Tom Tits Experiment, Södertälje, Sweden (review)

In 2006, Tom Tits Experiment, a science center located south of Stockholm in Södertälje, Sweden, received the European Museum Forum's Micheletti Award, a prize established in 1996 that goes to the year's most promising technical or industrial museum. The award citation explains that Tom Tits deserves attention not only because of its content, judged to be "amongst the most exciting in Europe," but also because of its new nursery school, its activities and tours for older children, and its excellent and dedicated staff.¹

When we were asked to write this review of Tom Tits for Technology and Culture, however, we wondered at first how a hands-on science center managed to capture a prize intended for museums—that is, we wondered whether "science centers" actually count as proper "museums." But as the nestor of museology who founded the European Museum Forum, Kenneth Hudson, once wrote, it is "almost impossible to define a museum in a way which is universally acceptable." For as society itself has evolved, so too has the concept of the museum.² Today, in fact, the International Council of Museums, which is closely related to UNESCO, officially recognizes science centers as legitimate museums.³

Museum professionals may not agree with this, of course. But if we take a longer view of the situation, we find that science centers, natural history museums, and museums of science and technology have shared a great deal in common in recent decades. During the late 1960s, when a number of large science centers were founded in North America—the Exploratorium in San Francisco, for example, and the Ontario Science Centre in London—they drew much of their inspiration from experiments carried out at the Deutsches Museum in Munich and at the Science Museum in London.⁴ Today, according to the European Network of Science Centres and Museums, the situation is reversed, and museums of natural history and museums of science and technology now regularly look to science centers for inspiration.⁵

Museums and science centers are also alike in that both serve as informal educational institutions. Since its inception in 1977, the European Museum Forum has consistently worked to improve the quality of the museum experience by embracing visitor-friendly and interactive educational features, and this is why Tom Tits won the forum's 2006 award. The official motto of Tom Tits Experiment is "experiment as methodology," and in its prize citation, the forum emphasized the pedagogical value of the center's stated goal: to explain basic scientific principles in a manner that is easily accessible to the visiting public, particularly younger visitors who might be inspired to continue to explore the world of science.

Our Experiment

Tom Tits Experiment is located in an old Alfa-Laval factory that was, at the turn of the twentieth century, the largest employer in Södertälje (fig. 1). The center's name dates to the nineteenth century as well, when the French magazine L'Illustration published a series of articles describing do-it-yourself scientific experiments for children. Pseudonymously written by "Tom Tit," these articles were published in a volume titled La Science Amusante (1890), which was quickly translated into several languages. When the center itself was established in 1987, its educational ambitions seemed to resonate with those of L'Illustration's fictional author. Hence the unusual name.⁶

We went to Tom Tits on a Friday afternoon in early January 2007, and, to find out if it lives up to its pedagogical goals, we brought along a test panel consisting of three girls, twins the age of six and a three-year-old. The children in our test panel were of course too young to truly grasp the underlying principles of many of the experiments at the center. But nearly everything at Tom Tits fascinated them, and at times it was difficult to steer them along from station to station.

Tom Tits consists of four floors filled with hundreds of experiment stations, as well as a large garden (which is closed during the winter). A floor plan available...