Children, technology and the future

Antony Funnell: Hello I'm Antony Funnell and welcome to Future Tense.

No specific theme to the show this week. It's actually a bit of a catch-up program, which I guess is a theme in itself, but you know what I mean.

Today we'll update you on several projects we've covered in the recent past. Progress reports. Okay, update number one: Scienceworks, Melbourne, and the 'Think Ahead' exhibition. 'Think Ahead' will be an exhibition about the future focussing on children, technology and their views of what's to come. I say 'will be' because it doesn't yet exist and it won't be a reality until late next year. But for us here at Future Tense that's a good thing, because 'Think Ahead' represents a chance to follow a futuristic project from inspiration through to realisation.

You may recall we first met the exhibition's creators back in early April when they were only just into the concept stage. Today in part two we'll find out how things have progressed.

But before we do, let's just briefly revisit our April discussion with senior curator Kate Phillips and exhibitions producer Kathy Fox.

Kathy Fox: An exhibition is almost a giant editing experience. You will always have too many ideas, and they're all great ideas, but at the end of the day you've got to create something that's a coherent experience. It may be layered, it may be accessible for all sorts of people, but it still needs to hang together as a coherent thing. That coherence is bought by both the content and the curatorial ideas, but it's also the visual aesthetic experience you're creating, and how that allows people to navigate a very, very big and potentially quite complex story.

Antony Funnell: In this concept stage, what are some of the issues that you have to take into account? What are some of the difficulties that you have to overcome?

Kate Phillips: Well, I think we're very conscious of our audience, and the fact that they come to Scienceworks either in their leisure time or on a school excursion. So we need to present things in a way that is really accessible and interesting and fun. So that's one of the big challenges for this exhibition and for any other exhibition, is thinking of ways that will engage people. And our target audience of 8- to 12-year-olds, we need to do things that work for them. And in this context I think we need to be careful about how we present the future and that we don't necessarily paint a gloomy view of the future, because I don't think that's fair, to be burdening young people with scary scenarios about what the future might hold. Even if in some cases we do think that there are some big challenges ahead.

Antony Funnell: Right, well, that was the concept stage that I was talking with Kate and with Kathy about almost six months ago, and I'm now in the Scienceworks Museum at Spotswood and Kate is with me again. Hello Kate.

Kate Phillips: Hello Antony.

Antony Funnell: Last time it was concept. Where are we up to at the moment?

Kate Phillips: So we're now working on developed design, figuring out how all our ideas will actually work in practice. So it's about designing spaces, it's about working out how interactive experiences will actually work, and it's about looking at what objects we want to display to tell our stories.

Antony Funnell: There were a lot of ideas when you were in the concept stage. Have you had to alter a few though as you've gone on? Has the direction altered in any significant way?

Kate Phillips: Yes, it has. For example, we had quite a few ideas in the medical and health area. We were thinking of trying to set up some sort of interactive operation where you had to find out what was wrong with someone and fix them up, and we thought that ended up being a bit of a dead end, so what we've got on with there is to actually have an experience where you create a super future you. So you look at all the different ways you might be able to enhance or repair your body and create another version of yourself.

Antony Funnell: We're actually standing in the spot in the museum where the new exhibition will go. It's pretty crowded with the old exhibition at the moment. Just tell me how it is actually physically going to change, because it is a very large area to fill, isn't it.

Kate Phillips: That's right. So we will take out the old exhibition and rethink how we use this space to create some very interesting sightlines and to make the most of a big cavernous double-height space. So we're going to create something which actually works up into that space.

Antony Funnell: It's a big space, and catering for 8- to 12-year-olds you're going to have to give them a lot of choice, aren't you, really. It can't just be a static display. I presume there has got to be some movement, some room for interactivity.

Kate Phillips: Definitely, and we're looking at a range of different sorts of interactivities, some things that you might just do by yourself, some things that you'll do with a group of friends, and some things that will actually require you to stay there for quite a while. For example, we're creating a sound room where you can experiment with sound and see the effects that different sounds have on your listening audience.

