibition.

3. Be clear about exhibitions being “multi-authored”

Exhibitions emerge from curatorial collaborations between experts and designers. But a show’s funders, the institutional context and other stakeholders have a bearing on the final outcome; it should be possible for exhibition visitors to find out about these influences.

The project teams who make exhibitions deserve to be credited. Those responsible for the show not only need to take a bow, they also need to be held responsible for its contents and impact.

4. Use only original material

Exhibitions should engage audiences with original material rather than reproductions and props. If you cannot illustrate a topic with original artefacts, images and documents, ask yourself if an exhibition is the best way to make the point. Models, replicas and reproductions can be shown, but only if this is the point of showing them.

Reproductions of artworks should not be used, unless the work’s natural medium is “facsimile” – for example, digital photographs. The use of scientific and medical images raises complicated questions, such as what is the “original” format of a microscopic image of a cell?

Most scientific images today are minted as digital data, and their final appearance invariably owes much to enhancements and cropping. How this material should be displayed and labelled needs consideration. It is often better to leave it out all together.

5. Never show ready-made science

Focus on the processes of science: science in the making; the triumph of discovery; the frustration and blind alleys explored along the way. Also, look at the social and cultural processes of scientific ideas becoming accepted and embedded.

6. Jealously guard a place for mystery and wonder

Exhibitions provide opportunities to explore topics in ways that bring new light to sometimes forgotten or less-well understood aspects of medicine, science, technology and their histories. But this urge to demystify subjects should not be allowed to render exhibitions earnestly didactic.

Deliberately include some exhibits about which less, rather than more, is known – curious exhibits that just cannot completely be accounted for. Visitors should leave exhibitions wanting to find out more.

7. Reject most exhibition ideas

Exhibitions represent the meeting point between subjects and material culture, and can be approached from either end – themes or objects first, or a mixture of the two. But often, topics that seem promising will not be worth developing because there simply aren’t good enough objects with which to explore or support them.

Similarly, many areas of material culture end up just not being interesting enough to make a show about. Too often, exhibitions are made from empty ideas of stupid objects. It is worth searching for a topic and a set of objects that harmoniously amplify and mutually enrich each other.

8. Leave out as much as possible

Less is usually more in exhibitions. Visitors will remember and enjoy looking at 10 carefully chosen things more than a 100 that are reasonably well selected.

The most important aspect of an exhibition is its outer boundaries, which keep out the mass of distractions that lie beyond. In the digital era, a core value of a museum exhibition is that it makes its point through displaying a few selected original objects.

9. Embrace the showbusiness of exhibitions

Audiences come to exhibitions in their leisure time and deserve to be lifted out of themselves. They will respond to the drama of the best exhibits, displays, design, writing and lighting.

Make sure that all of this is done well and given the greatest polish. This will enhance the presence of the objects and the impact of the ideas. Don’t be ashamed to admit that making exhibitions is, in part, a matter of putting on a show.

10. Celebrate the ephemeral quality of exhibitions

Catalogues, web-presence and filmed versions of exhibitions can lengthen the shadows cast by exhibitions, but they will never come close to keeping alive the actual experience of visiting a show.

This is an important part of the magic of exhibitions. Like good pieces of theatre, they gain much of their energy by being around for a limited time and then disappearing. The fact that they are time-limited gives their makers a degree of freedom to experiment and be daring. Grasp it!

11. Make exhibitions true to the geography of their venues

The principle is that knowledge is “situated” – the context in which we contemplate and acquire it can seem as important as the ideas or facts themselves. Exhibition makers need to think hard about how to work with the “place” of an exhibition.

Consider what is lost in touring an exhibition where the subject becomes detached from the local context. The country, the city, the venue, the room, and the set and design of an exhibition, even the showcases and the orientation of individual objects – all have a bearing on the meanings that audiences derive from them.

12. Avoid artificial lighting

Use natural light where possible. Start with the light available and build up from it. If possible, reveal the windows and keep the doors open. Let the natural layout of the building be apparent, make it clear where you have introduced false walls. This will enable visitors to keep a sense of where they are.

And don’t fall into the trap of imagining that the background for an exhibition has either to be a neutral black box or a pristine white cube. Ideally, a show should look and feel very different on a midsummer morning to a winter evening.

13. Always involve more than one sense

It is impossible for visitors to turn off their non-visual senses in an exhibition – they will hear, touch and smell things no matter what. So make sure that some of the tactile, audio, or olfactory experiences of an exhibition are curated. Exhibitions work by teasing their visitors into thinking that they could get close enough to what they see to touch it, even while making sure they don’t.

But curators should think about how to introduce at least a few objects that visitors can touch. Never use artificial sounds or odours, but try hard to find ways to enhance the audio and olfactory qualities of the original objects, getting visitors to use their ears and noses.

14. Make exhibitions for inquisitive adults

If you aim at educationally under-achieving primary school children, it will be impossible to engage anyone else (and you are unlikely to engage even your target audience). Many children and teenagers are keenly attracted to adult culture, but very few adults see the attraction of young material.

Never make exhibitions for educational purposes – other media and methods are more effective. It’s also worth bearing in mind that exhibitions are, by their nature, a “childish” medium, bringing out playfulness in all of us. This should be encouraged, but to focus deliberately on young audiences reaps diminishing returns.

