Necessity Or Taboo. How To Evaluate Art and Science Projects Silvia Casini
scientific experimentation and research, sensitive to representative procedures utilizing images rather that words. Many science museums before, and science centres later, like San Francisco Exploratorium, Dublin Science Gallery and Paris Laboratoire bet on the union between art, science and technology. Design played a key role in the modernization of science museums, that were looking for a
Scientists and communicators are more and more persuaded that divulgating science to the public and involving outsiders into it is a duty rather than a choice. In order to make science is necessary to use a various range of tools: from a pen and a sheet where to draw sketches, write notes and create mental maps, to the utilization of the most advanced technology. The sciences that more evidently and more closely concern the human body, such as genomics and neurosciences, are searching for more effective ways to communicate and involve people.
more and more advanced, userfriendly and absorbing interaction with the public. However, art stayed out of it. Art museums remained completely different from science museums and science centres, most of all because people went to the science museum with the purpose of learning something. In Italy a certain snobbery towards the terms “didactic” and “educational” reigned supreme. Now it seems the situation has reversed though: art, even contemporary one, can be and must be not only explained, but approached and treated like an ordinary aspect of
Art entered the scientific field many years before scientists and artists became aware of it: the focus on the perceptive and aesthetic-functional aspects has always been a part of
everyday life. The educational function of art is a taboo no more: children get closer to art through a 46