In collaboration between health education researchers from Steno Diabetes Center, and the Danish science center, Experimentarium, the PULSE project situates health promotion in a new setting: the Science Center. The project consists of/results in an innovative exhibition about movement and health combined with community-based activities and events to reach exposed groups. The goal is to find new ways of promoting health, create collaborations between research and development, involve users in the design process, and to engage with socially disadvantaged groups. With this new approach, health promotion is coupled to the specific learning context (Falk and Dierking 2000; Hein 1998) of the cultural institution. Based on the PULSE project, we discuss the role of science centres and museums as arenas for health education.

It is a relatively new area for museums to venture into health promotion (Camic and Chatterjee 2013), and the implications for both health promotion and the societal role of museums therefore need scrutiny. The ambition of modern museums and science centers is to create participatory experiences (Simon 2010), aiming at involving audiences in dialogue about socio-scientific issues and engaging in co-construction of meaning through interactive, exploratory and open-ended learning opportunities (Bradburne 1998; Pedretti 2002). The museums have transitioned from providing one-way information and specific learning goals to fostering critical debate, open-ended learning processes, and striving towards engaging the audiences as co-producers of knowledge and contributing with new perspectives of socio-scientific issues (Hein 1998; Hein 2005a). Being able to understand and relate to scientific knowledge and the production of new science and technologies is considered a critical aspect of modern-day citizenship, and the museums see themselves as contributing to equipping audiences to participate in public, democratic debates as competent and conscious voices (McCallie et al. 2009; Schäfer 2008).

We investigate the health promotion activities as they attempt to bridge between an informal learning environment with traditional science learning outcomes and the complexities of everyday practices of health and family life in local communities to establish lasting changes in conceptions of health and increase physical activity (Stentoft et al. 2012). We recount the process of involving the intended target groups in the design process and how this affected the outcome both in exhibition and outreach design, discussing the challenges and gains in co-designing learning environments. Involving the public in the design engine room shifts the power balance and establishes new audience-relationships. We explore practices of participation and non-participation and thus critically examine the possibilities and limitations of museums and cultural institutions to engage publics in important social issues such as health education. This emphasises the importance of inclusion and accessibility in order to create multifaceted representations of health and everyday life and to ensure counter stories to hegemonic discourses of health and ‘the good family life’. We discuss which audiences are enabled to participate, and how participation is facilitated and challenged in the process.

We draw on theories and concepts from health promotion (Green and Tones 2010; Jensen 1997), and theories from the area of museum studies about learning, meaning-making and knowledge construction processes as social, contextual and co-constructed (Falk and Dierking 2000; Hein 1998; 2005; Simon 2010). Concepts and discussions from post-structuralism, Science Studies (Jasanoff et al. 1995) and ANT/post-ANT (Latour 2005; Law 1999) and Practice Theory (Halkier and Jensen 2011; Pink 2012; Shove et al. 2012), are mobilised to analyse the relations between the heterogeneous practices of the everyday as well as museums and their ways of performing ways of knowing, debating and participating (Svabo 2011), and for analysing the user-involvement/co-design processes (Oudshoorn and Pinch 2005;Shove and Pantzar 2005).

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