Page - 95 - in Critical Issues in Science, Technology and Society Studies - Conference Proceedings of the 17th STS Conference Graz 2018

stronger tendencies towards balancing. This is because - this is our assumption - here, firstly, people do not recognize themselves so directly as affected and, secondly, because - unlike genome editing in general - a highly charged concept of nature comes into play. One of the results we won via questioning the visitors after the event was: there were mostly academics (37%), mostly connected with science. Opinionboxes The questioning of an audience that is determinedly interested in these questions of genome editing is one thing. The other one? Exploiting the possibilities of the museum and its heterogeneous public. But how can we engage visitors into these debates and animate them to connect single exhibits to larger contexts? We have therefore installed interventions in the permanent exhibition. We call them “opinionboxes”. In a certain sense we consider these boxes as Boundary-Objects. The idea of boundary objects, first introduced by Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer in 1989, is a useful theoretical tool. It is characterized as any object that is part of multiple social worlds and facilitates communication between them; it has a different identity in each social world that it inhabits (Star and Griesemer 1989, 409). As a result a boundary object must be simultaneously concrete and abstract, simultaneously fluid and well-defined. The opinion boxes now link exhibits with social debates by asking visitors questions on research practice and applications of research. Figure 3: Opinion Box in the permanent exhibition Debates focusing on gene technology are – in Germany – highly structured by assumption which makes an exchange of position not fruitful at all.1 This is why in a first phase the questions 1 For a closer look see (Hampel 2008, Gaskell et al. 2010) 95