How do you build an exhibition, during a pandemic?
Over the past three years, we’ve been gathering questions in our venue, and out in Bristol with our silver Curious Cube — we’ve gathered over 10,000 questions from people in every postcode in the city.
These questions have been funny, inspiring and profound and have been placed at the heart of our brand-new experience, Project What If, which launches this November. It’s the first time an exhibition has been built around the curiosity of a city.
The build is currently underway right now, with 68 new exhibits being installed — but you may have noticed, we’re currently in a pandemic, and yet, our brilliant Projects team have continued to develop this new experience.
We caught up with Aimae, Carmela and Rose from our Content Team (part of our wider Projects Team), to hear a little bit more about how you build an exhibition during a pandemic…
First of all, a bit of context on our Projects Team:
The Projects Team runs the exhibit side of things, from organisation to design, budget to content creation and is made up of design engineers, project managers, producer and the Content Team. The Content Team can be found doing anything from researching the science behind exhibits, to developing ideas for the exhibits themselves. They user-test everything before it’s signed off, to make sure it’s right for our audiences and input into designs. They help out in running artist and outside commissions and reach out to a lot of different groups, such as scientists, community groups and other experts, making sure there’s a good representation of people found throughout our exhibition.
So let’s start at the beginning, for anyone who is unfamiliar with Project What If, can you give us a brief update on the project itself? What is it and how long have you been working on it?
Rose — Project What If is a funded Wellcome Trust exhibition (part of the Inspiring Science fund), our Content Team came on board just over a year ago now, with a few people in the Projects team who have been working on it from the very start.
Carmela — Project What If started with a question-asking campaign where We The Curious gathered loads of questions, not just from visitors to We The Curious, but from every postcode in Bristol and gathered around 10,000 (Rose — I hear it’s 12,000 now!).
We then had to whittle that down to just seven questions — that was done through workshops with our community partners (such as WECIL (West of England Centre for Inclusive Living) and Creative Youth Network) and a huge internal database where staff and volunteers could vote on common themes. The workshops then helped us to work it down further into what people found interesting, and then the final seven were picked by the Projects Team, who were focussing on what we could actually make an exhibition from.
Rose — We also had a ‘wild card’ system where people could vote on what was the most and the least interesting when they were shortlisting the questions. We wanted to spark debate and to challenge people, so we chose the ones which we felt were either the most or least interesting, precisely to polarise people, and because we wanted people to feel something.
Carmela — The idea behind the exhibition is then, once you’ve got those seven questions, to explode that back out. So rather than just giving an answer to a question, they’re designed to spark other questions from each other. Each of the seven question ‘constellations’ that you’ll find in Project What If contains around ten exhibits (there are 68 new exhibits in total), approaching the question from different disciplines, angles and perspectives.
What skills do you need in a team to develop content for an exhibition?
Aimae — You need know a lot about sand, or at least be willing to learn a lot about sand!
Rose — We can identify different types of sand by just looking at them now.
Carmela — If fact, I have two bags of sand on my desk right now [holds them up for us to see].
Rose — I once spent 2 days calling up researchers and academics, to research how many grains of sand would fit into a Coke can. You think it’s simple, and it really isn’t! There are porosity issues, and fluid dynamics, there’s a lot to consider. I finally got it, and then the exhibit was cut! I have this knowledge, what am I going to do with that?!
Aimae — You definitely need that flexibility to change course suddenly, and be willing to put a load of research time in to something, and to then realise that it’s not viable, so to then start approaching it from a totally different direction.
You also need to be good at reaching out to people, whether that’s scientific expertise, community groups or cultural leaders, and you need to be good at forming relationships. You need to be able to work with a really wide variety of people to make sure your content is accurate, but also representative and relevant to different people.
Carmela — Within the wider Projects team there are lots of different skills, so when we’re looking at these exhibits, we all approach it with such different angles. I’ll be looking at something and asking, does the meaning make sense, is the language clear? Andy, our Design Engineer, will be asking if a child will be able to reach the exhibit, where is the maintenance access and what’s the visitor experience like? Helen, our Head of Projects will be looking at the bigger picture, so asking what’s the budget, who’s going to do that, how much time will it take?
Have you worked with many partners on the project? What do they bring to it?
Carmela — That’s quite a big question, because participation and collaboration is one of the main things about Project What If and part of our guiding Manifesto for We The Curious. Even the fact that we’ve started with other people’s questions, involving people at every different stage, has been a major part of the project.
