Arts
Host Ali Nazar interviews Shawn Lani, Director for the Exploratorium's Studio for Public Spaces, on the Bay Area institution's founding story, outreach programs, and preparations for their 50th anniversary.Transcript:Ali Nazar:You're listening to KALX Berkeley in 90.7 FM and this is Method to the Madness coming at you from the Public Affairs Department here at Calex celebrating the innovative spirit of the Bay Area. I'm your host, Ali Nassar, and today I got with me Shawn Lani, he's the Director for the Studio for Public Spaces at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Hey, Shawn, what's going on?Shawn Lani:Hey. Nothing. Just here, jabbing this morning.Ali Nazar:Yeah, thanks for jabbing.Shawn Lani:Yeah, my pleasure.Ali Nazar:Appreciate you coming in. So we're going to talk about a few things. Exploratorium, obviously, is a beloved institution in the Bay Area, but I always ask people when we first start out about organizations like the Exploratorium, they're very unique and they start out with a kind of a problem statement in mind. What is the problem statement that Exploratorium is trying to solve?Shawn Lani:That's a good question. A lot of people think of the Exploratorium as a science museum that was formed in the way that a lot of things were formed, but the culture institutions tend to be a product of their times. They're responding to a need, and at the time, there was an educational reform movement going on in America and the 60s were happening. This is 1969, it was founded and Frank had spent many years-Ali Nazar:Frank Oppenheimer?Shawn Lani:Oh, yes. Frank Oppenheimer had spent many years as a teacher on a ranch kind of perfecting a hands-on method of learning and was convinced that people really needed a place where they can get their hands on things and figure things out for themselves. One of the things he used to do is take his kids out to a junkyard and a very non-traditional approach, take things apart, find out how they work. It was definitely a sense of the authentic was always a driving force and also a trust that people were naturally curious and could be inspired to kind of explore their own inquiry. And that turned out to be a very powerful model for teaching and learning.Ali Nazar:Yeah, and I think any of us have been to the Exploratorium totally get that feeling because that's what the place is all about. But taking just one more kind of step down memory lane, can you tell us a little bit more about Frank Oppenheimer, who he was and how he came to found the museum?Shawn Lani:Yeah. Frank Oppenheimer was Robert Oppenheimer's younger brother, he's sometimes called the Uncle of the Atomic Bomb. He worked on the Manhattan Project, and for many years after that he was ostracized from universities and ended up in a ranch in Colorado. He was a natural teacher. He was very much a humanist, and so as he spent many years out there kind of basically, surviving, he ended up coming to San Francisco. He still had a lot of contacts, a lot of people knew who Frank was and started the San Francisco Project and found the Palace of Fine Arts. He wrote up a rationale for a science museum and ended up stomping around the City Hall drumming up support for it and got a 30-year lease for a dollar a year at the Palace of Fine Arts. Ali Nazar:Wow.Shawn Lani:Yeah. That's not a bad deal.Ali Nazar:Wow, yeah, pretty good. San Francisco real estate.Shawn Lani:Yeah, exactly. Well, the funny thing is even at the time when Frank walked in that behemoth of a building, he already thought, "This isn't going to be big enough," and, in fact, we added onto that building some years later, a second floor. And then eventually, we outgrew the building altogether and moved to Pier 17 just five years ago, Pier 15, sorry, in San Francisco.Ali Nazar:Well, Great. So thank you for that story and understanding kind of where it came from. So we're almost 50 years into the Exploratorium's founding. What's the journey been like? Where are we today?Shawn Lani:Well, the Exploratorium is, I think, necessarily evolving and I think this is true of any cultural institution. They need to evolve with culture in order to respond to it and be relevant. And as we started as a science museum with exhibits that quickly grew into a explainer program that integrated teens on the floor explaining and working with visitors. We started professional development of teachers very early. We were one of the first 600 websites when that started to evolve. And so the museum's always been kind of a slowly growing institution with new feature-sets and more and more of those have become interrelated over time.And so when I think about the Exploratorium, I went there as a child, three and four years old, you kind of fall in love with the place. And even all these years later, I walk through and there's something familiar about the way that we respect humans as learners. And in everything that we do, the way that we approach the work is very much in support of somebody's own sense of wonder and inquiry and to enable people to ask questions of the world and find those questions useful and even to question the answers they get back when they ping the world. We want them to know that they are active learners, they're in control of what they understand. And