ANNE RICHARDSON: It's magical. You feel a bit transported when you enter the Exploratorium. The right times of day, there are rainbows all over the floors and walls.

ERIC JOHNSON: For almost 60 years, the Exploratorium has been an iconic part of the Bay Area museum scene. It's the first museum in San Francisco that I ever went to, when I visited as a kid, and it's taught generations of children about science, technology, and art.

ANNE: We're giving you the real thing. We are not giving you a simulation of something that happens. We're really trying to invite you into interacting with the phenomenon itself.

ERIC: That's Dr. Anne Richardson, the chief experience officer of the Exploratorium. One of her many jobs has been applying its values of hands-on learning to new technologies.

ANNE: We're not there to take a stance on is AI a good thing or a bad thing. If there's something happening in society, let's help you learn about it and be curious and understand it for yourself.

ERIC: And her team has taken what used to be a monthly night at the museum and expanded it into a weekly themed event called After Dark.

ANNE: It creates a social environment. It's a great experience, and you get to be a learner and people are hungry for that.

ERIC: This is Call 'Em Like Museum, a podcast about how museums work and why we love them. I'm Eric Johnson. Today on our season finale, how can museums encourage people of all ages to be more curious? Why is the Exploratorium staff also helping museums in Brazil, Korea, and Kenya? And can hands-on learning really help us solve big problems like the climate crisis? Dr. Anne Richardson from the Exploratorium will talk about all of that and more right after this.

ERIC: This episode is sponsored by Transistor.fm. If you are starting a podcast, then you should use Transistor. Upload your audio or video and they'll publish your episodes to Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, Pocket Casts, Overcast, and more. Go to Transistor.fm for a 14-day free trial. On this podcast, we believe that everyone's experience with museums is deeply personal, and that's why we want to hear your museum stories. If you've got one, and I bet you do, please submit it at our website, likemuseum.com. Just go to the website, likemuseum.com, and click "submit a museum story" at the top of the page. It might just make it into a future episode. Thanks.

What does the word "museum" mean to you?

ANNE: For me, personally, museums have been a place of inspiration. In my first memories of museums, I went to the University of Michigan Natural History Museum in Ann Arbor. I remember being a kid and seeing this giant mastodon skeleton when you walk in the entry and just what a thrilling feeling that was to see something so special and so unusual. And then I remember when I moved to San Francisco, Cal Academy was under construction at the time and they had a temporary location. So they had temporarily put in aquariums and tanks with all these just incredible species of organisms and these seahorses that camouflage with the surrounding environment. And you think about just the incredible diversity of life and all of the things that living things do to make life work on our planet and how just mind-blowing and inspiring that is and how sad and devastating it would be for museums to disappear.

ERIC: Yes.

ANNE: Because these are places that we go to ignite our sense of wonder, to be exposed to things you might not see or notice every day. So it's a bit of an awakening every time you go to a museum. Or even when you go to an art museum and you can see the way an artist is exploring the world and the provocations that they put in front of you, [it] makes you stop and think a little bit differently than you might have the day before. So that's what they've meant to me growing up. Now I see museums as this essential learning infrastructure to support across our lifespan in addition to schools. We need other ways and other kinds of places of learning, and museums are essential for that.

ERIC: Could you talk about your path to the Exploratorium? How did you wind up working here?

ANNE: [laugh] It was a winding path. My career counselor in college told me, "It's going to be a winding path for you." And she was not wrong about that. I studied art history for my undergrad and I did my internship during college at the Art Institute of Chicago.

ERIC: Oh wow.

ANNE: And that was a really fantastic place to get to work and be exposed to museums. I worked in museum education, and so I credit the HR person who interviewed me that day with placing me in museum education based on my background and interests. It was just wild to get to be behind the scenes at the Art Institute of Chicago. That was a really, really fantastic experience. But at the same time, I was very involved in the outdoor club at Northwestern. I was the president of the outing club and I used to take people out backpacking in the wilderness and rock climbing and exploring the natural environment. So I actually really wanted to be a naturalist. And so I got a job at the Chicago Department of Environment working for a nature center, which was also just a fabulous life experience to have, and discovered that there's a whole world of environmental education.

And so I went into environmental education. That was what my master's degree was in. I did environmental education for several years. I worked in nature centers, I wrote curriculum. So I had this kind of both art and science, a little bit of museums and education, background. And I moved to San Francisco and I discovered the Exploratorium. And I walked in and I thought, "Oh wow, this is my place." [laugh]

ERIC: Wait, why did you have that reaction? What was it about this that changed your mind?

