Floor 1 is the largest of Glasgow Science Centre's original four interactive galleries. I worked for GSC on this gallery, in collaboration with the contractors Hüttinger Exhibition Engineering of Nuremberg, Germany.
On opening the gallery contained nearly 100 interactives. The general areas of science were: mechanics, electricity and magnetism, liquids, optics, perception, your body, and planets.
My tasks included:
- Negotiating exhibit lists and gallery style
- Inspecting and discussing exhibit prototypes
- Ensuring scientific accuracy
- Writing all of the exhibit texts
From Hüttinger, I worked mainly with Matthias Rudloff and Axel Hüttinger. At GSC, Graham Durant, Peter Anderson and Steve Allman were involved. Ilze Groves was the overall text editor for GSC and reviewed and contributed to the texts.
Aims of the exhibits and texts
Our priorities for the exhibits were that they should interest and intrigue the user (rather than conveying specific curriculum items), that they should allow open-ended exploration, that "correct" usage should as far as possible be intuitive, and that they should be accessible to people in wheelchairs.
The texts usually fell into three sections. The first told the visitor what they should do, the second indicated what would happen, and maybe why, and the third either suggested further activities or gave some further information on the topic. Our aim was to write no more (and preferably less) than 80 words of simple English for each exhibit. However, unthinking adherence to a word limit can sometimes result in a less comprehensible text, and on a few occasions we warily, and consciously, extended the text a little.
Pictures of Floor 1 and its development
"Slow Bubbles" is deservedly a classic science centre exhibit. Visitors use the pump to blow bubbles in a 4-metre column of very viscous oil. This exhibit offers something to everyone: from the visual beauty of the shining bubbles to fascinating optical and fluid-dynamical phenomena. Within a few days of each other, I saw a three-year-old and a Nobel Laureate equally enthralled by this exhibit.
The two wheels on this track have the same mass, but the one on the right has some of its mass further from the axle than does the other wheel (technically, it has a greater moment of inertia). When raced down the track, the right-hand wheel speeds up more slowly than the other wheel, but it also slows down more slowly too, so that both wheels reach the same place on the track in the end.
Reviewing exhibit prototypes at the contractor's factory in Nuremberg. Early review of prototypes is crucial to final exhibit quality.
In all we made 5 trips, of a few days each, to Nuremberg.
Steve Allman and I spent a long time experimenting with the positions of the magnets in the base of the Magnetic Chaotic Pendulum, to get the most interesting behaviour out of the pendulum.
This exhibit is a fine example of the need to develop exhibits "in the flesh". No exhibit should be built straight from the drawing board.
An electric motor and a generator are essentially the same machine. These two identical motor/generators are connected together by wires. When you turn the handle on one machine, the handle of the other machine turns by itself.
This turntable was one of my ideas. It continuously rotates slowly. The user tries to slowly roll the yellow ball along a diameter of the turntable. They find that they can't - the ball curves away to one side. This is the Coriolis effect: the ball is travelling in a straight line (with respect to the building) but travels in a curve with respect to the rotating turntable.
This exhibit works fine, but schoolchildren find the idea of playing football on it a little too tempting.
You can do this activity nicely by playing "catch" with a ball on a playground roundabout.
Pressing the button connects the coil at the bottom of the post to the mains electricity supply. This causes the aluminium ring to leap high up the post.
This is one of the most popular exhibits on the floor. I reprogrammed the controller to keep count of the number of times that the ring jumped. In only a few months, it had jumped a million times.
This boy is standing on a rotatable platform. The black wheel is mounted on a post on the platform. The wheel is set spinning, and then, using the handles, the user turns the axis of the wheel. As soon as they do this, the platform they are on starts to spin round.
There is no hidden mechanism inside this exhibit. The platform starts to spin because of a physical law called the principle of conservation of angular momentum.
This is the classic Hollow Face demonstration. The face on the right is actually a hollow cast of a face, but it doesn't look that way.
One of my mistakes! The central, pivoted, cylinder contains a magnet. The user is supposed to press the buttons on the table to energise the three electromagnets in the correct sequence to make the magnet spin round. However, the most prominent words on the text are "Spin the magnet". This is meant to be the title, but it's worded as an imperative, and people, quite reasonably, take it that way. So instead of using the buttons on the table, they use their hand to set the central cylinder spinning, usually as fast as possible.
Taking care of the details.
The view inside a housing containing two highly-curved mirrors.