so that's always kind of been a thread throughout all of our work.Ali Nazar:Yeah, and it's so fascinating to me, as I'm listening to you talk, and think about many times in this show, we have people who have started an organization six months ago or eighteen months ago. They had this dream and this vision and I've been part of founding teams too and I think one of the things that a founding team dreams of is to have something be sustainable and go on for a long time and now, we're sitting with something like that in the Exploratorium. We're almost 50 years in. How does the governance work? How do you guys keep the mission vibrant and alive and even though Dr. Oppenheimer has long since gone?Shawn Lani:Yeah, he passed in 1985. He used to say that the Exploratorium was anarchy and Frank was the anarch and there was a certain kind of a glue that he could bring just through kind of force of personality and his intellect was somebody once said, "Walking through the Exploratorium was like walking through Frank's mind," but in fact the places evolved a lot since frank has passed. And I think that was also by design because just like we've always treated visitors as part of the equation, staff has always felt like it was part of their job to generate new ideas and to figure out new ways of engaging with audiences increasingly diverse and in new ways and on subject matters that are important to them. When I first got there in '93, we were doing some work with the National Science Foundation, which is a long-term supporter.But I was kind of surprised at the number of people doing things that I didn't think at all were related to the Exploratorium. And eventually, we had a Body Show, we had shows about memory, we looked at our Light and Color and Sound exhibitions, we renamed them Seeing and Hearing, thinking more about how people are not only sensing the world but perceiving it and the acts of perception is active. You're construing, you're making sense of the world as you find it. And so reframing the world is actually a really powerful tool for allowing people to see things in a new way, and then from that moment forward, carry that with them. It's not something that happens in the museum for that moment, which is static, it's dead when you leave. You might pick up some information, but that's just information. A way of seeing the world is far more influential I think.And actually, it's far more respectful because what we don't do is say, "This is the right way to look at the world." What we do say is, "Have you thought of it this way? Have you thought about how when you look out at the Bay, say it just all looks like a bunch of water," right? But the long story behind that is where it comes from, the push and pull of the saltwater and the ecologies that live there. And once you tell that narrative, for a lot of people, I think it builds an appreciation for a way of looking at the world that's more animated. It's more animated and it's actually, it's much more fun. It's much more interesting. And so I think that's the way that we've drifted over the years as we added more and more program is how do we do that more? How do we connect with people in such a way that they feel like they're a little different from after they've brushed up against us? And likewise, I think the museum needs to feel like, "Hey, we're being changed by our visitors as well because we're in conversation."Ali Nazar:Yeah. And it's so appropriate. I think for the spirit of the Bay Area because I always think of us being kind of like the furthest on the west of the Western civilization and kind of able to question everything. That's kind of where we're at and just geographically we're the most newest of all the cities to come. And so we can kind of look back and say, "Well, should we think about it this way? Should we be thinking about it that way?" And Exploratorium really embodies that kind of spirit.Shawn Lani:Yes. It's easy to take for granted, especially if you grew up here and I know you're raising some children and once you have kids you start to realize like, "Wow, we are in the middle of so many things." We watch movies, there we are. You hear stories or you see movements come out of the Bay Area that are global. And I've been lucky enough to travel a lot because of the Exploratorium. We have a lot of global influence from the Bay Area and the Exploratorium itself. We do global consulting, we do a lot of professional development. We train over a 1,000 teachers a year. We've trained over 30,000 teachers since the inception of the Teachers Institute. And that's the kind of influence that that continues on. So those 1,000 teachers teach 15,000 students, right? There're 30,000 teachers. Think about all the kids they've reached. And all we've done is given that teacher a new tool, a way of using inquiry and informal approaches to learning about the world, and then they take it and move that forward.So that's the kind of impact I think the Exploratorium, for me, in my mind, when I think of it, I don't think of it as a place as much as a kind of movement and I think it's continuing to be a kind of movement. We occupy space in people's minds sometimes because they went there as a kid or because they bring their kids or they ... But there's something