Antony Funnell: This is all about design, this stage, and we're off to meet a designer, aren't we.

Kate Phillips: Yes, Richard Glover is our exhibition designer and he is ready to show us the model.

Antony Funnell: All right, lead the way.

Richard Glover: Here's where you were standing, at the entrance to the exhibition space. We are now sitting in front of a 1:50 scale model of the exhibition which was presented as a concept, and we use it as a working model for the exhibition itself.

Antony Funnell: The first thing I have to say, Richard, is looking at this model, it looks great. It's all paper and it's cardboard, which doesn't seem a very futuristic thing for a futuristic exhibition, I have to say.

Richard Glover: All of our models are usually, at this concept stage, paper and cardboard, and we do that for two reasons. One is that we like to let people use their imagination. So in a way if I was presenting this to you, as I am now, you can fill in the gaps yourself. The other reason is that people tend to take things literally and we don't want them to at this stage. So it's not detailed because we don't have the detail to put in there. So it just blocks out basic construction and built form.

Antony Funnell: So if you had a graphic, in a sense, people would think, oh, this is the image of what it will eventually look like, whereas this, it's a white paper and cardboard model and it's easy to see that this is not completed.

Richard Glover: Exactly.

Antony Funnell: As Kate and I were talking about, it's actually a large space, it's a high space as much as a wide space. There must be challenges or opportunities as well in building into that space, in building up as well as out.

Richard Glover: Yes, there is, it's over 600 m² of space, it has a mezzanine floor above it, three bridges, if you like, as we look at the model now. All of those bridges and walkways provide good vantage points for looking down on the space. When you're in the space, I mean, we do plan to use that double height. We've got about seven or eight metres to work with, which is quite tall, and if we look to the right of the experience here as you walk in the door you will see a big city cyclorama, that's a seven-metre high projection space and wall, and that would be a truly spectacular way of utilising that double-height space. We intend to also use it down in the space area down at the end there, and also in the natural systems area where we may build up organic forms.

Antony Funnell: I know this is your professional background, this is what you do for a living, but how difficult is it to actually take a concept and to try and realise it in a small model form like this, particularly when you don't want a model to look perfect, to look like the end result?

Richard Glover: It's always challenging in the sense that at this point we never want to overcook things. There are a whole lot of ideas that are floating around and need to be bedded down, and we bed down what we can bed down, knowing that further down the track things will change. I think that's one of the reasons why we do things well here, is that we are open to change and discussion. The entire design process is not just me and other members of the design team just sitting in an isolated studio drawing things up, the whole experience and the whole process is collaborative. We work with curators, multimedia people, we talk to our carpenters about how we might build things. We take this model down and say, well, Scott, how might we go about building this?

We've already started drawing this form so that we can build a prototype. So a lot of this will be prototyped as well. So is it difficult? Yes. Is it challenging? Certainly it is challenging, and that's kind of what I love about it, it's just getting from this model to...and then we push the whole process further and things start to be realised, and it's a tremendously exciting experience to go from nothing, just to have this idea about doing an exhibition about the future for 8- to 12-year-old kids and their families, to actually realising something in built form from a design point of view on the exhibition floor. And I'll never lose that excitement.

Antony Funnell: Well, designer Richard Glover, it's been lovely meeting you. Thank you very much.

Richard Glover: Thank you.

Ruth Leveson: Okay, so this is the Scienceworks collections store. It's been here for about 20 years, and it has a lot of the technology objects that were in the old museum and also in storage off-site from the old museum.

Antony Funnell: And how many objects would be in here?

Ruth Leveson: Thousands.

Antony Funnell: All different types of science over the years?

Ruth Leveson: You name it, we have it. We've got agriculture, transport, economic botany, photography, space, aviation, all that.