ANNE: It all came together at the Exploratorium for me. In Ann Arbor where I grew up, there's the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum, which it turns out was started by the University of Michigan in collaboration with the Exploratorium. So it was very familiar to me when I walked into the Exploratorium, I recognized the exhibits that I had been exploring as a kid that totally inspired me in my early days. I could see right away the way that art and science and nature all come together in this place. And I was frankly really inspired by the approach to teaching and learning there, the idea that learning is really in your hands. You get to have a real experience with actual phenomena in the world, ask your own questions, and try the things that make sense to you to try to see what happens, and make meaning out of that and have conversations with people.

It's not a place where anyone is telling you what you need to learn and understand. You discover that for yourself. So there's a really strong sense of agency that comes with that that I think is really important. So that to me felt like this is the place I want to be and where I want to push myself to learn and grow. And I feel really fortunate that there was a good fit at that time. And it's been 23 years and it's still there.

ERIC: Wow. So when you first came, the Exploratorium was in its original location at the Palace of Fine Arts. These days you're at Pier 15 on the Embarcadero here. And I was wondering if you could talk about what you see, what you hear when you enter the space. What does it feel like to enter the Exploratorium?

ANNE: It's magical. First, I think you feel a bit transported when you enter the Exploratorium. The right times of day, there are rainbows all over the floors and walls. There are people lifting bubbles over their heads to try to put your head inside of a bubble. There's a lot of activity. There are things that are moving and spinning that you can stop and interact with and actually change yourself. So you see a disc that's spinning full of sand that's falling forever as you spin it around and you see people dropping ball bearings to bounce through hoops. You see fans of air blowing little inflatable balls you can move around. There's all this activity happening. That's what it feels like when you walk in. The world's full of phenomena, all kinds of interesting, amazing things that are happening, and what we do is isolate and frame those things for you.

So you can say, okay, I just want to look at how light travels in a line and I can move that with a mirror or a prism and I can see what happens, or I just want to look at a cloud, maybe that's moving because there's air being pushed past it and what happens when that air is moving past that cloud. How does air move? So we frame those things for you and you get to take a nice close look at them and then wonder, well, what if I blow on this? Does that change things? Or what if I move this a little bit? And so you get to have your own experience as you choose. And at the same time, there's a lot happening around you. It's a pretty stimulating place to be.

ERIC: Yeah. My friend Cate recently visited San Francisco with her daughter and they went to the Exploratorium, of course they did. And afterwards I saw them for dinner, and her daughter was so excited. She was like, "We played a game called Sip or Squirt!"

ANNE: [laugh]

ERIC: Do you want to explain Sip or Squirt?

ANNE: Sure. That's the classic prisoner's dilemma. In social science, how do you frame up phenomena for people that are about people so you can really think and reflect about how you interact with others in society. In this one, we set it up as two drinking fountains that are facing each other, and you have a choice of whether you're going to have your partner take a sip of water or if they're going to be squirted instead.

ERIC: And if you both choose to sip, then you both get water, but if one of you chooses to squirt, then the other person gets squirted with water. Does that sound right?

ANNE: I can't remember exactly, but the idea is you have to really think about what it means for you to win as an individual or to win together. And also it's fun. Do I know the person on the other side of this drinking fountain? Are they going to choose to give me a sip of water? Are they going to squirt me with it?

ERIC: And Cate's daughter of course was very happy because her mom got squirted in the face with water. That's what made it fun for her.

ANNE: Yeah, exactly. And you learn something about your family. And so we have exhibits that are about cooperation and collaboration, exhibits about emotion, which I personally love and think is really important. We have exhibits about identity. One of my favorites is one where people write about themselves, like people think and they say what people tend to think about them, but really, and then they say something about themselves and there's a photograph of that person. And you're invited to do the same thing, to really think about how do other people perceive my identity in the world, but really how do I perceive myself? And what does that mean also about the way I perceive other people? And might there be something more going on with other people than I immediately perceive? Slowing down to think that way is incredibly important in a high-functioning society.

ERIC: When your team is building new experiences, new exhibits for the museum, I believe since the very beginning, there's been a workshop that's been exposed for everyone to see. Is that right?

ANNE: Yes. There's still a workshop there. It's the heart of the museum. We intentionally exposed it. There's no glass between you and the workshop and the tools. We wanted people to see that what we're doing there, it's not a black box. The ideas for the exhibits come from Exploratorium staff who are noticers in the world. They're discovering these phenomena and then they try out some ideas. So we start out with a proof of concept and try it, just frame the phenomenon, and we try it out with each other until we get it to a place where we feel like, okay, we can put a prototype out onto the museum floor in that gallery right outside the shop. So that whole workshop area spills into the gallery, and those are prototypes that we are watching to see what happens when people interact with them. And then they get pulled back into the workshop and changed right there on site and then put back.