about the place that just glows, and the more we can export that glow, the better. Right?Ali Nazar:Yeah. Bottle it up.Shawn Lani:Bottle it up. Yeah. But don't commercialize it. There's that beautiful blend of sharing. It's a kind of sharing.Ali Nazar:Yeah. And the amplification effect is so much what's so special about founders in my mind is someone has this idea in their brain and if they're successful, like Dr. Oppenheimer was, look at the amplification effect and how many lives he's touched just because he pursued that thought in his brain of, "Well, people should have experiential learning."Shawn Lani:That's right.Ali Nazar:And look what's happened since 50 years later.Shawn Lani:That's right.Ali Nazar:And it's really amazing. So we're talking to Shawn Lani, he's a Director for the Studio for Public Spaces at the Exploratorium in San Francisco right here on Method to the Madness on KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM. Shawn, so let's talk a little bit about the Studio for Public Spaces. So there're lots of programs there, but before we get into that, I want to just get a little bit of your background. Tell us about yourself.Shawn Lani:Well, I grew up in the Bay Area primarily. I was born in San Leandro, lived in Oakland and so definitely a Bay Area person. I was lucky enough to spend a lot of time out on a ranch in eastern Nevada and was inspired by just the raw nature of that landscape. And, in fact, it brought a lot of that work into the Exploratorium and that way of seeing those landscapes. And I studied at Davis and really enjoyed English and art history. I studied a lot of things. And the funny thing was I wasn't a science guy. I was handy and I could fix things on the ranch, but mostly when I was supposed to be digging holes, I was staring at springs or watching birds and so it wasn't a great rancher either.So somehow I landed up, ended up at the Exploratorium. I got a Masters in Museum Education and Design at John F. Kennedy University. And I just never thought I could work in a place that wonderful. I didn't even think to apply and it popped up, but it seemed faded. I lived only three blocks away from it. I was just extremely lucky to find it and that place changes over time. We've gotten a lot bigger and its mission has shifted not unnecessarily. And I was able to slot into a place and then move through the museum and experience what the global impact is like, what it's like to work locally. And then in 2008, we opened a show at Fort Mason. It was an outdoor Exploratorium and rather than introducing phenomenon like we do in the museum, we capture it out there.We framed it and we looked at the landscape as kind of a subject matter and tried to do these conceptual framings that allowed people to see the world in a new way and was really hooked, really fascinated with the idea that you didn't have to go inside the museum to have a really poignant experience. And, in fact, I was struck by how different it was. I wouldn't say better, but having it be a part of your daily life seemed to make it much more accessible and far more interesting as a developer, as a designer because then it's like you're in the ultimate a flea market, right? Like, "What's that? How did that happen? What the?" All these questions come to mind and sometimes when you dig a little bit, you find the most amazing answers. We're curious, Pete Richards, a senior artist at the museum, he'd heard the Golden Gate Bridge moved up and down because of the heat.So we put a GPS tracker on it. We talked to Leica. We really did our research and it turns out, sure enough, it moves up and down a foot or two depending on the temperature of the day. And there's kind of a mean temperature in the middle. So we put a scope on the bridge from a mile and a half and actually, it's three miles away with a little line in the middle. And we called it a bridge thermometer if it was a hot day, the bridge would be low and it was a cold day, the bridge would be up. And it was just such a lovely kind of observation that Pete had brought along. And then we were doing evaluation later and a runner came by and she stopped and she looked at it and she took off and our evaluator chased her down and said, "Well, that's usually not a good sign if somebody just does a glancing blow."And she said, "No, I just like to see where the bridge is every day when I went by, I want to see what the bridge is doing." So it was such a wonderful thing to think of reframing that big static thing in the distance, not as kind of a thing that doesn't move, but a thing that's being responsive to temperature. When the sunrises, it takes a couple hours for the bridge to heat up and sag. So there's all these beautiful thermodynamics going on and it's that kind of animation that really caught our attention.Ali Nazar:That's super cool. I mean it reminds me of just in such a hyper-creative environment of almost in I would think like Saturday Night Live where you have all the writers around pitching ideas. There're like lots of ideas. How does it work? Because I would think that the staff there is super-creative and comes up with all sorts of interesting thoughts like that.Shawn Lani:Yeah.Ali Nazar:How does the process of getting something approved and funded go?Shawn