15. Remember that visitors ultimately make their own exhibitions

Some visitors might not be interested in reading what the curators write, while others might not look at many objects. Some will be interested in aspects of a topic that the curators might not have come across.

Because of this, when an exhibition opens, it is only ever the second or third draft of an idea that will, through revision, reach maybe its eighth or ninth incarnation by the time it closes.

Exhibitions should be alive, and change is a vital part of life. Even in the most “stable” shows, lights will need adjusting and labels redrafting. An exhibit might even have to be removed or replaced. More radically, some exhibitions should be deliberately half-finished, or set up so that updates can be added halfway through.

16. Make exhibitions the jumping off place for further engagement

Good exhibitions are the point of departure for a longer relationship. The value of exhibitions should only partly be judged by analysing how many people come, how long they spent in a show and what they think of it. On this basis alone, most exhibitions are foolishly expensive ventures, particularly in these cash-strapped times.

Don’t forget that, just occasionally, exhibitions can really change visitors’ lives and this is worth a lot. Effective exhibitions can also bring in new objects to museums, have an impact on recruitment, add to shop sales, improve the organisation’s reputation, and provide a context for corporate celebrations. There is a virtual avalanche of cultural capital that can flow from them: this should be valued from the start.

17. Don’t be afraid to bend, break or reinvent the rules

The theme of the 6th annual conference in the ‘Science and the Public’ series, to be held at Kingston University, London, on 2-3 July 2011, is ‘A Quarter Century of PUS: Retrospect and Prospect.’

The meeting takes the publication of the Royal Society’s report into the public understanding of science (the Bodmer Report) in 1985 as its point of departure. Introducing what Brian Wynne and others later called ‘the deficit model’, the Bodmer Report stimulated a widespread interest in the public understanding of science (PUS) in the UK and later in the rest of Europe.

The aim of the meeting is to take stock of where public understanding of science stands now, 25 years later:

Is there still (or was there ever?) a ‘public understanding of science movement’ and if so where is it and what form does it take? Is it now defined by ‘engagement’, by ‘dialogue’ or by some other mode of public interface? Is the deficit model dead and if so has it been properly buried or does it still haunt our corridors? What else is there? What shape does the PUS field now have? Is there a comparable agenda of concerns to that defined by Bodmer and if so what is it? And in what direction(s) should work now be going? What about the critical responses? Where have they taken us and where might they be taking us in future? Is there a consensus or do we remain a field in conflict with entrenched opponents, if no longer actively at ‘war’, then hunkered down in separate bunkers refusing – or simply neglecting – to speak to each other? Is there, indeed, a language we share to communicate with each other, let alone the public?

The organisers invite papers and panels that address themes and issues like:

• reflections on the Bodmer Report and its historical, sociological and/or cultural significance;
• the PUS movement and its off-spring;
• how engaged is ‘engagement’ and how dialogical is ‘dialogue’?
• the prospects and circumspects of ‘citizen science’;
• the new science communication – education, entertainment … or irritation?
• new forms and modes of popularisation;
• technoscience and its consumption;
• science, art and culture – changes, developments, continuities;
• theorising PUS
• methods of research – new developments, new thoughts, new proposals;
• new agendas for the science/public relationship and its academic study.

<250 words abstracts to l.allibone@kingston.ac.uk or s.locke@kingston.ac.uk not later than 28 February 2011.

More info here.

On Thursday 2 December, a new Centre for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the University of Copenhagen is inaugurated with talks by Sarah Franklin and Ken Arnold.

Sarah Franklin will speak about “Life After the In Vitro Fertilisation: Biology Has Become a Technology?”. Sarah Franklin is well-known for his studies of in vitro fertilisation, cloning, embryo research and stem cell research. Her latest book is about the cloned sheep, Dolly. Since 2004 she has been a professor at the London School of Economics, where she has led the BIOS Centre together with Nicholas Rose.

Ken Arnold, who will speak about “Art and Communication of Medical Science”, is Head of Public Programmes at the Wellcome Trust, where, among others things, he has been responsible for the Trust’s collaborative projects between scientists and artists. He is primarily known as the initiator of and creative director of the Wellcome Collection, which is one of the world’s most successful arenas for biomedical science communication. In 2010-2013, Ken Arnold is visiting professor at Medical Museion, where he will contribute to the museum’s efforts to build an integrated research and public engagement programme for medical science and technology.

The Centre is a collaboration between Medical Museion and the Section for Health Services Research at the Faculty of Health Sciences’ Department of Public Health. The faculty of the new Centre includes Lene Koch (head of center), Thomas Söderqvist, Signild Vallgårda, Mette Nordahl Svendsen, Klaus Høyer, Jan Kyrre Berg Friis, Henriette Langstrup, Annegrete Juul and Adam Bencard. About ten postdoc’s and PhD students are currently attached to the Centre..

The Centre is co-operating closely with the new PhD-program for Medical Science and Technology Studies at the Faculty of Health Sciences, led by Thomas Söderqvist.

The opening takes place in Medical Museion’s Anatomical Theatre on Thursday 2 December at 3pm. After the talks there will be a wine and sandwich reception.