And we have an evaluation department that looks at them with us to help us really understand, is this working? How are people using this? What are they taking away from it? And sometimes visitors teach us things that aren't maybe necessarily what we had planned for at the beginning. What matters is really what's actually happening, not some idea that we have about something we want to teach you. It's really about inviting you to notice something in the world that we also thought was interesting.

ERIC: Do you remember an example of that? A time when a visitor taught you something unexpected based on a prototype?

ANNE: The one that's sort of this classic story that we tell is from before my time, the Pipes of Pan exhibit. It's glass tubes of different lengths and when you put your ear up to them, you hear ... Basically they're filtering out different frequencies of sound that are just ambient in the environment and you can hear that sound through the tube. And one day a visitor took off their flip-flop and hit the ends of the tubes and they make the sound, and we thought, oh, that was a great idea. So now there's a rubber flap that's attached to the exhibit so you can bonk the ends of the tubes also. And so the developer didn't think that was their plan, but that's what we decided to do. More recently, we have one that's a spinning blackboard. It's a table of sand, it's a wheel that spins and you can put your finger in it, make designs in the sand as it moves.

What happens if I'm standing here and I'm making my design and you're standing next to me, you might be erasing the pattern that I make as you make yours at the same time. And so we saw this happening and decided let's make three wheels so that I can see what you're doing and you can have your space and I can have my space and we can still interact with each other, but you're not going to erase the work that I'm doing. I still get to have control over my space. So we're always learning from people. We watch them.

ERIC: Creativity doesn't need to be a competition, basically. You don't want to teach the wrong lesson there.

ANNE: Well, it's just like everyone wanted to do it at the same time. So you never get a chance to see your pattern go all the way around the wheel if there were other people there. And so you want to get a chance for that. And so instead of making rules, we just changed the setup. We wanted also [to] set things up so that people can intuitively behave the way that they think that they should and not have to check and see if they're doing it right. It's not about that. Of course you're doing it right. This is what you think you should do. So we need to design around that.

ERIC: What is the fail condition for a prototype? What does it look like when an exhibit doesn't work, and then what happens after that?

ANNE: Let's say a phenomenon just isn't easily replicable over and over again, or it's too fragile and so it has to constantly have a person there to reset it or tweak things. That's too fragile for an environment like ours, it has to be able to stand on its own. Or it's just not that interesting. Maybe the way in which people are interacting with it, the change that they can affect, is too small to really be perceived — again, without someone standing there helping you notice it. So those ones don't make sense. It has to be a worthwhile experience. It has to be able to hold its own. Ideally our exhibits — not always, but most of the time — we're giving you the real thing. We are not giving you a simulation of something that happens. This is the actual thing. Our living systems gallery is really interesting because we give you interactions with real living organisms, and that's really important to us.

And of course we can support with video that we've taken in our lab or things like that. We do sometimes introduce models. Models are a really important part of learning about science. We're really trying to invite you into interacting with the phenomenon itself. If we instead are starting with "there's a really cool thing I want you to know," it's probably not going to result in a great exhibit.

ERIC: The more promising start is "there's a cool experience to have" or "there's a cool feeling that you could generate with this."

ANNE: Like "there's something I noticed." I noticed that when ice forms, it's really cool to look at. I want to show this to you. Or I noticed that a soap film has colors that move, I'll show that to you rather than I need you to understand the structure of a soap film and I'm going to create a model to show that to you. That's a different way in, and our way in is to invite you to experience something that we've noticed.

ERIC: Because then that encourages a curiosity about the world that extends far beyond the exhibit. Then you're encouraging the visitors to start noticing things like that in their own life with the soap or whatever else they see.

ANNE: Exactly.

ERIC: That's so cool. Yeah. One thing I was really surprised by when I last visited was that — I'm not sure if this is a permanent exhibit or if it's a prototype — but you have an AI exhibit now where people are drawing pictures and then AI is using the digital to generate a larger picture in a song, something like that?

ANNE: Yeah, Sketch to Song.

ERIC: Can you talk about the decision to have AI represented in the Exploratorium? What's the behind-the-scenes story there?

ANNE: Sure. That was our summer exhibition the year before last, Adventures in AI. It takes us a couple of years to develop a temporary exhibition. So that means back in 2023, we were starting to think about the summer of 2025 and what we would do. And in that moment in time, AI was becoming important. And so we asked ourselves, can we, should we develop a temporary exhibition that's about AI? And if so, what are we going to do? Turned out to be really important work for us. And so that show primarily is about building AI literacy, which has become an important thrust in our work right now.

