One of my tasks is writing summaries of breaking science news stories. Fossilized fleas, malaria tests inspired by origami, the latest breakthrough in solar energy—all explained in 50 words at most. So it’s natural that I can’t get the Flame Challenge out of my head. It’s ingeniously simple: explain what’s happening inside a flame in a way that satisfies scientists—and intrigues 11-year-olds.

Alan Alda devised the challenge during the years he hosted the television show Scientific American Frontiers. He recently posed it to the readership of Science magazine. And the World Science Festival upped the ante by offering VIP Festival tickets the Flame Challenge winner (and yes, submissions will be read by real scientists and real 11-year-olds).

So if you’ve wanted to try exhibit development, this is the perfect time to do it. Just be prepared to get out the cardboard and duct tape (and a fire extinguisher) if you want to try getting people engaged in an activity—the other half of doing this job.

–Katherine

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I spent a long time trying to picture Being Human. For months on end I’d stare at colour palettes, drawings and floor plans, then close my eyes and strain to envision the exhibit. If I just had a good enough spatial sense, I thought, I’d know what the finished exhibit will be like.

Wrong. Even if I’d summoned up a perfect image of the hall it would have missed how it sounds. Because it turns out that Being Human has a distinctive sound, and that sound is laughter. I can stand in the hall with my eyes closed and pick out the giggles of the Flirt Station, the belly laughs of Eight Faces, and the hoots of delight from people watching themselves jump in slow motion. You can’t know what a finished exhibit will be like unless you include the visitors.

–Katherine

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A while back I wrote about how not to be an expert. Today I read the best explanation I’ve seen in a long time on why not to be an expert in, of all places, the journal Nature. But you don’t have to take my word for it–read it yourself.

–Katherine

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I’m a Mike Brown fan. Not because he discovered Eris and caused astronomers to re-define planets, but because of how he comes across in his book, How I Killed Pluto and Why It Had It Coming. I won’t blog about it again; here’s why I loved it.

So I’ve been following Mike Brown on Twitter. On June 11 he live-tweeted the data he collected while observing Haumea. Pretty awesome. Today he followed it up with a series of tweets, from:

Today I will live tweet more of what astronomers do in real time: writing proposals for telescope time! Now: working on 1st paragraph.

to:

Going out for coffee. #nevermind

As an exhibit developer I’ve been asked many times to (though not on this project) to give visitors an experience of “what it’s really like to do science.” Real science is hard. It’s exciting, but it’s also repetitive and painstaking and bureaucratic. I’m grateful for the perspective I get to have from the sidelines.

–Katherine

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Supposedly, the best people to talk to when you’re looking for a job are friends of your friends. You’ve already heard about the jobs your friends could suggest. Strangers are a shot in the dark. But a friend of a friend has fresh leads and knows some about what’s important for you.

Game designers are in the friend-of-a-friend category for exhibit developers. We share enough that their ideas are relevant, and we’re different enough that their ideas can be fresh and challenging. That’s what I found at Ludocity, a

collection of pervasive games, street games and new sports – social forms of play that take place in public spaces, such as city streets, parks and public buildings.

Their games look fun, but what really got me was the this thread in their forum: This is fun! And this isn’t. It’s a short but interesting and useful compilation of characteristics that … well, the title explains it. It’s what I’d imagine a friend of a friend would advise science centres to do. Like making programs that make visitors feel like heroes. Or being mindful that our exhibits don’t make people feel like they’re missing out. There you go.

–Katherine

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Sometimes I bring my laptop downstairs and work in the Prototype Lab. Since I’m not piloting much these days I miss it, and working there lets me see more of my co-workers (no one ever happens to walk past my desk in a back corner of the third floor). The main fringe benefit of working there is that there’s just a curtain separating the Lab from the Engineering Deck, and sometimes I overhear visitors talking about the activities and about the Titanic, and I have to say, you guys are pretty great. Thanks for the inspiration.

–Katherine

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I’m editing text for the Human Body exhibit and I just got feedback I promise I have never been given on any other text I’ve ever written for any other exhibition:

can this be cheekier?

It’s just one more reason I like working here.

–Katherine

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“Strictly speaking, blue whales shouldn’t exist.”

I wish I’d written that opening sentence, but Carl Zimmer gets the credit. It’s a bit of a cliche in science writing to declare that something shouldn’t exist, but an article about blue whales is exactly the right time to use it.

Okay, I’m hooked. How will you follow that up?

With this paragraph:

Blue whales can weigh over a thousand times more than a human being. That’s a lot of extra cells, and as those cells grow and divide, there’s a small chance that each one will mutate. A mutation can be harmless, or it can be the first step towards cancer. As the descendants of a precancerous cell continue to divide, they run a risk of taking a further step towards a full-blown tumor. To some extent, cancer is a lottery, and a 100-foot blue whale has a lot more tickets than we do.

So vivid! So clear! This is the kind of writing I keep in an open window on days like today, when I’m sitting down to a few solid hours of writing text for exhibit graphics.

–Katherine

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I recently picked up The Department of Mad Scientists: how DARPA is remaking our world, from the internet to artificial limbs. I expected to be fascinated by the projects taken on by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Administration; I didn’t expect to think so much about my own work. But I kept being reminded of it. When you peel away the cutting edge technologies and military applications, DARPA runs remarkably like the NSC. Here’s how:

1) Giant Goals
A special class of problems earns the title “DARPA hard.” They’re huge, impossible at first glance, and thrilling. “NSC hard” is smaller but still striking. I still kind of think the goal of generating thousands of ideas and running hundreds of pilots is ridiculous, even after we’ve done it.

2) Failure
When I tell people that part of my job is to fail, I often get a “yeah, yeah” reaction. Then I say that I’ve been told, and this is a direct quote, “you’re not failing enough.” Like at DARPA, failure isn’t tolerated as a side effect of ambition; it’s a sign you’re daring enough to surprise yourself.

3) Looming Deadlines
Every DARPA employee badge comes with an expiration date. It’s not a renewal date–it’s your last day on the job. Our equivalent is opening day. We’ll still work at the science centre the next day, but this phase of the project will be over.

4) Hire broadly
Science fiction writers apparently make great DARPA program managers. When you look around the Prototype Lab, you’ll find dancers, puppeteers, artists, skiers, musicians, singers and a dog trainer (even if there are only a couple of people there). DARPA and the NSC are also both remarkably international.

5) Glory, but no credit
There are no gold stars at the NSC. There’s no time to do more than give a high five, and all of our ideas belong to the team, not the individual. To be happy here, you have to be motivated by something other than credit. Of course this is nothing compared to DARPA, where your project is likely to be classified, so you can’t even talk about it.

There’s even more. DARPA and the NSC both love acronyms, and both got their start in space (DARPA was created in response to Sputnik; we started as the Calgary Centennial Planetarium). But these things are coincidences–what really matters is the daring, agile and demanding approach to work.

–Katherine

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People who make exhibits and people who make props have a lot in common. You have to figure out how to make something unique, without instructions, that will withstand unusual use. And it has to meet the budget, and the schedule. And probably someone has had some strange ideas.

So I was excited to find this blog, run by the assistant props master at the Public Theater in New York City. The fact that his current top post is a history of the hot glue gun shows how much of a kindred spirit he is.

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