Lani:Well, we prototype a lot and you might have an idea, but if you don't test your idea, nobody's going to believe you. And the ultimate test is how the public responds to it in the final form. And so one of the things we do, we utilize evaluation in a more formal way but also in an informal way. We tinker about, we try things. And that's true of most subject matters. Even as we move into the social sciences and thinking about stereotypes and thinking about how do you exhibitize some of those experiences? You don't really know until you go out and you try it with people. And the beautiful thing about that isn't that there again to prove or disprove what you thought was right they're most likely going to inspire you to do something that you wouldn't have otherwise thought of. That collaborative effort extends far beyond your immediate development team. I mean we might beat each other up about whether we think it's a good idea or not, but that kind of healthy criticism can only really be verified by the end-users.Ali Nazar:Sure, which is very much part of the spirit of San Francisco tech life. Lean startup and 20th-century design, hi-tech.Shawn Lani:Starting in '93 there was no tech, there was no ... I didn't have a computer on my desk. If you wanted something, you called the old guy that worked at the part shop and you told him what you needed, right. But the language started to come from tech eventually started to seep and some of it was familiar and some of it sounded kind of, I wouldn't say naive but there was the beginnings of that ... Because that kind of iterative culture, the prototyping culture takes a long time to get good at. Not 20 years, but a few years, and the lessons that tech learned sometimes it's in this much shorter cycle so they'll learn part of the lesson. But the full lesson really is, I think, it goes to the maturity of an organization and as a creative person and who's able to work with others and also listen, it's not an easy thing, but when you get it right, you understand why it works.Ali Nazar:Yeah. Well, so back to your story, so you joined in 1983. It sounds like you just lucked into the perfect job for you, which is congratulations.Shawn Lani:Yeah. Yeah.Ali Nazar:You've been there for a long time now, so that's awesome. So you're right now on this Studio for Public Spaces project. So tell us about that and how it came to be.Shawn Lani:Yeah. So as an exhibit developer, back then, you would develop exhibits for the floor for people have experiences they learn from those. It was something that you learned. It took about five or seven years I got my chops. And that project at Fort Mason was interesting because we had this kind of instrumented landscape, right? You can walk through and experience it, but what I think we missed, I found out later with subsequent projects, is that places have people in them and those people are part of that landscape. That social landscape is also the raw material of future experiences, future exhibits, you can instrument the landscape, but you can also help instrument people's behaviors and how they're moving through the world. And so after we opened Pier's 15, 17 we did the first living innovation zone on market street.And that was through the Mayor's Office of Innovation with Mayor Lee. And we worked with Neil Hrushowy over in city planning and Paul Chasan and others. And it was a remarkable experience because we put a pair of listening vessels, which are eight-foot-tall dishes done by Doug Hollis on Market Street. At the Yerba Buena Lane and nobody really knew what to expect, including us. But we had this notion that that inquiry's a natural kind of social lubricant and that there were lots of rules on Market Street. We know this, right? You don't look people in the eye, you don't talk to anybody, you don't put your bag down. It's like a human freeway. Right? So we put these listening vessel's kind of diagonal to that freeway and people really responded. I think they responded in a better way than I had even hoped.They were willing to talk to strangers. They were kind of joyous and celebratory. They would watch each other play and figure this thing out. They tried to find out where it was plugged in. So these dishes, you can whisper in these dishes and hear each other from 50 feet away very clearly. And it's also very intimate because it sounds like somebody's just in your ear because the way the sound is focused with the parabolic dishes. And so after that, the Studio for Public Spaces was founded with the goal of bringing more of these inquiry-like experiences to public spaces because the audience is vast. The impacts are amazing really in terms of how it shifts people's behavior in real-time, in real space in cities. And so since then, we've done many projects throughout the Bay Area, San Leandro. We're working on a project currently on Fulton Street between the Asian Art Museum and the library across from City Hall.And to bring this methodology work the way they explore terms work traditionally the prototyping, the integration, the respect for the learner to a public space. And I think especially with social sciences, understanding how we construe the world, what science can teach us about how we understand things and how and why we process