Our AI initiative has two big components. One is AI literacy and the other is embedding AI as a tool for learning. And those are two important pieces of work that need to happen. I think it's become even clearer now that AI literacy is critical for society, and so we have an important role to play there, and that AI can and will be used as a tool for learning. It's important for us to participate in thinking about and experimenting with what that can look like in a way that centers humans as learners and that still preserves the learner's agency and self-efficacy for learning science rather than taking it over and doing it for them. So we're really involved in that. We have a lot of work in that area. The Adventures in AI show was our first push into AI literacy and created for us a collection of experiences that now we can build on [in] our research and take a deeper look at how that's going.

It was a bold decision for us to decide to do that show in the first place. The team needed to spend time learning about AI themselves and be learners and feel what that felt like to try to learn about it and to ask ourselves what's really important for people to be able to know and understand. What are the phenomena that we're exploring and what will be lasting? Because this is technology that's changing really quickly.

Actually, a lot of them don't have screens and a lot of them don't have AI baked into them because the questions that they're asking don't necessarily require that, especially when we're asking you to consider your own relationship with the technology. So my very favorite one is a game that you play with a little robotic arm that comes out of a trap door to push a button. And the game is somebody needs to push the button before the light turns on. And is it going to be you or the robot? And do you trust the robot to do it or not? And it kind of looks like a little cat paw, which may be part of why I like it so much. It's a sort of cute little robotic arm that comes out and it kind of surprises you when it comes out of its little door and presses the button and then it goes away.

And so then it tells you at the end how many times did you trust the robot and would you consider, when you rely on technology, when you trust it and when you don't, when you feel like you need to step in, in this case to win the game. And so those kinds of things doesn't necessarily require AI to be a part of the exhibit. It's about you thinking about when do I trust AI to do something? When do I feel like I need to take over? And there's no right answer to that question, but it's important to ask.

ERIC: How do you conceive of AI as a person, as an agent in this world, right? Do you think of it as a player in this game or is it just a machine that happens to be very advanced? I think there's lots of really interesting questions raised there. Was that show, Adventures in AI, was that very controversial among the staff at the Exploratorium and the members of the museum?

ANNE: That's a great question. A little bit. Among staff in the beginning, certainly it sparked a lot of discussion, but generally speaking at the Exploratorium, we're not there to take a stance on is AI a good thing or a bad thing. If there's something happening in society, let's help you learn about it and be curious and understand it for yourself. If there's something new and important that is very much a part of our lives, then it's our job to be there to help you learn about it. That's not controversial.

ERIC: Right. You don't want the museum to feel stuck in the past. You don't want it to feel like it's not evolving with the times. So that's why it's so good that you have this workshop, you're constantly trying out new ideas and seeing what works, seeing what gets at the curious reaction that you're looking for.

ANNE: Yeah, it's a mix, right? I think curiosity is evergreen. It's never going away. The exhibits that were developed back in the '70s are still there and just as important now as they were before. And there are new phenomena to explore. And as we look to the future, complexity is becoming important. There's a new area of skills called wicked problem skills that we think are really important.

ERIC: Wicked problem skills?

ANNE: Yeah. So a wicked problem is something that is very complex. It requires many perspectives to understand that maybe it doesn't have one clear right answer. Climate change is the classic wicked problem. And you could say that the proliferation of AI is a wicked problem as well. We need new skills to be able to engage with those problems. The classic inquiry skills that we've always worked on at the Exploratorium are still really important. So the skills of noticing, asking questions, making observations, testing your ideas, those are all still foundational and we still do all of those things. And the exhibits we've chosen are really selected because they support those skills more than they support, necessarily, content-learning outcomes. So now we need to expand our repertoire to include these wicked problem skills as well, which are things like being able to grapple with complexity, uncertainty, change over time, multiple perspectives, things like that.

So now we're venturing into what experiences support those kinds of skill building so that in the future world that we're all shaping together, we're better equipped to show up and participate.

ERIC: Hey, if you're enjoying the episode, then make sure to follow the podcast in whatever app you're using right now. It's free and it makes sure that new episodes will show up automatically. If you're on YouTube, then hit subscribe there too. Thank you so much. Do you have a museum story? Maybe there was a time you got lost, a time that you were moved to tears, or a time you saw something that blew your mind. No matter what your story is, I want to hear it. Head to likemuseum.com and click "submit a museum story." It might end up on a future episode. That's likemuseum.com and click "submit a museum story."

I was there last week visiting the Exploratorium with your colleague, Sam Sharkland, and it was for your weekly After Dark event, which is an 18-plus event on Thursday nights. When I was there last week, the theme was Day of the Dead/Dia de Los Muertos/Halloween.

