One of the fun things we get to teach our MSc students is to develop historical and scientific knowledge of their field of study. Last week we took a group of students to the wonderful Information Age exhibition at the Science Museum. Leah Lovett (@leahlo.bsky.social) organised the visit and did a great job of helping us see things that we might not as a casual visitor. In addition to the historical context the field trips to museum have multiple goals.

As practice-based research, to inspire possible making projects that could be woven into their assessments and utimately in preperation for their main dissertation project. To develop critical skills and awareness of public facing exhibition and cultures of display - i.e. what are the methods being used to engage audiences in often ‘dead’ tech and how do they communicate ideas? Lastly our goal is to support all students, but especially our international students, in accessing free learning spaces across London - there’s a social and orientation aspect here! 

It is intentionally loosely structured as there is so much to see. The students are already racing towards their first assessment deadlines which can often become quite singular in focus, for us it’s really important to allow space for reflection and to help students be guided by their interests. As we wander around the exhibits we have informal chats and discussion about what we see. Whilst we don’t specifically do any journalling or sketching, we do encourage students to be active in the observations - making notes, taking photos, video clips. At the end we have an informal chat about things we saw and why they were interesting. We all tend to see different things.

Already looking forward to the next one (Design Museum) and we are thinking about Bletchley Park in the spring. I also want to go back and take a look around the Technician exhibit: