My work at Glasgow Science Centre can be divided into three phases.
The beginning
For the first 18 months I was part of the exhibition development team, under the direction of Graham Durant, now Director of Questacon in Canberra, Australia. I worked closely with the exhibit contractors Hüttinger Exhibition Engineering, of Nuremberg, Germany, to deliver the content for the largest of the science centre's exhibit floors, which contained about 100 exhibits. My main tasks were: negotiating exhibit lists and exhibition style, verifying scientific accuracy, inspecting and discussing exhibit prototypes at the contractors' factory, and writing all of the exhibit texts. During this period I worked in a chilly portakabin full of nutters and eccentrics - it was an exciting and stimulating period and I rate it as the best 18 months of my working life.
The middle (1)
When the science centre opened I spent 18 months as part of a team of 7 Staff Scientists, which was responsible for the day-to-day running of the centre and the delivery of its activities. That's us above. In the back row: me, Gillian Lang, John-Paul Sumner, and Leigh Fish. In the front row: Robin Hoyle, Amanda Jopling, and Mario Di Maggio. The early days of GSC were a frantic and challenging time as we learned the hard way how to run a new and very large science centre that had suffered a difficult birth. For much of this time, we didn't even have a boss and ran as a collective - the fact that we achieved so much and that these good folk are all still my friends says much about the spirit in the team.
During this period I worked with the public on the galleries, delivered science shows, and worked with others to develop new activities. These included a Barbershop Science show which involved me having head completely shaved in front of GSC's thermal camera. I also opened and closed the science centre, reunited lost children with their parents, stuck plasters on leaking children, (reluctantly) organised the Science Communicators' lunches, and did my best to make sure that the Scicoms' daily morning meeting included something interesting and scientific, to stop all the administrative stuff swallowing us up altogether.
The middle (2)
For the last 18 months at GSC my post was Science Adviser. As well as continuing to develop activities and science shows, I had responsibility for the accuracy of all science presented by the science centre, and worked with our exhibit maintenance team troubleshooting exhibits. I also prototyped some of my exhibit ideas, of which details should appear on this site before too long.
The end
In July 2004 I lost my job at GSC as part of a programme of redundancies. I was gutted, but not entirely surprised, because there seemed to be neither the funds nor the will to do the things that I was supposedly there to do.
My time at GSC was both rewarding and intensely frustrating. It was rewarding because I am very proud of what we achieved, I did some fascinating things and I worked with some wonderful people. After opening, it became very frustrating, because I felt that there was so much more that I could have achieved on the exhibit development front.