It was life and death. And I got to say, I don't think there's anywhere else in San Francisco where I could see people standing around sipping cocktails while watching a rat be skinned. That was — [laugh]

ANNE: Yeah, only at the Exploratorium. [laugh]

ERIC: Can you talk, though, about why have the evening programming? Why do it this way where it's a weekly themed event?

ANNE: So the Exploratorium is important for your entire life. It's not just for children to do learning. Adults also are learners and should be learners in the world, and a full half of our audience is adults who come to the Exploratorium without children.

ERIC: Really?

ANNE: Yes. So adults are interested too. It turns out, though, during the daytime, adults will tend to hang back a little bit and give space to kids to really own the exhibit experience. And so you're not going to elbow a child out of your way because you're really curious about something.

ERIC: You don't know me that well. I mean ... [laugh]

ANNE: [laugh] And so we experimented with [it] a little bit and found that it really helps actually to have an adult-only time. People come to the Exploratorium across any age group for three reasons. They're coming to have an enjoyable experience. They're coming to learn something. And they're coming for a social experience either with people they came with or with others. The After Dark does all of those things. It creates a social environment — and it's really popular for that reason, it's a great experience — and you get to be a learner, and people are hungry for that. The reason that we do the themed events is that it gives some energy behind the programs that we do, the partners that we bring in, and it allows us to do what we do really well, which is to take a thematic topic and look at it from many different angles.

It's not all one thing. It's sort of a kaleidoscopic experience to come into the Exploratorium and you're exploring something from many different angles and you have lots of ways in. There might be things that work better for you than others, but there's probably some way in that's surprising and interesting to you.

SAM SHARKLAND: In this darkened space, we are repurposing a room with an old artist-in-residence piece called Recollections. We're in this darkened kind of shed and in front of us appears a coffin-shaped mirror. As we approach it, I see an array of glowing LEDs that recede infinitely into the background, and standing center, I find myself in the middle of this coffin. So, clearly another meditation on what it might mean to imagine our own mortality, but this time through an artist's lens and the choices that this artist made for this work, and again, something that our program developer found and decided would be a fit for the night.

ERIC: It’s always funny when museums do an after-dark event like this one: Come hang out with friends, have a drink, contemplate your mortality.

SAM: Yeah, just the everyday stuff.

ERIC: Are you involved with the team that is figuring out the themes, figuring out the programming, for these After Dark events? Because I think Sam was telling me that sometimes it's an 18-month lead time.

ANNE: Sam and his team lead that process and they're part of my team, but they are really leading it, and that team has led it for years. Of course, they're always eliciting ideas from others around the institution, and that's a part of what makes it a great place is that ideas can come from all over, but Sam and his team really lead that work.

ERIC: Do you have a favorite theme that the team has done in the past?

ANNE: I am kind of a big fan of this life and death one because I actually think that you need places to talk about life and death, so it's nice to have a place to do that. One of my first memories of an Exploratorium After Dark, I think the theme was fear. And of course we had some social science experiments about fear, and the director of public programs at the time, Melissa Alexander, had brought in, I think it was the Humane Society, and they were giving up black cats for adoption because they're underadopted. People are afraid of black cats. So she brought them to the Exploratorium and I thought, okay, this is a different kind of place for a science museum. We really are coming at it from lots of different angles, and we really are bringing together the everyday and the unexpected and surreal phenomena in the world into this place where we get to really experience things and think about and reflect on something like fear. What a wonderful thing to get to do.

ERIC: Yeah, because fear is like, it's so much harder to measure. It's not something that's quite quantifiable and objective in the same way that a lot of things in science are, and yet it drives so much of our behavior, so much of how we interact with each other and with the world.

ANNE: It's important to understand and reflect on about yourself.

ERIC: When you are hiring people for your team, how do you find the right sort of person, the right mindset for someone who wants to work at the Exploratorium?

ANNE: I've had the great fortune of getting to hire a lot of people at the Exploratorium, and that's one of the parts of my job that's really enjoyable. We are lucky in that we attract a lot of people to open positions and we tend to attract a really diverse pool of applicants in many different ways. We also have incredible retention. The leaders who are working in my team now have been with the institution for a really long time, and that's fantastic. So on the one hand, to get to work with people over decades and learn together, you can go further faster when you've been learners together doing really difficult things, and we get to bring in new people with their new perspective. I frankly am looking for people who see themselves as learners. So of course there's expertise that's required for any role. In addition to that, there is a certain interest in continuing to learn and grow and develop.

So understanding what someone brings to the table, but also what they think they have to gain and to learn as a professional is really important to me. So we're looking for that.

ERIC: Could you talk about the sibling museums to the Exploratorium that you work with? How do you find those partners? What does it look like to work with other museums?

