Technologies of Romance: introduction

In 2010, Stephen Hawking commented that, “Science is not only a disciple of reason but, also, one of romance and passion.” This is not a connection we might readily make in the modern world. Science is technology, laboratories, facts and figures. It is experiment, cold, hard evidence, and equally cold, hard environments. Yet, visitors to the Science Museum Group’s museums (and readers of the Science Museum Group Journal) know that this is not the case. Many have recently stood in awe at the Soyuz TMA-19M descent module that brought Tim Peake and colleagues back to Earth from the International Space Station, cowed by the fragility, complexity and humanity of such an object: its romance. Indeed, Hawking was talking about sending astronauts on dangerous missions when he spoke about romance. Although unmanned space flight was perfectly possible at the time, and eliminated the risk to human life, he believed that human participants were a fundamental part of the endeavour. The exploration, the adventure and the risk were essential. There is romance in the stars that inspires humans to advance, but a romance that technology devoid of human connection cannot convey. Yet, technology also has its own romance. There is a nostalgia, an emotional pull, to technologies that we have known and spent time with over the course of our lives. Technologies facilitate romance – the phone call, the dating app, the email, the letter, the train journey, the meal, the contraceptive pill. Technologies open a new world of experience to us, whether through travel, enhanced vision, means of recording, or display. But technologies can also be ‘romanticised’, over-simplified into a black box that masks realities of labour, discrimination, resource exploitation or environmental damage. This complex relationship, as well as the sheer variety of what we might consider technology, or romance, to be was investigated as part of a collaboration between the Science Museum Group, Central Saint Martins, and eeodo publishing in 2018, and is further developed in the papers that make up this mini collection.