Rose — We’re working with a lot of artists now, which we didn’t do so much when we were At-Bristol. That’s something that you don’t see much in science centres, certainly not to the degree that we’re doing. I’ve never seen anything which approaches something in so many different ways.
The definition of what we’re calling an expert is also very different to what people are used to seeing in a science centre. Lots of people from across Bristol have been telling us their lived experiences, and that being the highest point of the hierarchy of knowledge, is pretty special.
Aimae — We’re still working with lots of scientists and researchers; they’re the people that we’re consulting with on content, but they’re not people shaping the direction of the exhibits.
Whereas, the question askers have shaped the direction. They’re all different ages and backgrounds, and along with some of our partners, like WECIL and Creative Youth Network, who may not fit the traditional definition of what an expert is, have come up with ideas that are totally outside the box from what anyone in the organisation has come up with, and it’s actually changed the direction the exhibit has gone down.
For example, one of our exhibits focusses on time travel and culture, and we were working with a group of work experience students from Bristol City Academy — they were talking about time travel in their favourite TV shows, and mentioned Rick and Morty. That meant that we got to think about an exhibit in a way which came out of a teenager’s mind. It wouldn’t have come out of the mind of someone here at We The Curious, and that’s really exciting, because it means that we’re approaching things in so many different ways by bringing so many voices in.
Rose — It’s really helpful to get other people’s opinions. For example, I’d been working on content research for an exhibit which looks at what it means to have a soul, and we needed a fact to provoke the question about whether a human has a soul. I spent two months trying to figure out what that fact could be; we ran some workshops with The Listening Partnership (part of WECIL) where we talked about the soul for hours and how independent cultures have come up with the concept of a soul, and now their facts are part of the exhibit.
Let’s talk about the actual development of the project itself, and the importance of including different voices, perspectives and experiences into it. How do you work that into a plan?
Carmela — The actual planning was set before our time (this Content team has been in place for just over a year now), but always known that it would be a core important part to include as many different voices and perspectives in the project.
User-testing is a really important part of this, as we can’t just make something and assume that people will think it’s good. There are three parts to user-testing, there’s the early stage prototyping where we test out to see if an idea is even interesting. It’s a really simple process, with bits of paper on a wall and people voting for and making notes, to see which ideas people would find engaging.
After that, there’s early stage physical prototypes which are made by our Workshop team, to see how people physically interact with an exhibit.
We’ve also all done a lot of digital user-testing, the new exhibition has lots of screen-based exhibits, and pre-COVID, we’d get people in to our Test Lab to test the exhibits to see where they click and checking whether it was intuitive. Sometimes we’d be testing the design, and sometimes the content to see if it was usable.
Rose — User testing isn’t something which we’ve come up with, as all exhibitions do user test, but they mainly focus on the physical aspects so how it works and less so on the concept. For example, we put out a survey about robots, and asking what people would want to talk to a robot about. The responses were then put into a script of what a robot might say, and we tested it out via Zoom to see which ones people engaged with, what they didn’t like, and why. The final script for the exhibit will say that it’s based on what people found interesting. It all comes from research on our part on the theory, but the content came from people.
Carmela — It’s an extremely unusual way to design an exhibition, in that we didn’t decide what the theme would be, we just opened it up to people’s questions.
Rose — It’s also interesting to go into an exhibition with no clear end goal of what science you want to communicate. We went into it asking, what’s interesting? Let’s prove that science isn’t just silos of biology, chemistry and physics, but a holistic mash of a million and one different disciplines. That’s quite a challenging place to start from.
Aimae — It’s the biggest exhibition in our history, previously we created smaller exhibitions for our venue, which are challenges in themselves. This exhibition features lots of completely new designs (as well as some of our old exhibits which have been re-purposed and re-housed), none of it is mass-produced and there’s not going to be anything like this in any other science centres — it’s involved so many voices.
We’ve really worked hard to be inclusive and representative of our city, so that people coming in to the science centre can see themselves in the exhibition.
Let’s focus on the pandemic specifically — how has it impacted on your plans and work?
Carmela — It both has, and hasn’t impacted our plans, somehow, we’re still where we hoped we’d be at this stage. We had lots of user-testing planned with different groups, and all of a sudden everything changed. We couldn’t not test our exhibits as we needed to know how they would work, so we had to do it digitally. Luckily, we’d tested all of the physical things which needed testing pre-COVID, so we were on to digital user-testing by that stage.
Rose — It was also really nice to user test online. We spoke to over 100 people via Zoom, it was great to see people that we knew from We The Curious (such as Members that we know and some of our volunteers) and to have some in- depth conversations with them about the exhibits, in the middle of a time when people weren’t able to have these sorts of conversations.