ANNE: This is a really exciting part of the work. The Exploratorium launched this field of informal science learning in museums the way that it is today. It was one of the first museums to develop this kind of interactive inquiry-based type of learning, and now you see it all over the world. You see Exploratorium-inspired exhibits in most museums on the planet that were either inspired by or even developed by or at the Exploratorium. It actually became an intentional part of our practice to partner with other institutions — and that can be existing museums or brand new ones getting started — and more recently with institutions that don't yet exist. What happens oftentimes is a personal experience at the Exploratorium is really meaningful to someone and they feel that this is something that is important for their communities. Earlier, I was talking about the idea that this is essential informal science learning infrastructure that we need for a resilient society.

When you think about — when you take a step back [and look at] the world at large — the word for me right now is "resilience." That's something that the future needs, and a future-resilient world needs curiosity. As we think about economic resilience and climate resilience, we think about what kinds of infrastructure do we need? We need energy infrastructure, mobility infrastructure, and we need learning infrastructure also. That's a critical place to invest, and museums provide a lot of that support. When we are choosing partners, first they come to us to ask if we can do something together, and when we're selecting what feels like a good fit for partners, they're partners who we think are well positioned to be successful, to create that kind of infrastructure, and to be leaders in the regions where they are in informal science learning. We have had the opportunity to do some really fabulous projects in partnership, and some of those happened during Covid that launched just before.

We opened the SESI lab in Brazilia, Brazil, with an organization called SESI, which is under the umbrella of the National Confederation of Industry. They are supporting workers in industry across the country in education and health care and other dimensions, and wanted to start a place of learning that integrates art, science, and technology, and just like the Exploratorium really puts the learner in the center of that experience. And so they asked us to work with them, and so together we developed this brand new museum that didn't exist before, and it opened in 2022. We partnered with Heritage Omaha to create the Kiewit Luminarium that opened in 2023, similarly inspired by the Exploratorium, and in both cases, really grounded also in their own values and their own communities and what was important there. Right now we're partnering with Hyundai in Seoul, Korea, to create a brand new science center in the heart of Seoul.

ERIC: What does that then look like? Are you then going to be involved in the programming decisions at these new museums that are popping up?

ANNE: These museums are not owned and operated by the Exploratorium. They are their own organizations. They make their own decisions. We work with them from the day that they start thinking, "Gosh, it would be really nice to do something like this in my community. And what are we going to create?" That's the moment that we get involved to work with them and their communities and their stakeholders to dream about what is it that makes sense for your community that you'd like to create? And then we work with them all the way through designing the exhibitions. We partner with their architects to advise on the buildings. We work with them to build their teams, to build a culture of learning on those teams so that when they open, they're ready to go. They're ready to create their programs. They're ready to make decisions and operate those spaces.

We're really proud of the work that we've done and the work that our partners are doing. It's really exciting work to be a part of.

ERIC: What have you not been able to do yet? What is your pie-in-the-sky goal, either in the partnerships world or for here, the Exploratorium in San Francisco? Do you have a big thing, a big project you want to tackle that you haven't been able to get to yet?

ANNE: The way I like to think about this question you're asking me is what's the future state that I'd like to see? That's not necessarily one project, but it's what is this future world that we're all building together?

ERIC: Like what does the Exploratorium look like?

ANNE: Yeah. So there are a couple of things that I hope for. I hope to continue working with partners around the world to build these institutions. I'll give you one example. There's a group in Nairobi, Kenya, right now, called Nemayiana, they're building the Africa Museum for Science and Technology. They're in the early stages of planning. I feel like a big champion of that project. They've identified a strong need there to build this kind of essential learning infrastructure. And so in this future world, I see that groups like that worldwide who want to have institutions like the Exploratorium are able to do that. And that those places are connected to one another and are able to see each other as resources and work together more broadly to create this future that we collectively are advancing research and development for the field. That's something that I feel really enthusiastic about.

ERIC: Is there a little detail somewhere in the Exploratorium that is really special to you that maybe most people wouldn't notice but makes you happy every time you see it?

ANNE: Okay. I'll give you a really small detail.

ERIC: Please.

ANNE: So small, [laugh] although I don't think it's unnoticeable, but one of my very favorite exhibits highlights the plankton living in a single drop of water.

ERIC: Wow.

ANNE: So it's very small and it's very simple. We have a little dropper, [it] slowly pushes out a tiny drop of water from the Bay that has plankton in it and a light that shines through it and casts a shadow on the wall. And you can see the shadow of those little planktons swimming around in that little drop of water. And it's of course larger. It's enlarged on the wall because the water is like a lens. It's pretty amazing. When you look at the water with your eyes, you don't necessarily see that there are microscopic organisms swimming around in there, but then when you see their shadows on the wall, you see them and they're very vibrant, alive and moving. It's just kind of mind-blowing. And then you think, wow, there's so much happening in the world around me that I may not have noticed before. It's great to slow down and take a closer look.

