View transcript
- Well thank you for inviting me, Jen. It's delightful to be here, at the Exploratorium. But it's really delightful to meet all of you, and to learn all of this great work going on in so many different levels, from cognitively how we understand these visualizations, to different ways that... let's start at the beginning here... to to the way people in laboratories are beginning to figure out how to do visualizations, and to all of us in the public education world, the way in which we're trying to advance this work. I'm going to start really... we've been here at this location for six years. I can't tell you how hard it is to move a museum, and I'm still not sure we're all here, doing this. It's all the planning, and then just getting used to the new place, and one thing that was really important to me when we moved here was this site, so I'm really going to talk a lot about how the work that we do comes out of being right here, on the urban edge of San Francisco Bay. To prepare us, it took three years to move here, and we had a lot of meetings talking about all the great ideas and somehow these metaphors came out of it, that our building was a laboratory. We understand that is always has been a laboratory, but the idea that would be a town hall for convening, what would that mean, is a museum really being a convening space, and appears a place of exchange. Historically, that's what these did. How could we do that, as an institution? The Bay Observatory is at the end of the pier, you've seen it. There's a restaurant underneath, and then the museum, the gallery on top. Inside, it's really a glass box. You know, most museums are black boxes. I like to say that everything that happens in that frame, of that gallery, is controlled. Usually, even where you enter and end, whether it's a story that's being told, or how we design our institutions are often to get the maximum value out of the story we're trying to tell. And in this case, we really tried to use the windows as the main theme of the story, which meant we had to try something really new, which was how do you couple an exhibit to a view, and would people understand that? So in some ways the exhibit isn't the phenomena, the view is the phenomena, and the exhibit is just a tool to help you understand what you're seeing out the window. One side of the room you see the city. And I have to say that the other story here is that we first used to say we were exploring the built in natural environment, but the built in natural environment is on both sides of the room. Most of the things you see on the Bay side have been built, or created in some way, and likewise on the city side, you do see a lot of natural things, but you also see a lot of built things. What that means, is really that the human imprint is embedded in both sides of the window, so how do we tell that story, the Anthropocene really. But we were very shy at first about talking about climate change, or using any terms, because really nobody knew us, in the museum world, for doing environmental science, so we approached it a little bit slowly. In order to understand this place, we wound up looking at a lot of maps and it turns out that people like maps, and so now we have a huge map table. And the interesting thing is that maps aren't exactly visualizations, although we have many maps on the table that are the results of visualizations, and maps are really cultural artifacts. Most people, we learned, think that maps are tools to help you find your way, but almost never are they that. They're usually an idea somebody has, a scientist or researcher, a geographer, about what this landscape is telling you. And so we really wanted to get that across, so everything on the table, the San Francisco, or California, or neighborhood, it's all located here, but different ways of thinking about that. The other thing we have in the room, I noticed some of you saw this, it's a daily board. So everyday we ask our explainers to put what the tides are doing and what the temperature is, and they take this all from the data that we collect, but then we also ask them to make an observation. And for some reason over these last seven years, this thing has become like this major effort that people put into it. Not all the explainers are great artists or anything, but I love that they start doing visualizations, they're responding to the things in the rooms, and in this case it's a whole, you know, thing about birds and the migration patterns because we are in the Pacific Flyway right here. Another exhibit that was one of the primary ones, and there's a number of people here, Eric Sokolowski, and... that have helped us develop this thing. There were probably five people on staff who helped develop this plus many scientists and researchers. It a topographic table upon which we project data. Initially we hoped we could overlap all this data, so you could learn about how fog might affect where people live, we have a census data, fog data, salinity is on this, we used to have a tide model, we have a sea level rise model, we have an earthquake model, and I was always hoping people would overlay them somehow. Doesn't seem like that happens, but we do notice from studying this, that the size of it, we made it different sizes, and we finally resolved it at this size, and it turns out that people would talk to each other, that don't know each other, and compare notes about what they're looking at, and we found that to be a really valuable thing so we know that anything that's about the size of a dining room table or a kitchen table is like, the perfect communication tool for engaging people and talking to one another. One visualization I want to show is a newer one, which is, we were going to do sea level rise, and then working with scientists we were convinced that maybe we should start back eighteen thousand years ago and talk about how the bay didn't even exist eighteen thousand years ago before the last glacial melt. So the water was way out by the Farallon Islands, really quite far away. And as the glaciers melted, the water started coming in, and eventually made the bay that we know. I didn't do this in exactly the correct sequence, but this shows about five levels, five feet of sea level rise. We didn't put any time projections on this, we just show that this the water will rise, and that it rises similar to the way it looked in about 1849, before a lot of people moved to the bay area, during the Gold rush, and started to fill parts of the bay. This image shows all of that brown stuff is fill, and you might notice that the SFO airport is missing, the Oakland Airport is missing, and so we used it as a tool to help people understand the consequences of sea level rise, and what is coming in the bay area, and to develop this, we