Antony Funnell: And Kate, how many of these objects would you actually be looking at trying to use in the 'Thinking Ahead' exhibition?

Kate Phillips: Several hundred objects. We're going to use some of them as part of technology timelines where we will show the development of, for example, different types of transport, computer technology, medicine. So yes, we are going to use the objects to show how things have changed, where we've come from.

Antony Funnell: One of the things I find fascinating about the idea of this exhibition is that, yes, it is very much future focused, it's about the future, but it is still the past, isn't it, it's connecting the past with the future using the past as a guide to the future, isn't it. Is that the way you see it?

Kate Phillips: Yes, sure, and I think we continue to learn from the past, or it throws up interesting questions for the future. Like, is faster always better in transport? The Concorde is an example where you can go at the speed of sound but actually Concorde wasn't a great success because no one wanted such a noisy thing flying overhead, so it was really restricted in terms of where it could go. So I think by looking at the past you see some of the dead ends of the ways in which technology has developed, and maybe that has some interesting things for the future. Well, what is the future of transport? We might all be going a lot slower.

Antony Funnell: Kate, we've met you to talk about concept, we have met you again today to talk about design. Instalment three, when we come back again, following the progress of this exhibition, what will we be looking at then?

Kate Phillips: Certainly we will have developed the interactive exhibits and tested them with some of our audience. So there will be more detailed drawings definitely, and there are may also be some actually partially made exhibits that you can have a look at.

Antony Funnell: The last question; construction, when does that start, the heavy construction?

Kate Phillips: That will be next year from I think about February. But it's a phased process.

Antony Funnell: Kate, many thanks, and we'll see you next time for instalment number three.

Kate Phillips: That would be great.

Antony Funnell: Now update number two, and this involves our recent show on creativity. Little did we know when we put it together just how creative one of the main guests, Jonah Lehrer, actually was. A few weeks after the program he was embroiled in scandal and was forced to admit that he'd actually made up important facts in his new best-selling book Imagine: The Science of Creativity. Just made them up. Imagine that!

And several people tweeted taking umbrage with Edward Jung from Intellectual Ventures, another of our guests on that particular show.

Viveka Weiley: Hello, this is Viveka Weiley, I'm a PhD researcher in the Creativity and Cognition Studios at the University of Technology Sydney. I heard your very interesting program on creativity lately, and in particular I was interested in the words of Edward Jung from Intellectual Ventures. I work with some start-up companies on putting some ideas together, turning them into products, and they've heard of Intellectual Ventures but they don't feel that way about them that perhaps Intellectual Ventures might like them to feel. They don't see them as that kind of white knight really.

He mentioned the nice side of their business where they have 1,000 researchers who've put together 1,000 patents. He didn't talk so much about the 30,000 patents they've acquired, and their practice of them sending on those patents to shell companies, empty offices with no assets and very few employees whose entire purpose is then to sue other people, other inventors who independently come up with the same invention. So Intellectual Ventures have now become known as the canonical patent troll, somewhat ironic as one of their fore-founders Peter Detkin actually coined the term 'patent troll' as a pejorative while he was working at Intel.

Edward Jung described creativity as this process where there is a person sitting alone in a room and an idea comes to them and they send it out to the world, and that's a very outmoded idea of creativity and it's very odd, but it is a lot like the way the patent system sees creativity. As other speakers on your show mentioned, creativity is a social process, it happens within and among people, every idea is to build upon the huge substructure of other ideas. As Newton said, he stood on the shoulders of giants, as do we all.

So there's this social process going on, and when something is invented somewhere in the world it's very likely that it is being simultaneously invented by other people. And then if somebody happens to register the patent and then just sits on their hands and doesn't actually do anything with it, they become able then to sue anyone who does implement the idea and they don't have anything to lose. So there's no way to counter-sue them for a frivolous suit, if, for example, their patent is overbroad or obvious. This could be considered one of the motivations for setting up a company that doesn't make anything itself.

Antony Funnell: Viveka Weiley.