One of my favorite things that we do — and we can do this now because we're at the piers — is they take a plankton net out to the Bay and do a plankton drag every day. So they're collecting plankton that are just right there, right off the end of the pier, and they bring them into the gallery at the end there, and put them under the microscope so visitors can take a look under a microscope on a big screen of the critters swimming around in the Bay that you cannot see just by looking over the railing. And they change all the time. So there are all kinds of reasons why plankton come and go and the population there is not the same today as maybe it was last month. So that means the Explainers are in a position of putting something in front of you under the microscope that they don't know what they're going to see that day.

So they really need to be curious in real time with you. And that's a fabulous moment to role model what learning can look like and curiosity and not knowing, and taking maybe what you do know and understand and patterns that you've seen and applying it and starting to maybe make some guesses about what's going on. And they all have their own ways of asking questions of what they see, what they notice, and maybe they look things up. But this is all just very dynamic. It's not pre-scripted. And so I love those moments. It just brings everyone in to the idea that we can all learn about the world.

ERIC: I think it's so easy when you're a kid to think like, yeah, once I get past 12th grade or whatever, I'm done with learning.

ANNE: I'll know everything.

ERIC: Or once I get past college, I'm done with learning. I will be done with all of the studying. I will have passed all the tests. And I think it's so important to have spaces where we're reminding adults like, nope, you are never done. There's always more to know.

ANNE: There's always more.

ERIC: What's the best thing you've ever heard a visitor to the museum say?

ANNE: I think my favorite thing is when I hear someone call out to someone they came with, a friend or family member, "Come over here, you have to see this. I need to show you something." That's my favorite thing, and I hear it a lot. So something sparked something in somebody and they need to bring over their friends and family and share that experience with them. Then they become the guide to show what they noticed. I love those moments.

ERIC: That happened to me when I was there with my partner. She said, "You've got to come over here. Stand in the middle of these spinning pieces of leather or fabric and it's going to feel like the floor is spinning."

ANNE: [laugh]

ERIC: I don't know the name of the — you know what I'm talking about — the installation.

ANNE: Is this the red and white stripes?

ERIC: The red and white stripes.

ANNE: Yes.

ERIC: That is the trippiest thing I've ever done at a museum. [laugh]

ANNE: That could be said for a lot of experiences we have.

ERIC: Do you have a favorite exhibit?

ANNE: Yeah, I think I tell everybody "this is my favorite exhibit" maybe 20 times a day. I have a lot of favorites.

ERIC: It's a tier. It doesn't need to be one. It could be a tier of favorites.

ANNE: I'll tell you my top favorite exhibit is actually a sad story because I also broke it permanently.

ERIC: Oh my gosh.

ANNE: It was called Magnetic Labyrinth and it had two pieces of clear acrylic pressed together with ferrofluid inside that you could move with a magnet. And you see this experience all over the place where you move ferrofluid with a magnet, it makes these really interesting unexpected shapes. But because it was so flat, the shapes that it made were particularly satisfying, and I was helping [laugh] to clean the exhibit and I went too far and I took it apart and it cannot be put back together.

ERIC: Oh no. [laugh]

ANNE: I loved it so much.

ERIC: Well, what happens when an exhibit breaks? I mean, is the workshop ... Are they able to generally repair exhibits?

ANNE: Yeah, so that's a really unusual example because typically things are fixable. Our exhibits get pulled into the shop all the time for repairs. That is a part of the work, and it's something we pride ourselves in as well. It doesn't feel great to go to a museum and find that the exhibits are broken. In fact, that can be really confusing when you try to do something and you're not sure if the result you're getting is what's supposed to happen, and then that really can interfere with your sense of confidence in your own observations of the world. So we really try not to have broken exhibits on the floor. When something isn't working, it comes into the shop, it gets repaired, and that's just a normal part of the process that we invest in to make sure things are in good working order.

ERIC: So obviously, as you said, the Exploratorium has been a huge influence on a lot of museums all around the world ever since Frank Oppenheimer opened it in the '60s. What have you been influenced by? What other museums have you been influenced by in your work and how have you applied what you've seen elsewhere?

ANNE: I feel like I'm being influenced all the time. And in fact, I do think that being out in the world and seeing other things is critically important. Not only do I like to get out in the world but I like our teams to get out in the world also and be inspired by all kinds of things. It can be other museums — it can be science museums, art museums, natural history — but it doesn't have to be museums. The whole world is an incredible place. I'm inspired by going into a redwood forest. I'm inspired by swimming in the ocean, especially for the Exploratorium. And partly when I'm out in the world, I'm thinking about how you construct a meaningful experience that feels right from the perspective of a visitor. Everything from the question you asked, what does it feel like to enter the space? What does it sound like and feel like?

