Q&A with Ilan Chabay Interviewed by Joelle Seligson It was a case of professional schizophrenia but a very useful one, laughs Ilan Chabay about his varied career path. He has dabbled in the natural sciences, exhibition design, museum administration, and higher education. Currently professor and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies in Potsdam, Germany, Chabay advocates taking a similarly multidimensional approach to addressing global change. Here he advises on how science centers and museums can become key partners in transdisciplinary research for sustainability, as he ll discuss at the 2013 ASTC Annual Conference in Albuquerque this October. Ilan, I know that [professor and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies] is only one of your many roles. Could you tell me a bit more about your positions? My primary position is at the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies, which is a new institute in Potsdam, Germany, that has an interesting role as it sees itself as a hybrid institution that does both top-level academic research in natural social sciences and humanities, but also is very much focused on direct interaction, on a practical level and on a policy level. And the second position that I hold at the moment is also as a professor and fellow at the University of Stuttgart, in the Department of Sociology and Technology Assessment as part of the Helmholtz Alliance, looking at this rather major new development in Germany on the energy transition away from nuclear to renewable energy in the next 10 years. So those are the major ones. I also should mention that I chair a 10-year research alliance as part of the International Human Dimensions Programme on knowledge, learning, and societal change, looking for pathways to a sustainable future. That is a nice bridge into the session that you ll be presenting at the ASTC Annual Conference: Science Centers as Key Partners in Transdisciplinary Research for Sustainability. What is transdisciplinary research in terms of global change? Why is it important? It s a very important point that global change and the many pieces of that, which include of course climate change, but also financial changes, demographics both in population increase and shift in location, urbanization, energy I mean, pick your favorite, there are many. But the main point is that they are quite complex in that they are very deeply interwoven with one another so that global change is a matter of these global systems, which affect us all in different ways at local level, but through this enormous web of interconnected flows of materials, energy, and communication. And in order
to address that, it is no longer really sufficient it s necessary to have disciplinary research and very carefully focused in particular areas but it s insufficient to address these complex problems for two reasons. One, because they often involve many different aspects of different disciplines if you will, but also, they involve fundamentally the kinds of value choices about what is important, what is not, and that depends very much on who is influenced and who is influential in each area in regard to those global challenges. So that transdisciplinarity has become sort of this buzzword to indicate that, to really address the problem to even know what problems to address. It s not so much going off and doing the research and handing someone the results and saying, Isn t this nice? and then they look at it and say, Yeah, but who cares? We need to be involved from the beginning in defining the kind of research and hypotheses to this research with the people, stakeholders who are directly involved in this and that s both in guiding the research and in conducting and analyzing it and in communicating it. How can science centers and museums help in that charge, and if you could give some examples of maybe some practical steps they could take? Absolutely. The key idea that I think a few science centers have taken up already, and I hope more will, is to collaborate with the many research centers that are doing this kind of transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, etc., research but typically around the transdisciplinary in which stakeholders are involved. And from my own experience in science centers over many years in one of my past professional incarnations, it s clear that the science centers are tremendous resources in terms of engaging with the public at many levels, and by the public, basically, I mean all of us. It is not just the prototypical person on the street but it s policy makers, policy shakers, research scientists in all different fields we are all the public, those of us who are not specifically an expert in some, all domains that we re talking about. Science centers have that capacity all over the world to bring the stakeholders in the community that they are very closely linked to into dialogue with the people who are concerned or trying to do research that would affect that community among others. As an example, if one is talking about the oceans and impact of oceans on our lives, which are profound indeed whether one lives on the coast or one lives in the middle of Ohio those, the capacity to define research can be greatly increased the research that s relevant to communities can be greatly increased if people understand ways in which those apparently both diverse but also distant issues directly affect them. And if a dialogue can be opened between research centers who for example might be looking at specific aspects of oceanography, let s say fisheries resources, coral reef protection, the runoff loss of soils in the ocean that s covering the reef there are many specific issues. If those can be not only presented, if you will, as science, natural science often, that says here is this particular problem but
also social issues that then directly might affect the community in which that science center is located and bring together that and open that dialogue. I think our readers would be interested to know exactly what your experience was in your former professional iteration in museums and science centers. Originally I did natural science, physics, and chemistry, and then had the good fortune to spend a year and a half working at the Exploratorium as associate director with Frank Oppenheimer at the time, going from doing my basic research [for] 12 years... and then doing that and then while I was at Stanford University in the chemistry department, I started a company and designed and built science exhibits and learning environments for something over 200 institutions worldwide, which I enjoyed enormously and was great fun and I think was a worthwhile endeavor, but it also raised many questions for me in terms of what the impact was not just, if you will, inspiring interest in science, natural science in particular, but how was that going to affect the larger societal issues that we really face? And where science plays a fundamental role but is not the only major factor and that by the way is equally true in terms of technology. Technology can be wonderful but the question is who s adopting it, at what cost, and at what tradeoff to other issues? That s where I diverted and I had the good fortune that I was