It’s a drizzly afternoon, and the Exploratorium is packed. School groups jostle past parents pushing babes in strollers and the odd teenage couple. But none of the visitors to San Francisco’s renowned hands-on science museum is more animated than its executive director, Dennis Bartels. His eyes sparkle as he insists that I see “the [surprise].” (The identity of said surprise is concealed to avoid spoiling readers’ future visits.)
Bartels, PhD ’94, guides me over to a small video screen. I follow the directions, carefully counting how many times a basketball team in white jerseys bounces the ball during a brief game with opponents in black jerseys. I please myself by getting the number right and then do as instructed, replaying the video to see if I missed anything. There, in the midst of assists, layups and rebounds, is—well, let’s just say there’s something large, active and obvious that doesn’t belong on a basketball court.
“Did you see the [surprise]?” Bartels asks. He is delighted when I answer no—that I have been tricked like thousands before me. The lesson (at the Exploratorium there is always a lesson): what we focus on or pay attention to affects what we see. This exhibit reflects cutting-edge neuroscience work that is being used to, for example, cast doubt on eyewitness testimony in criminal trials.
Furthermore, the [surprise]’s viewers (or nonviewers, as the case may be) themselves are experimental guinea pigs. Once you know what to call it, search for the [surprise] on the Exploratorium’s website. The first link you will find is a 2002 research study detailing observations of visitors as they watch the video screen. The second link takes you to material for classroom teachers contemplating field trips and gives them follow-up questions to pose (“Do you think your parents are right that you can’t concentrate on what they are telling you while you watch TV?”).
That’s the essence of the Exploratorium: a laboratory, a learning center, a museum that educates people of all ages—within its walls and beyond—about science, art and human perception. At its center is a workshop where some of the museum’s 20 PhDs develop new exhibits and tinker with old ones. In the public area, there are 400 exhibits to touch, look at or try out—and each one tells a story. Tourists snap a photo of a dirty toilet bowl with a water fountain mounted inside (will you take a sip?) while nearby a woman tests her ability to keep a poker face while the video screen in front of her tells her how great her hand is.
Nothing in the place is static or stale. Staff members put an exhibit out, see how the public reacts, then refine it. On a tour of the Mind section of the museum, which examines how people think, feel and make decisions, Bartels is full of questions for three of his staff scientists: How is a film of clips of teens engaging in risky behaviors going over? Did the idea for “Be Here Now”—where a visitor clears his mind, then presses a button each time he has a stray thought—come from a journal article?
At a meditation exhibit, while a little boy lies on a recliner and looks up into a cloud-patterned canopy, the employees recall how they once put philosophy tomes beside the chairs for visitors to thumb through. That didn’t seem to add to the experience, so they pulled them. Now they are toying with changing the music or the height of the canopy, to see how that affects what people gain from the exhibit.
Bartels, 44, directed the museum’s center for learning from 1996 to 2001, before heading to Cambridge, Mass., to take the helm at TERC, a nonprofit dedicated to improving math and science education. Named to the Exploratorium’s top post a year ago, he succeeds Goéry Delacôte, one of two long-term directors who left a significant mark. Founder Frank Oppenheimer (brother of J. Robert, the father of the atomic bomb) in 1969 established not only the Exploratorium, but the modern participatory science museum, which has been copied around the world. Delacôte spent 15 years expanding the Exploratorium’s reach internationally and on the Internet, touting the idea that it is more than just a place; it’s an idea, an approach to seeing science democratized.
Now, Bartels wants to deepen that understanding within the museum’s hometown. He almost certainly will oversee a move from the Palace of Fine Arts to a new, bigger site, perhaps on the waterfront. The Exploratorium also may find ways to embrace the city’s countercultural bent or use its location as a launching pad for studies of the environment or of climate change.
Wherever the changes take the Exploratorium, Bartels wants it to innovate in science education. American schools “teach in a way that makes science inaccessible for 80 percent of the population,” he says. “That’s inexcusable.” Bartels’s goal is in keeping with his background; his first job after earning his PhD in education and administration policy analysis was overseeing a National Science Foundation grant to improve science instruction in South Carolina.
That was where Bartels was first approached by the Exploratorium, to be the director of the center for teaching and learning. “Gosh,” he said when he got the recruiting call, “what an incredible place, but I think you have the wrong person.” Soon convinced otherwise, he launched a number of initiatives to support science education, such as a national center for staff development professionals who want to improve their workshops for elementary school teachers, and ExploraZone, a section of the science museum in Fort Worth, Texas, that contains Exploratorium-originated exhibits. “He has been extremely valuable for the whole science education community,” says Alan Friedman, former director and CEO of the New York Hall of Science.
Bartels’s vision of science education isn’t just for schoolkids. On issues as divergent as global warming and hormone replacement therapy, he says, laypeople should ask more questions than they do and refuse to accept anyone’s opinion unexamined. Participating in how science works, he says, provides the impetus to start questioning and exploring more.
The ideas he and his crew of scientists are exploring are sometimes wild. Maybe they will start up a science bar—“they are all the rage in Europe,” Bartels says—where people can discuss ideas in a social environment akin to a sports bar. Maybe they will add more evening programs aimed at young adults. Maybe they will add a space for museum patrons to design their own exhibits, “embracing this maker’s culture,” he says.
One thing’s for certain: when Bartels’s time at the Exploratorium is complete, another director will get a chance to innovate anew. “Frank said this place is never finished. It should always be creating,” he says. “If it is finished, it has lost the essence of itself.”
CHRISTINE FOSTER is a Stanford contributing writer.