What does the lighting feel like? All of those things matter. And what does it require to be able to engage as a learner in those spaces? What are the signals that we're sending to you? Those things matter. Something that I think is really special about the Exploratorium is those signals are just a little different, maybe, from what you might expect. And instead of us telling you "You need to learn this," you feel like you are really smart and you're really capable, those are the signals I want to send people when they come in.

ERIC: If you think back at all the museums that you've been to, just as a patron, not in a work capacity, but just [ones] you've visited since childhood, what's left the biggest impact on you?

ANNE: One is a place in Brazil called Inhotim. It's an art gallery in a botanical garden. It's a pretty large area that you can wander around and you're outside in a botanical garden environment, which in and of itself is incredibly inspiring and beautiful. And then you come upon art installations that are outdoors and then some that are small galleries purpose built for the artist and the art that's inside. And each gallery and artwork there is quite provocative and powerful. And each gallery I would enter, I'd exit and need to spend that time in the garden to process and decompress after each gallery before proceeding to the next one. It was a really powerful set of experiences and it's a full day. That was really meaningful to me. And every detail of how they've designed that space is really carefully thought about. Another really different one is a theater experience by Punchdrunk theater called "Sleep No More."

ERIC: Oh, I've heard of that. Yes, yes. People love that. It's where you're walking through one of the Shakespeare plays, through ... Was it "Macbeth"?

ANNE: Yes, it's inspired by "Macbeth." It's not entirely the same, but it's an immersive theater experience where you're in a multistory building for several hours where the play is looping all around you. So you can choose to follow the actors or come upon them as you go, and you can explore the set and try to see what you can understand on your own. It was a really powerful experience and it was also really interesting watching people in the environment responding to it. And I could see it's definitely not for everyone, but for folks who are interested in it, it came back to me for a really strong craving for human interaction in real places. I could see how important it is to people to connect with other humans. And I've been thinking about that a lot.

ERIC: Ever since we got our Covid vaccines, I've been thinking a lot about that too, just how special that is to be in a place with people, to share an experience, see other people's reactions to things. I mean, it's something we just don't get on our devices.

ANNE: Yes, exactly. And now with more and more time spent mediated through devices, I think we're all seeing that time spent in the real world with real phenomena and other humans and connecting with other humans really matters. I would like us all to be designing for those kinds of experiences to happen and supporting those kinds of experiences happening.

ERIC: When you find yourself in a museum gift shop, what do you buy?

ANNE: Oh, I love museum stores.

ERIC: So do I. I really think it's the best store in many cities is just a museum gift shop.

ANNE: Okay. What do I buy? I'm always doing my shopping for friends and family in museum stores. What did I buy most recently? Oh, it's really embarrassing.

ERIC: Now I have to hear it. [laugh]

ANNE: I can't tell you because it's a surprise. I'll have to go back further in my mind. I recently came home with soap made by robots from the Robot & AI Museum in Seoul.

ERIC: Oh my gosh. Soap made by robots. What does that actually mean? So they shaped it? How did they make it?

ANNE: I didn't ask those questions. I don't know. There's a fascination with things made by robots. You can have a cup of coffee made by a robot in the airport if you so choose, just for the experience of it.

ERIC: The novelty, yeah.

ANNE: Exactly.

ERIC: Well, Dr. Anne Richardson, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. It's wonderful to meet you, and I loved hearing about everything you do.

ANNE: It's a pleasure talking with you.

ERIC: Thanks again to Dr. Anne Richardson for coming on the podcast. The Exploratorium is open Tuesday through Sunday from 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM, and its weekly After Dark events happen every Thursday from 6:00 to 10:00 PM.

This has been our season finale, but I will be back soon with more museum stories, so please keep following us. And make sure you subscribe to the newsletter at likemuseum.com. If you're watching or listening to this episode on the day it comes out, November 10th, then you have less than one day left to enter our gift shop giveaway. And when you enter, you might win prizes like this STEM kit from the Exploratorium Gift Shop. It's for ages 12 and up, and it teaches you how to make a working voice recorder. To enter, all you have to do is sign up for the newsletter at likemuseum.com.

Call 'Em Like Museum is hosted and edited by me, Eric Johnson. It's produced out of my podcast agency in San Francisco, LightningPod. Our social media specialist is Julia Wilde, artwork by Rhe Civitello. Special thanks this week to Sam Sharkland and Lyndsey Roach. Thank you for listening and I'll see you real soon at the museum.