Hope, Empathy, and Optimism
Tapping People's Better Nature to Think about the Future
In an earlier post, I wrote about planners and museums engaging people in building their ideal future neighborhood or city. In each project, people seem to build with an optimist’s lens: plenty of trees and parks, and homes for all. But when it comes to shaping actual plans and policy, how does the collective ‘We’ deal with everyone’s differing vision of the Ideal? After all, my lovely lakefront home could be your barrier to lake access. No one is raising their hand to host the next municipal compost plant or bus depot in their neighborhood. And, the U.S. has a long history of “solving” these urban design conflicts based on race, language, class, wealth, and political power. So, the Inner Cynic has to ask: Given how divided Americans are – about everything – how can we get them to agree on a vision of the future?
On good days, my Inner Optimist, shoving aside the cynic, thinks that we start by giving everyone’s Inner Optimist a chance to speak up. By fostering empathy. By appealing to the fact that we like to think of ourselves as good people. These are a few of the museum stories my Optimist thinks about.
Plenty of People are Empathetic by Nature
At my last museum job, we conducted a survey about a future exhibit space for early childhood learners and their grown-ups. When we asked about the importance of amenities, like a private nursing/pumping room, it was striking how often people said, “Yes. I wouldn’t it, but other families might.” This accounted for, by my recollection, a third or a half of the yes answers we got about such amenities.
That same empathy showed up when we were testing a prototype of the Magnetic Neighborhood interactive in which visitors designed their ideal neighborhood. My favorite anecdote was an elementary-aged boy who said that he’d put the school at the far corner of his neighborhood, rather than at the center, so that “other kids could go to a good school, too.”
Cynic: “How sick is it that 9-year-olds are trying to solve…”. “Stop! You’re not wrong, but I’m talking now.” ~ the Optimist
Show People Consequences; Let Them Try Again
I’ll grant that those stories may just illustrate that we had exceptionally empathetic people in our visiting population, or at least people who could perform empathy when talking with museum staff. But we also had a few interactives that specifically awakened that perspective-taking by showing people the consequences of their designs. In one, people built a city neighborhood, then watched how it heated up when the heat lamp “sun” was turned on. The instructions then asked, “Can you make your city cooler?” Of course, they redesigned - adding trees, installing green roofs, removing asphalt; that was the design challenge. But in their in-group conversations (not interviews with us), they demonstrated that they were thinking about the human health consequences of their designs with comments like “My grandma can’t take the heat.”
In the other interactive that I’ve mentioned before, Turtle’s Eye View, visitors are invited to design a housing development on a parcel of land with a stream or river running through it. People’s initial designs inevitably gave every house river frontage, or at least a river view. But when the interactive highlighted a wood turtle’s territory, they noticed that the houses cut off the turtle’s path between its nesting site, food sources, and winter hibernation spot. They could have decided that the turtle would just weave its way between the yards and find other spots to live. But that’s not what happened. Consistently, people downsized their development, using smaller or fewer houses, and they tightly clustered them off to one side of the plot. No house had a river front, and most views would be of the neighbors’ houses, all to protect a habitat.
Bringing Different Voices into Conversation
Another time I’ve seen empathy fostered around urban design-related issues is when our city had 30,000 trees cut down as part of a highly divisive federal program to eradicate the invasive Asian Longhorned Beetle. Let’s just say that federal entomologists don’t make the best science communicators. Homeowners were signing permission papers they didn’t understand and coming home one day to find every leafy tree gone from their neighborhood, including their own backyard. City counselors had a field day spouting false science that they said could have preserved trees. People who reported beetle sightings were harassed.
And at the EcoTarium, we were hearing information from visitors that wasn’t making it into the public discourse. What people thought they were signing before the tree removal and which specific vocabulary in the document confused them. People who confessed that they had an infestation but would not report for fear of neighborhood anger. People who were violating quarantine rules, unknowingly risking 5-figure fines by taking wood fall from their own property to their out-of-state cabins. The infestation was the result of a complex set of circumstances involving the rise of international container shipping, the perils of a tree monoculture, the specifics of the beetle’s life cycle, and tree anatomy. Without that background information, there was no way for most people to understand why a city counselor’s “scientific” solution was complete bunk, or why they should trust a Fed who dismissed the counselor’s idea with “That won’t work.”
We created a small exhibit about the science behind the infestation. Even included a CT scan of beetle damaged log, so people could see the hidden devastation in the trunks of trees that showed only pencil-eraser-width holes on their bark.
We began looking for ways to help people understand not just the science of the issue, but also the perspectives of multiple constituencies affected. After all, people in Worcester were losing mature shade trees, which drove up their summer power bills and possibly drove down property values, in order to protect maple-driven industries in northern New England and Canada. Taking inspiration from the European Network of Science Centres & Museum’s (Ecsite) Play Decide game, our Exhibits and Education teams created the “Beetle Battle” role-playing game. The game structure ensured that all players were working from the same set of information, and heard from multiple, real stakeholders impacted by the beetles. In the final steps of the game, players discuss a number of possible policies, select one by consensus, or draft their own. I only got to participate in a few of the sessions that we ran, but at every one, people remarked about how much they learned and that they wanted the program repeated for others. It was amazing how invested folks could get in designing a policy that they felt would be practical, effective, and fair. They were able to hear multiple perspectives and to hear the reasons behind the reasons, and to identify which options that were scientifically viable (and which were a politician’s b.s.)
Yes – these are anecdotal stories, but they feed my Optimist. These are the kinds of engagement tools that we museum folk know how to create. I think they are worth taking out of the museum and into the community. Planning-relevant issues are complex, informed by data and by social values, and they kick up debates and divisions: housing, transportation systems and infrastructure investment, zoning and building codes, and climate, climate, climate. Museum work can and should help people shift through complexity, understand the consequences of actions, use empathy to understand multiple viewpoints, become trusted messengers, and find better pathways forward.
~ Betsy Loring1
The Planning-Curious Museum Person
Sharing stories and ideas for other Planning-Curious Museum People and for Museum-Curious Planning People.
If you’re already collaborating, tell me about it! Interested in expLoring a collaboration with me? Let’s talk! betsy@exploringexhibits.com
Betsy Loring is founder of expLoring exhibits & engagement. She has over 20 years’ experience in project management and exhibit development in multidisciplinary, indoor and outdoor museum settings. Her services include exhibit master planning, content and interactive development, and writing, with a focus on hands-on STEM. She also offers staff training in exhibition planning, formative evaluation, and prototyping. Special interests include multi-institutional collaborations, peer-to-peer professional development, and of course – collaboration with municipal planning practitioners.