Our world—exhibiting sustainability

What does sustainability have to do with a giant hamburger you can watch a cartoon in, a garbage dump you can slide through or an oversize toilet you can flush? These are just a few experiences you’ll find in Our World, a 4000 sq. ft. permanent gallery on sustainability that opened in June 2001 at Science World in Vancouver. These are some questions we wrestled with during its development.

Is it fun?

If visitors aren’t engaged, the ideas won’t reach them, no matter how important. Our visitors tend to be young families. We aimed for exhibits that were colourful, energetic, interactive, larger than life. Visitors can activate unique musical robots by generating electricity with one of the alternatives.

Is it relevant?

We focussed on significant choices that everyone makes every day—transportation, food, electricity, water and garbage. Our working premise, stated at the entry, was that a sustainable world balances the needs of people, money and nature. The exhibits deal with the consequences of our choices as they relate to people, money and nature.

Can visitors enjoy the exhibit more than once?

This depends on the attitude of the visitor and the nature of the exhibit. Dogzilla versus the Carbonator is an animated computer kiosk game that introduces our connection to climate change by making choices with Dogzilla to help defeat the Carbonator. The outcome depends on the choices made.

Does the exhibit offer different kinds of experiences?

One exhibit is based on the “whack-a-mole” game but instead of moles, models of a toilet, car, garbage can, electrical lamp and hamburger pop up at random. The visitor smacks them down for points. Another visitor can join in or stand back and read about tips on reducing their impact in these subject areas. Okay, it’s still gratuitous violence, but it’s fun. We hope that by creating a fun, memorable experience, people can use them as starting points for discussion later.

Is the content up to date?

Finding useful and reliable data is a challenge. We relied on government results and printed “factoids” on paper mounted behind clear cover so they would look good but be easy to update. Staff also maintain a bulletin board to display relevant newspaper articles.

Can visitors make choices?

We made the exhibits modular and nonlinear, to accommodate the way science centre visitors tend behave. Envision the Future, an interactive video in the theatre next to the gallery, illustrates the current state of affairs in our region and projects the social, economic and environmental consequences in forty years. Visitors can use a keypad in the armrest to make lifestyle choices. The most popular option selected by the audience is used to generate a new prediction of life in the region. This is an introduction to an elaborate choice-driven project developed by the Sustainable Development Research Institute at the University of British Columbia.

Can visitors get more information?

The role of the gallery is more an introduction to ideas than a reservoir of knowledge, but we did set up a web page of relevant links that can accessed through two terminals in the gallery or in general through the Science World web site.

Can visitors contribute?

We left forms for visitor feedback and evaluated the results after about six months. Of the roughly 3000 forms, about 20% of the feedback was graffiti. Of the rest, over 85% was positive but of a general nature. We began to conduct visitor surveys regarding lifestyle choices, e.g. how do you usually get to school/work? to incorporate visitor input into a display.

What will sponsors think?

This can be an uncomfortable question. Fortunately, most of the groups interested in supporting Our World, shared similar views about sustainability. Having lots of eyes to review the content was sometimes frustrating, but ultimately useful. It provided confirmation, raised awareness about different perceptions and issues and in the long run provided a greater audience and awareness of the gallery.

Will it make a difference?

We hope so. The impacts of such efforts are hard to measure. We have received positive encouragement from visitors. We could have done more to build with more sustainable materials but these are still being tested. Internal operations are being reevaluated so that Science World can “walk the talk.” I transformed my approach from spouting environmental gospel to exploring new possibilities from different perspectives. I’m really hoping I don’t have to become vegetarian to save the world.

Click here for a virtual tour of the Our World, the web page of web links and a downloadable teacher’s guide.