offered a position as a professor at two universities in Sweden in 2006, and I spent five years there in the chemistry department, as well as the IT [information technology] department, and sociology department so it was a case of professional schizophrenia, but a very useful one. And in that I really tried to understand better how to use the ideas and tools and the framing of social science to address this science and technology that is fundamentally embedded in the society and how to make that connection, which is now then what comes back to this question of transdisciplinarity: How do we actually engage with people in all of these domains? So from your experience both within and without the museum field, what do you think are a couple of best practices for science centers and museums to communicate these messages? I think that the idea for many of the science centers are now implementing with Science Cafés, with various types of dialogues with the public and with scientists of all sorts and researchers at all levels and all sorts I think those are excellent ways to start this. I think what may be an addition to that and it s not as common, though certainly I know that some places have made specific efforts around sustainability now and around socially critical issues including health that these become a more prominent part of the kinds of offerings that the science centers have. It s hard to do in the sense that it s harder to put a hands-on exhibit about climate change in a way that people read it and react to it, but that is being done. The [Marian] Koshland Science
[Museum] in Washington is one that I m aware of that quite a few years ago already tried to put some materials on there that were somewhat interactive. Some have been more successful than others, but I think greater effort is that it s focused really on social issues and social implications of that. And for example the artistic expression of those becomes important. Two particular aspects could be the focus of that. One of them is, if you will, the analytic aspect of dealing with complexity which is, how do we think with models? We need models if something is relatively complex because we don t have the working memory to deal with issues that involve thousands of interrelated pieces operating simultaneously or with different timelines. And the other side of it is how do we even discuss and communicate about complexity and that is in general something that, where we have to remove some of the complexity, so it s a simplification of our models and we use narratives, we use stories, we use ways of simplifying they may not just strings of words, they may be images, bands for making music but there are these, if you will, the analytic aspects of communicating about complexity, and I think museums and science centers could be also very good institutional environments in which to really foster a collaborative development of good science, balanced science with multiple ways of representing that, in ways that people can understand and relate to their own condition. I just had one more topic that I wanted to bring up with you: How are you involved with the Future Earth initiative? I m on the scientific committee of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, otherwise referred to as IHDP, which is one of the four global change research communities. There s the World Climate Research Programme, which runs the climate change IPCC [Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change] process; DIVERSITAS, which deals with biodiversity; IGBP, the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme, which deals largely with natural science and physical changes and is now incorporating more social sciences; and the IHDP itself really is looking at the social science aspect of global change. This is now being restructured those four programs there are many, many projects within those that have been running over the last 15, 18 years, and many of them have been very fruitful in illuminating how society reacts to the natural science changes, and what are those changes and the so-called, for example, planetary boundaries as to where are major changes in the Earth s system as a natural system that s a natural science approach to it, but also social science. How do human societies couple these kinds of changes and again coming into... where human society has a profound effect on the global system and not simply is the subject of it. Those all of that effort now is being put under larger umbrella called Future Earth, and that is a process underway now. I think formally it will it was announced at Rio + 20 last June and will in effect be institutionalized probably in the very beginning of 2014, in January, and it s simply the umbrella organization of all of these different approaches to addressing global challenge, and it will help in synthesizing all these research projects in looking for the gaps and
supporting the new developments, new directions of researching this. And since it is so comprehensive around the issues of sustainability, global change I think that and I m certainly not alone in this, I know a number of the museum directors even at the Planet Under Pressure meeting a year ago were very much interested in that as a connecting point for the science centers. Sounds like you have quite a lot going on. Is there anything that I didn t ask about or touch on that you d like to mention? Perhaps one thing very briefly to comment on, because it is quite directly relevant to science centers, is that the Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies has produced a set of films, one on global soil as a resource, one on climate engineering and the controversies around that, and one on short life climate pollutants, which are also significant factor in global warming that s like black carbon, ozone, methane. We will have those at the ASTC Conference in October in Albuquerque and on top of that so those are things where I think in this sense the research institutions can contribute directly by having developed these things and the science centers can see where those might fit into their programs, but there s also the work that I m doing with the University of Stuttgart and working with the Baden-Württemberg Foundation in southern Germany, is the development of a set of exhibits about the energy transition in Germany, which is a major step in a very important way for Germany but also potentially a very important and interesting experiment on a grand scale for many societies if they are to whatever degree they are successful in doing this in 10 years. But the kind of changes that it will require from consumer behavior the technology is of course one aspect of this, but probably much more challenging and also more fascinating in a broader sense is how will that intersect with the changes in the societal pattern. And that I think is something that the I m in the middle of designing what will be a mobile exhibition, it will travel out on this in Germany, but that s something where hopefully other institutions can pick up as well and also can learn from. This interview appeared in the May/June 2013 issue of Dimensions magazine, published by the Association of Science-Technology Centers, www.astc.org.