the world. Exploring that in a public space, especially when it challenges you in Plaza and The Civic Center, it's improving. There're a lot of things going on there now, but there's also a lot of friction. It's right in the middle of it. I mean you had to put a pin in San Francisco and say, "Where's the middle of it?" It's right there. And it's a powerful medium to be in. And I'm exploring topics like how do we categorize it? Why do we so immediately categorize people? Why do we stereotype folks? What biases are driving ourselves? This is all a way of thinking about the human mind.What you know of the world is directly proportional to what you know of yourself. And to understand how we're thinking on a meta-level is incredibly empowering because it allows you not to be a victim of your own fast-twitch thinking. You can slow down and you can reconsider. You can look for the options when you look at a scene. Not only, "This is what I think about what's happening," but, "Why am I thinking that and what other alternatives might there be?" So it's been fascinating and I think also humbling to have such a dynamic mix of emotions, cultural issues, and then trying to do this place-making maneuver in the middle of a place that is kind of inherently inhospitable.Ali Nazar:We're speaking with Shawn Lani, he's the director for the Studio for Public Spaces at Exploratorium Museum in San Francisco here on Methods of the Madness on KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM. I'm your host, Ali Nassar, and Shawn, so you're talking about different projects that you might be doing in different municipalities across the Bay Area. So take me through how does that work? I mean, this sport team can't just parachute in, "Hey, we're going to do this," right. "Get out of the way."Shawn Lani:That's the worst case, man. You never go where you're not invited. That's the rule.Ali Nazar:How do you guys build these projects?Shawn Lani:Yeah. They're very complex networks of partnerships. So that city is one level, but we also have formal relationships with the Gladstone Institute, NASA, the Smithsonian, UC Davis, UCSF. We've worked on the Resilience by Design design challenge with Tom Leader through the Bay Observatory. And so those networks have been forming over the last 50 years, literally. And I think the last 30 and even 20 years, we've really accelerated that partnership. There're strategic partnerships, meaning that we have partners where we benefit from each other's expertise. And we've always brought in a lot of Ocher Fellows, which is a program where we have visiting scientists who've had Nobel laureates, we've had Poet Laureates, right? We've had MacArthur Geniuses, four or five of those coming through the program in order to do enrich the work.And I think that's the natural mode for the museum now is to have many, many receptors. Because what we can do, I think, is make some of that really important work, especially when it comes to the environment, environmental issues. We can provide a platform for people to understand that the complex issues that are going on around them, and a way of sorting through the information and figuring out what they think is important and not telling them what's important. It's not that kind of advocacy. It's advocacy for the visitor to feel like they understand what's happening. So they could make a more informed decision, which is very much about one of the tenants of Frank's founding, the Exploratorium was we need an informed citizenry to have a healthy democracy. You can't have it without that.Ali Nazar:Now, more than ever.Shawn Lani:Now, more than ever. And I think the need continues to increase. It's never gone away. And the notion of learning is what the body of work that we learn about is a bunch of facts. That's not true. It's the cultural pursuit of what we collectively value and that shifts over time. So only through partnerships and only through this way of thinking can the Exploratorium remain relevant. So with our work in the Studio for Public Spaces, we're working with urban planning. We work with the mayor's office, we worked with REC and Park, we work for the Trust for Public Land. We work with other people that are invested in public spaces. So oftentimes there're community groups, groups like Green Streets over in Buchanan Mall, Citizen Film.They're smaller nonprofits, but they play an incredibly important role as guides in how to make this work. And guess what? Mayor Lee used to say for the first [inaudible], "We're going to make this a bureaucracy-free zone, so you guys going to come in and do ... So it turns out it was actually bureaucracy-light. There was still a lot of bureaucracy.Ali Nazar:Yeah, that was aspirational.Shawn Lani:Yeah, it was aspirational, but you got to reach and it got us in, right? It got us the gig. But to be able to go through those permitting processes with DPW or with MTA and have a good working relationship and even watching those departments bend a little when they're not totally sure it's going to be okay. I think it's really a hopeful sign. I mean there are so many good smart people working in city government. I know that sounds crazy, but I am shocked at how dedicated they are and how willing they are to bend a little and to help things