Ellen Giusti: You've had a long day and long weekend, and I
think you're going to go into information overload soon, but I'll
try to be brief. You all heard about the science and the design. And
I think the reason I'm here, the exhibition evaluator, is not to go
around the museum and say that's a good exhibition, that's a bad exhibition.
That's not what I do. Because we believe that our exhibitions reflect
not only great science and great collections and cutting-edge design,
but also they have to communicate something to an audience.
I heard this morning one of your panelists say a great thing that
I liked: "Communication does not equal information." What I do is
to try to learn more about the audience so that we can communicate,
not just give information. It's a two-way street. Visitors have to
understand the information also. So we did a lot of front-end and
formative studies to find out, do visitors know what biodiversity
is? Do they care? Do they understand what's going on? We heard a lot
of good stuff and bad stuff. We found that less than half knew what
"biodiversity," the word, was about. Willard mentioned the debate
as to whether we should we call it the Hall of Biodiversity. There
was a lot of discussion about whether people would know what that
was. But I think in the end the decision was made that it's incumbent
upon us to tell them what it is. It's an issue that's out there and
it's part of the whole story.
I'll just give you few examples of some of the studies that we did
and our techniques learning what the audience knows and what they're
likely to be interested in. We did surveys and collected a lot of
baseline information, and found out that people in general—when
I say people in general, I mean mostly museum visitors, who are not
really like the general public because if they're coming here, they're
a little bit more interested in natural history and natural science-so
it's not exactly what the whole public is about. But still, they have
very little accurate information. They don't know what the population
is today, what it's projected to be in 2025, and how that relates
to the extinction crisis. They say things like, "Animals have always
gone extinct and something else comes along and takes its place."
They don't really know what natural selection means. They're not too
clear about sustainable development, in terms of the actual meaning
of that concept. But there is also good news, too. Two out of three
people were interested in coming to see the exhibit.
Then we did one-on-one interviews. For instance, one interview involved
showing habitat photographs of beautiful, pristine places. And I think
that relates very strongly to your film, because we found that people
really have strong emotional ties to beautiful, natural settings.
And obviously that was going to help us to convey the beauty of nature
and the importance to everybody. That it's beautiful. And they also
are concerned about human impact on those natural places. Maybe a
little more as it affects them than as an altruistic thing, but still,
it's a way to hook them to the problem.
We talked to groups of students. There are students that have their
classes here in the school. There were fourth-grade students. We tried
to work on systematics. Our scientists are systematists, and we used
pictures and asked fourth graders to classify the pictures in some
way. They were wild animal pictures. Just to give the idea that there
is more than one way of classifying animals, and that you can think
about the features that you might use to put them together. For instance,
they took a whole bunch of things that you might not think go together,
like geese and seals and a bear fishing, and those were water creatures—creatures
that live near the water. And the sixth graders were a little more
advanced. They had a very good concept of extinction. It's caused
by the inability of animals to adapt to the changes in environment,
which is great. They also thought that biodiversity was like the food
chain. That was good. Then with some college freshman biology students,
we found that they had more of a concept of the rain forest than they
did of the wetlands that surround their campus. But again, it proved
that an icon exhibit like the rain forest would have very strong connections
to people.
And we asked them to think about personal connections to nature. We
found that was another hook, that people really relate. They've all
had personal experiences. This one young man told a story about how
he was driving along and there was a turtle crossing the road and
he thought about stopping and moving it. It was a very large turtle.
But he was in a hurry, so he didn't. He remembered this very strongly,
when he came back, he saw that the turtle had been crushed and squashed
on the road. He felt bad that he hadn't stopped.
Then we had a temporary exhibition here called "Endangered—Exploring
a World at Risk." It was obviously about endangered species. We used
that as a kind of laboratory to find out what people understood about
extinction and endangered species. We found that they understood.
They were very moved by the problem, especially with the charismatic
large species-the tigers and pandas. They understood the over-exploitation
and the various human-impact problems. When they left, they were very
disturbed, but they wanted to know what they could do. So I worked
with Meg and the Center for Biodiversity Conservation to work up an
interview to find out what people really would do. How green are our
visitors? I asked them if they considered themselves to be active
environmentalists or sympathetic or neutral or whatever. And we found
that three out of four consider themselves sympathetic but not active,
and just one in 10 were active. Only one in four belonged to environmental
organizations. We also asked them where they get their information.
Museums were not high on the list of where they think of getting information
about natural science, but museums were No. 1 when it came to credibility
of the sources. And when I asked them what they would like to do,
there were a variety of things they liked-to go to ecotourist spots
and to support projects. They were willing to pay a small amount of
tax—25 cents, we said—for the government to buy land to
preserve species. And a number of other things that we asked about
they were willing to do.
After the hall opened, we did some surveys and observation and interviews
to find out about its impact. One thing we found out was that the
forest and the Wall of Life attracted more people, but, when it came
to the time they spent , they actually spent more time in the resource
center. And that was good news. We found that visitors felt significantly
more familiar with biodiversity and the concepts around it when they
left the hall. Actually, though, a lot of our visitors are very sympathetic
toward the environment when they come in. We realize that we have
to do a lot more outreach to reach the people who are not coming into
the Hall. I think Meg's going to talk more about that.
We found that the Hall does succeed in reaching people and convincing
them of the seriousness of the situation, the beauty and the gorgeousness,
and that people are destroying it. We found that they still are saying,
"What can we do?", but I would argue that their helplessness is not
a failure of the Hall but rather reflects the failure of society as
a whole to cope with this problem and come up with adequate solutions.
So we're still working.