wanted to be sure that this story wasn't exactly that scary and that negative. We once did a presentation with some school kids, and we put the flags from all their schools on the model and then showed what would happen with sea level rise, and they were visibly horrified, the ones who saw that their school was underwater. And first we had to convince them that they probably wouldn't be at that grade school when this happened, but then we also talked and we finally developed with our Bay Conservation and Development Commission and friends of ours from the port and other science agencies, a narrative that talked about all the wetland restoration, seawall refurbishment, horizontal levees, things that are happening in the bay area that are being planned through a great, coordinated effort. We also have gotten very kind of fixated a little bit on sea level rise because it's so eminent here for us, we were very interested in this project, out of UC Berkeley, called Resilient Infrastructures as Seas Rise. It's a project where the scientists who are looking at sea level rise are working with scientists looking at our transportation systems, and how at risk they are. And another social scientist is looking at all the governments in the bay area, we have nine counties and they all operate differently, and so if you're going to make a highway work better, or solve a sea level rise problem in one district, you kind of have to coordinate with everybody or it's not going to work. So this really interesting project that's really about how networks need to work together, became a really interesting kind of problem for us, and we were able to get a grant, which we called Artistic Practice Towards Urban Resilience, and attached an artist to work with that particular project to help think about how do you talk about these things with people, and what would be tools to make this a little bit more public? And she came up with the idea of a climate compass. So this is based on data, each one of these compasses, and we think of it as kind of a media campaign, would be placed at different locations that are at risk for some kind of inundation in the future. It has an arrow that points north, so the thing gets put on the ground with the thing pointing the right way. It has another line that points to the highest hill nearby, as if it's the evacuation route, based on the geography, and then what compasses usually don't have is a timepiece. So this tells you what the predictions are for that location over the next fifty years. We've been working with BART, Bay Area Rapid Transit, some of the different universities, there's a little theater in town that wants to have one of these, and we're really thinking of it as a media campaign, not that this solves any problems, of course, but it allows people to have a conversation so if you got on BART in Hayward, and you got off at the Civic Center, and there were two of these things, that you might begin to understand, this is really happening and this is serious. So we really love this dialogue that they had, and felt that this kind of visualization which is really more of a symbol, was going to be perhaps very useful and we're launching this in the Fall. We also, I think as you know, collect data. We try to present live aspects of this data. We thought it was really important that, to really talk about climate change, you know scientists know what they know because they've been taking data for at least since the early part of the twentieth century, and we wanted to be as close as that as we could so we host sensors from a number of different science networks around the bay area, and we're completely novices at this, so we depend on the scientists to really calibrate the instruments, to maintain them, and then we use the data, and we have a few exhibits in there, that are beginning to work with this live data as part of an interactive experience that people can have. We also felt like people don't know what we do here, because we weren't known for doing climate change, or environmental work, so we started having a lot of convenings, and when you were in the Bay Observatory you might have noticed that everything's on wheels. We didn't put everything on wheels because we knew we were going to do this, we put it on wheels because the room gets rented for lots and lots of money. So I promised that we would make it easy to move things out of the room and so we figured out a way to put these huge wheels on everything, but it turns out it's really easy for us, to turn it into a workshop, or turn it into a community gathering, or to invite the mayor to do whatever. So far, we've really built an audience around this work, and I'm especially excited that we have gotten very close to the policy people in the city, and the government's people, so that I feel like we're kind of following what's happening on this more political and policy level, which is new for us, that's the way we've sort of turned this place into a town hall. The other question we get a lot, I think all of us in the public education realm is, if you only are doing things that you can do in your own environment, how does that affect anybody else? And that we were kind of cautioned, we should really do stuff about global climate change, because everybody has that same thing to worry about, but we realized that climate change isn't going to happen the same way in even like ten blocks from here, and so it's kind of important to take that into consideration. So recently, we brought this work to Toronto, and we have a colleague there, these are mostly our artworks. We had a booth in a fair called Art Toronto, and we wound up setting up a map table, with Toronto maps and San Francisco maps, and we also did one of our exhibits, a lot of our exhibits in the Observatory you draw, and this one was a key one, which was asking people if they could draw the shape of San Francisco Bay, it's not really a bay, it's an estuary, and so it's kind of an odd shape. So we have thousands and thousands of these drawings, which people really enjoyed doing, and they're really cognitive maps, I think, they're what people know about the place, it's not a drawing test, it's not a memory test, it's what they know about where they live. And it turns out it worked in Toronto, too. People could draw the Toronto shoreline, and posed questions by looking at the maps that they had. So we're beginning to explore how these experiments we've done in place based learning might be translated as an approach for other places in the form of perhaps even considering many of us move out of our institutions and think of occupying smaller places like field stations, where we're really in these environments, and help people make connections to them, and be better travelers, I guess. Thank you.