that might not be known as this is going to be a total success. But the way we work is two-year pilot projects very often. It's worth the risk to find out does this help? Are we prototyping a way for the city to work in the future and what can we learn from this lesson? It's heartening to see how many people will support that kind of activity.Ali Nazar:Yeah, I think so much as to do with the vision. So we had Ben Davis on the program who was the thought leader behind the Bay Light Shore Bay Bridge. He had to get a few different municipality organizations together to make that happen. But the vision was so strong and everybody loved that bridge. So they were like, "Yes." Like, "I get it, we want to do it," and I think you guys have that power too because you have a vision that people, like you said, you feel it's not just about when you're at the museum, it's about the next day or that night.Shawn Lani:Right.Ali Nazar:I feel that with my kids when we take them there because we're members of the Exploratorium and they talk about it for a few days afterwards, "Remember that thing? Remember that thing?" And it's a vision that's so powerful that I think is galvanizing for people to get behind.Shawn Lani:Yeah. I always joke, "It's almost a cheat when you come into a situation that's in a public space." The Exploratorium comes and like, "Oh, you guys are here." Oh, he's always so happy to see you. Like, who's going to fight with Exploratorium? Like, "We don't fight. We just want to come here and have some fun and talk about things," and so it really is a leg up to build on that many years of goodwill and tradition and I think that's super important. When it comes to brand value, people don't want a brand the Exploratorium has always striven or strived, striven? Stroven?Ali Nazar:Strove? [inaudible].Shawn Lani:Thank you. To be authentic, it doesn't lie to people. I mean, I remember, this is how crazy we can get. If you have a box of wires, it's always a question whether or not you could make it out of plexi or you should make it out of wood because if you can't see it, you might not trust that it's not just going through or connecting up. So oftentimes we'll reveal the back of an exhibit just so people can kind of test it. And I wish government was like that actually, that radical transparency, right? "Is it doing this?" And like, "I don't know, try it out." I mean if you can't tell, that's not a good exhibit. Right?That's not a good experience if you're wondering, you're scratching your head and wondering if somebody just put one over on you. And so we have always tried to have that kind of relationship and that really pays off when we go for partnerships. They sense that we're not going to get between what it is that they think is important and what they're trying to show and what the visitors are going to take in. We're all about facilitating that understanding.Ali Nazar:Well, it's, it's super cool work that you're doing and thanks for coming in this morning. I do want to ask you just next year's the 50th anniversary?Shawn Lani:Yeah.Ali Nazar:So it's such an amazing institution that we're all proud of in the Bay Area. What can we expect for next year to happen at Pier 15 or across the Bay Area?Shawn Lani:Well, we'll be opening the Social-Psychology show in July of 2019 and so that is going to be 12 to 14 exhibits outside Public Space Installation and that's going to be paired with a show about identity at the Exploratorium. This is a really interesting move I think for the museum to move into the social sciences because they're not traditionally easy to approach. But I think they are incredibly relevant, given the time. And so those are going to be two peak ... Now, we also have a lot of ongoing programming about the environment and ecologies. So we have conversations about landscapes, we have Lab and Lunch.We just hosted the climate summit, several talks about the climate summit, so we're going to be continuing that work moving forward. And also our After Darks, are every Thursday nights and those are heavily programmed. So we're kind of like a piece of broccoli in that way. You have the broccoli sprout but then you have a lot of other little things going on and then you have a lot of other things going on. But those are some of the big lobes but there's lots of other stuff going on as well.Ali Nazar:Okay, I'm sure everybody knows how to get ahold of the Exploratorium, so how about for the Director, for the Studio for Public Spaces? If people want to learn more about that, how would they learn more about it?Shawn Lani:Well, just type in Studio for Public Spaces at the Exploratorium, and you'll see the website that has a list of our projects and also a lot of the thinking and the framing of the work. We have some publications there as well, and an ongoing blog.Ali Nazar:Okay, well, great. Well, we've been talking to Shawn Lani this morning, the Director for the City for Public Spaces at the Exploratorium in San Francisco. Shawn, thanks for coming in.Shawn Lani:Oh, my pleasure. Thanks so much.Ali Nazar:And you've been listening to Method to the Madness on KALX Berkeley 90.7 FM, University of California, a listener-supported radio. I'm your host, Ali Nazar. Thanks for listening everybody and have a great Friday.