Our World Exhibit Gallery

Within fifteen years, an exhibit dome designed for a temporary World’s Fair 1986 was

repurposed to make room for an ongoing science education center, Science World. This science center constructed ‘Our World’, an interior gallery exhibition, focused on the themes of the environment and sustainability. Its original name, “the Living Planet” can be seen in the

ReGeneration plan (4.2.1) on Level II, the second floor of the Science World building. Its vision, drawn by the author of the Urban Treehouse vision (4.2.2) in November 1998, can be seen below.

As seen above (Figure C3), the design process would start with the initial image of 1998 eventually leading to a decision to build the resulting exhibit space (Figure C4). Opening in 2002, it was the first true exhibit space in Science World which aimed to communicate themes of sustainability, or at the least, how humans relate, shape and affect their environment. Its resulting interactive exhibits and posters would focus on four themes: Energy, Food, Waste, Water.

Energy was represented with the archways in the middle of Figure C4 manifested by ‘the robot band’ exhibit. It demonstrated the different ways that one could generate electricity, including solar panels, wind, and hydro-electricity. The goal would be to coordinate all these different sources of energy to make the full robot band play together:

RN: Rather than just a meter [for the electricity generation], we wanted something that showed it – and that it wasn’t just one controlling everything.

There were different members of the band controlled from each different energy Figure C3: Initial Image of Our World then

known as the Living Planet (1999) with resulting exhibit space finished in 2000 reprinted with permission by Science World

Figure C4: Our World Exhibit with its initial image in 1998 and its completion in 2002 reprinted with permission by Science World

source. It was also the idea of cooperating in order to get the band playing altogether.

As Raymond describes, the robot-band was an interactive exhibit requiring a coordination of different band members. This exhibit is a great example of a learning environment (Dewey 1938;

Gislason 2007), communicating abstract themes of sustainability (immaterial) through different simulated renewable energy sources (physical) relying on people working together to make the band play music (social). and the notion of active prolonged engagement intending to

communicate abstract themes kinetically.

Food would be represented through a giant burger with a small theatre hosting a documentary inside showing how a burger was made and the distance travelled. Waste, seen to the left of the burger, was represented through a big garbage dump illustrating the approximate volume of waste produced in a year by a single person. Water, placed in the adjacent corner from the burger, was represented by a giant toilet. The aim was to illustrate how much water would be consumed in a year.

Not only would each of these themes find their way within the Environmental Trail, but many elements of the exhibits themselves are similar. This should not come as a surprise as Our World’s content curator (RL) would also be the content curator for the Environmental Trail.

Exhibit designer RN describes his experience of conceiving these sustainability exhibits:

RN: There were no models I could draw on which tackled all those things [Food, Water, Waste, Energy]. I had very hard time find any material to base it on.

For the exhibits of sustainability that did exist, they were seen by the team as too serious:

RL: The exhibits that I saw in the States – the Pacific Center in Seattle, they looked like they got put together by the Public Service Center – It was very serious and matter of fact, pedantic. Lots of finger pointing. We said, look, that’s not our style, we thought, let’s put a tinge of humour to this. RN’s a funny guy, [Exhibit Director] was a funny guy.

Indeed, the team, using a giant burger, a giant toilet, a robot band, and even whack-a-mole showed a different approach to exhibit design, communicating themes of sustainability in a fun and playful way. Another Our World exhibit, whack-a-mole, would use garbage bins and toilets to be whacked instead of moles, alluding to the ideas of limiting their impact as part of the sustainability imperative. Each of these more playful exhibits with something “for the parents to read” – two-line entry panels with the 3 different bullets – money, people and nature. This was based on the three-legged stool model of sustainability – social, environmental, economical.

We may understand the exhibits themselves as seeking to reconcile the three legs of the sustainability stool in their design and execution. Economically, Our World would require funding to realize its conceived exhibits. As described by BT, Science World would target companies related to each exhibit in order to bring Our World to life. For example, they obtained funding from the Greater Vancouver Regional District for the Water and Waste exhibits.

Agriculture BC would fund the Food exhibit.¹⁴¹As the entire gallery space was an artificial

141 This is confirmed through correspondence with RN, I3, and BT

environment and not an accurate depiction of the ‘Living Planet’ (initial name for Our World), such sustainability themes would be communicated in a more illusory form of design:

RL: The electricity stuff from the Robot Band was all fake. When you cranked the thing, you weren’t actually generating the power to it, you just triggered something which activated the mechanism. It was totally illusionary.

Indeed, as RL describes, the energy exhibit of the Robot Band aimed to give an interactive component using wind, solar panels and hydroelectricity. This notion of feedback by the user to generate the power of the marching band was simply triggering an actual energysource from the electricity grid which would powerthe marching band. This brings a touch of irony to Our World’s notion of communicating sustainability to a wider audience; the intended interactive experiences can be ahead of the technology that is being designed to engage and educate its audience. The technology to generate electricity directly from the exhibits may not have existed during Our World. Budget could also have been a factor in this design choice. Therefore, when produced within an indoor Science Exhibit center, the process of designing exhibits on

sustainability may lead to a certain degree of artifice:

RN: The theme of sustainability is challenging because in itself it’s very abstract. Science Centres are more based on physics and the repeatable interactivity of it. Issues of sustainability are inherently abstract, you end up creating models to get the point across and that makes them more linear rather than open ended. In the ideal science center, you can start from anywhere and explore from there. With sustainability tends to be more message based, so that was a thing we kind of wrestled with.

As RN describes, sustainability would be communicated abstractly in the Our World gallery with illusionary electricity generating exhibits in its interactive exhibits within its artificial environment. While the design could have been accomplished a different way, it did not necessarily practice what it preached. Yet, such artifice to create interactive experiences may be justifiable if it brings the general public a more critical and systematic understanding of the environment (Orr, 1990). Our World’s team, in making these sustainability themed exhibits, would have in itself a trade-off of using external energy sources to power the artificial wheels. This notion of trade-offs is actually communicated within one of their exhibits known as Dogzilla and the Carbonator.

Part of Our World was an interactive video kiosk with a trackball giving one the option to play the Dogzilla vs. the Carbonator. Described in its opening lines: “Evil Dr.Dos has created the Carbonator to produce mega-carbon emissions to choke out all humans. The Carbonator eats carbon emissions and then spews out double that amount. Your mission is to help Dogzilla.¹⁴²

142 Fortunately, there still remains a web-version of this game for those interested http://littleguitararmy.ca/music/carbonator-offline_version/

First Dogzilla must be powered by an energy source, you get to choose which one – would it be Natural Gas, Oil, or Hydroelectric Power? At each stage there were three choices, each of these choices were represented with trade-offs, between usefulness and carbon level seen in Figure C5 above. If your emissions were too high, you’d have start the game again. Such a framework begins to show the early development of sustainability-based gaming exhibits which aim to communicate the power of choices and trade-offs.¹⁴³ Tradeoffs is the essential theme of Dogzilla, where choices on which energy sources and which transportation methods are made by the users. From a different perspective, this notion of tradeoffs would be found in the very design process of the Environmental Trail. Choices of materials would be made to assemble in the design form of the Environmental Trail some requiring larger transportation cost, other materials with the ability to be recycled.