Dinosaurs and white elephants: the science center in the twenty-first century

Abstract

This paper argues that science centers are expensive to create as capital projects, expensive to maintain with professional staff, and, given the high costs of exhibit development, expensive to change. Lacking a fixed collection of unique artifacts with which to attract visitors, the science center is at risk when it cannot change quickly enough to meet the demands of its users. In the past, temporary exhibitions have been used as a means of creating more frequent change. Now, however, given the exponential increase of the availability of new electronic media, coupled with their massive interconnection via the Internet, informal learning can be had at home and in other sites, rendering the science center unwieldy, expensive, irrelevant, and obsolete. Threats to the science center cannot be lightly shrugged off, and a real transformation of the institution is required. The paper concludes that the science center, as an institution and as a building project, is doomed to extinction as a consequence of two factors—ecology and economy. It argues for the need to develop a new kind of institution of informal learning in its place.