I had one who had one family with a teenage son, who were really happy to do the user testing, but also wanted to have a chat at the end about careers in STEM. I said “of course, I love talking about this!”
Carmela — All of the exhibits were developed in-house, but we’ve been working with 3 external contractors, our software developers (Calvium), our exhibition designers (Kossman dejong) and exhibition fabricators (Bruns), the last two are both based in the Netherlands.
We would normally go out to their workshop to do ‘shop approval’, which is where we look at, test and play with all of the exhibits to sign them off. That’s how it should work, but we’ve had no physical shop approvals throughout this whole project, so they’ve all be done online virtually.
It’s also really hard not be able to play with the exhibits, and to have to sign it off online through a mobile screen. We realised that colours over a screen don’t always match up and aren’t the same for everyone, so it can be really hard to sign off if you’re unsure!
Rose — It’s also worth mentioning that Bruns also had to build the exhibits when they came to Bristol for installation. To do so they needed to have a special construction exemption due to COVID restrictions, they’ve been working on a rotating teams system have been socially isolated in their hotels the entire time. Not something that we’d planned for!
What’s been most challenging, about both the project and working through the pandemic?
Carmela — I’d say the scope of the whole project is pretty challenging, as there are 68 exhibits.
Rose — It’s also something that people really care about it; not just the team, but all of the contributors care about it, and it’s challenging to navigate that, and to make sure that everyone’s proud of what they’re making and putting out. It’s important that we stay true to what we want to do — it would’ve been easier not to user test, to just crack on and make things and to say “yes, that’s good enough.” It’s a challenge to keep a high quality across the whole exhibition, with so many different voices.
Carmela — We all believe in it and care about it, and don’t want the standard to drop. It’s such a big project that it’s hard personally not to work around the clock when there’s so much to do (and you’re working remotely), and you care about it.
Aimae — Specifically during lockdown, it’s been a challenge not seeing people that you work with day-to-day. It can feel quite huge and overwhelming, when you don’t have any contact with those people, and you’re doing it all from your home. Anyone who’s been working from home throughout this period can relate to that.
Rose — We’re a close-knit team, who enjoy bouncing ideas off each other so it’s hard to pass on information without seeing each other. It’s also hard to see colleagues feeling the pressure, and not being able to hang out and help out. We have a Projects meeting online every day, and for a while in lockdown we dressed up for the meeting. Aimae’s costumes were always a bit of a curveball, she came dressed as an owl to one of them!
And what’s been most surprising?
Carmela — Some of the really surprising things have been the individual conversations that we’ve had, ending up talking to clock fanatics and sourcing time pieces for an exhibit. It’s a real deep dive into a whole new world. Searching for sand has also been a huge task, having to think about how to find a sample from a specific part of the world. It’s been a wild goose chase at some points!
Rose — This job is so weird; it was weird and amazing being on our Live Science Team [Rose was previously a member of our team of science communicators] and it’s both weird and brilliant being a content researcher. At university, I always thought that I’d go on to be a chemist in a lab, and since then I’ve found myself making phone calls about getting horses’ eyes preserved for the exhibition. It was a very interesting conversation, we bonded over our shared experience of eyeball dissection!
Aimae — I’ve been most surprised at the fact that all of this has been possible. Looking back at it now, I wonder how we’ve managed to make this work without being in the room with each other for 6 months, and without being about to go and look at look at the exhibits. I’m also surprised at how much random stuff I’ve learned, I never thought that I’d have a job where I’m contacting people to find out how much sand goes into toothpaste!
What are you most excited about seeing when the exhibition open in November?
Carmela — Seeing the actual exhibits in real life, and not just on screen. It’ll be really interesting to see how people move from exhibit to exhibit, and to see how visitors will interact with the whole of Project What If.
Aimae — I’m excited to see our visitors in Project What If, we haven’t seen any of our visitors for so long. It’ll be great to see people interacting with it, and to see what they take away from the exhibition.
Rose — It just doesn’t seem real at the moment, I still don’t believe it’ll exist. We’ve been working on it virtually, digitally for so long it just doesn’t seem real! Life is through a screen at the moment, so the idea that people might actually perceive it is unreal.
Aimae — I’m also excited to bring family and friends, it’s so conceptual and it varies so much day to day and week to week. I want to show people what we’ve been doing, and what we care about. We’ll finally be able to show them what we’ve done!
Project What If opens in November, tickets will be on sale mid-October.
Visit www.wethecurious.org/projectwhatif for more information, and keep an eye on our social media channels for more news and updates.
