Award profile: Reinventing the Canada Science and Technology Museum

On November 17, 2017, the Canada Science and Technology Museum marked a pivotal moment in its history. The museum reopened its doors to the public, starting a fresh chapter following a three-year closure.

In the three years leading up to that momentous event, a small team of dedicated employees worked tirelessly to rebuild the entire facility from the ground up—including the creation of all-new exhibitions—in preparation for reopening. It was an incredible feat of teamwork that did not go unnoticed. Last spring, Ingenium – Canada’s Museums of Science and Innovation was honoured with the Canadian Museum Association’s Award of Outstanding Achievement in Exhibitions, for temporary, permanent, or travelling exhibitions that effectively and distinctively contribute to increase public understanding.

The Ingenium Channel reached out to each of the teams that worked to make the award possible, and asked them to share their memories along the road to the museum’s reopening. The result is a collection of anecdotes about how a remarkable group of people came together as a team to achieve collective success.

The Curatorial Team

By Bryan Dewalt

Curators work at the interface between the museum collection and the public – to do a good job, we have to look in both directions. We work directly with the public to acquire objects for the national collection. We also contribute to public understanding by researching objects, selecting objects for exhibition, and collaborating to tell compelling stories about objects. Nevertheless, when I began my career as a curator I did not expect I would one day be standing with a clipboard in an Ottawa shopping mall, asking the public questions about objects. 

For the Canada Science and Technology Museum renewal, the curatorial team was given a daunting but exciting challenge: to show the public more of the collection than ever before and to bring out some “hidden treasures” that might be exhibited for the first time. Although we did our best to propose exhibition topics that would have public appeal and focus on areas of collection strength, we knew success would not depend on our expertise alone. From the beginning, we worked closely with exhibition staff and contract designers, to craft a visitor experience that would optimize the public’s physical and intellectual access to the artifacts. We also collaborated with experts outside the museum, to ensure the information we provided was accurate and that it represented diverse Canadian experiences of science and technology. Finally, at the urging of exhibition staff, we talked to ordinary people about objects, what interested them, what confused them, what questions they asked.

This was how I found myself in the St. Laurent Shopping Centre on a Thursday evening in the fall of 2015. I was there—well outside my comfort zone—with exhibition staff, showing off sandwich boards on which we had pinned photographs of artifacts. The purpose was not so much to decide what objects to exhibit, but to learn more about how potential visitors might respond to them and what meanings they might construct from the groupings we had created. In a sense, as one curator put it, this was yet another form of research, one that could improve our understanding of the objects by seeing them through the eyes of others. It was also a great demonstration of the teamwork, professionalism, and openness that we tried to practise through all phases of the museum’s renewal. In the end, no one person can claim credit for the new Canada Science and Technology Museum. It took dedicated, experienced staff with a broad range of skills and a willingness to collaborate – not only with each other, but with the public.

Team members: Anna Adamek, Sharon Babaian, Cédric Brosseau, Tom Everrett, Emily Gann, William Knight, Michel Labrecque, Molly McCullough, David Pantalony, and William McRae.

Team Access

By Gabrielle Trépanier

To the already long list of challenges that crop up while re-imagining and re-building a national museum from scratch and in only a few short years, the Canada Science and Technology Museum added the daunting goal of becoming truly accessible. Sure! Great! No sweat. Yikes.

To make change happen, you need a critical mass of people in different departments and at different levels of leadership. You need patient listeners and tenacious fighters. You need support and courage from the top, because it takes time and resources. Amazingly, over the three years of this project, all of these necessary conditions fell into place. We even won an award, by the Rick Hansen Foundation’s Accessibility Certification Program.

That said, the funny thing is that “Team Access” was never a formal team. There was no committee, no terms of reference, no team meetings. Instead, a like-minded network of colleagues took it on. From within our respective positions, we learned how to create standards that would let us build accessible experiences. We learned how to work with designers unfamiliar with universal design. We chose to make exhibits that included people with disabilities, both their stories and their technologies, and in so doing we reached outside the Museum, creating new networks of advisors and experts.

Looking back now, I’ve learned that being accessible is not a state so much as a pursuit. We made mistakes, many of them, both large and small. We’re still working on the fixes.