Think about a museum, and the chances are that the past will come to mind first: dinosaur bones, archaeological treasures, vintage vehicles, and so on.

Visit the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh and you will indeed encounter all of those.

Perhaps less well known, however, is that we also have a continuing programme of contemporary collecting, acquiring present-day objects to represent social, scientific, natural and artistic developments and to preserve and interpret them both for today’s visitors and for future generations. One of the questions we ask ourselves when we collect material from today is, ‘will this matter tomorrow’? That question carries particular resonance when applied to material related to the vital contemporary themes of sustainability, climate change and biodiversity loss.

Dr Ellie Swinbank with part of the MeyGen tidal turbine, acquired by NMS. PIC: Stewart Attwood

Contemporary collecting has been part of the Museum’s mission since it first opened in 1866 as the Edinburgh Museum of Science and Art. Some now historic objects still on display today were acquired or commissioned as new in the Victorian era to showcase the latest cutting-edge developments in science and industry.

Much of the industrial technology of the past represented in the Museum is directly connected to fossil fuels – coal, gas and oil including, latterly, oil from Scotland’s own shores. As awareness of the climate emergency has grown, so the collecting focus of National Museums Scotland and its public programme are adapting to reflect responses to it here in Scotland and around the world.

For example, Scotland is a key European hub for testing and demonstrating marine power technologies. This week, a blade from a pioneering tidal turbine, previously used in a marine energy pilot in the Bluemull Sound in Shetland, will go on display in our Energise gallery. The community owned Nova 30 K tidal turbine paved the way for the development of the world’s first offshore tidal farm. This prototype was trialled for two years and provided invaluable learning around the design, offshore operations and commercial viability of tidal turbines. In 2016 the turbine was replaced with the world’s first offshore tidal array and began supplying electricity to the national grid.

A more recent acquisition is a piece of equipment used to connect a tidal turbine from the MeyGen array to the subsea cables that carry the energy generated ashore. The MeyGen tidal array is in the Pentland Firth, off the north coast of Scotland, and last year became the first tidal stream array in the world to generate 50GWh of clean electricity from tidal energy. It was further upgraded in the summer, after which the recently replaced connector came to the National Museums Collection Centre in Granton. Conservators there are considering the pros and cons of retaining the evocative covering of barnacles that currently bear witness to this object’s time in operation at the bottom of the sea.

Objects like these are material examples of innovation and, while we must also be mindful of the environmental impacts that even renewable technology can have, they offer a message of hope. This is important. As serious as the consequences of climate change and biodiversity loss already are, and have the potential to become, we find that visitors respond more positively and have greater engagement with these difficult subjects when there is a sense of agency. They want to feel that things can and are being done to make a difference and that we all can contribute to that crucial difference being made.

Our focus on marine energy is around Scotland’s shores, but there are many other areas in which Scottish innovation is having an impact around the world. One example is the SolarisKit Collector, developed in partnership with Heriot-Watt University by lecturer and mechanical engineer Dr Faisal Ghani.

In parts of the developing world, heating water can make up as much as 70 per cent of a household’s total energy bill. Many of these regions have an abundance of sunshine, but the technology to generate solar power on a large scale is expensive and governments have been reluctant to invest. The award-winning SolarisKit Collector is a potential smaller scale solution.

It is relatively portable, easy to set up and, using clean solar energy, can heat water up to 60C, hot enough for most domestic purposes such as hygiene and laundry, and requires a relatively small amount of additional energy to boil for cooking or sterilisation. Installation of the company’s first small-scale commercial solar hot water system has recently been completed in Nairobi.

The collections of National Museums Scotland extend far beyond my own area of technology. We collected material connected to the COP26 meeting held in Glasgow in 2021, including the Corryvreckan brooch, made by City of Glasgow College student Aileen Dickie Adams and worn at COP26 by then First Minister Nicola Sturgeon.

Sustainability is an area of increasing attention in the fashion industry. Recent acquisitions reflect responses from designers, including a dress by VIN + OMI which incorporates nettles and horsehair sourced from Highgrove, the private residence of The King and Queen, first shown in last year’s exhibition Beyond the Little Black Dress, a silk jacket and skirt by Phoebe English made from now defunct care labels that say ‘dry clean only’ and ‘polyester’, and a jacket and skirt created by José Hendo out of recycled Harris Tweed and Ugandan barkcloth.

Meanwhile, our Natural Science collections, accumulated over nearly 300 years are helping researchers to understand the impacts of climate change on our natural world. Genetic material contained in over 10,000 frozen tissue samples holds a wealth of information that can be used to facilitate fundamental scientific research and support conservation management of endangered species. In addition, we work with Scottish Marine Animal Stranding Scheme to collect and analyse whale strandings. In recent years, we have seen a number of what we would normally think of as warm-water species being found for the first time in British waters. Our palaeontology and geology collections also contribute to the scientific understanding of changes in climate over deep time.

Back to the present, National Museums Scotland has recently published a new Sustainability strategy which sets out how, having already met the Scottish Government’s 2030 target to reduce emissions by 75% from a 1990 baseline, the organisation will continue to work to minimise its own environmental impact over the next six years, with the intention of reaching net zero by the target date of 2045.

The strategy also sets out how we will continue to collect material connected to sustainability, climate change and biodiversity loss, and to use those collections as part of a public programme which encourages people to engage positively with these themes.

Our current special exhibitions offer more and different perspectives from which to approach such topics. Wildlife Photographer of the Year, created by the Natural History Museum in London, features 100 amazing images from all over the world: snapshots in time. capturing nature’s often fragile beauty and, in many cases, the impact that we humans are having on it.

Meanwhile, Rising Tide: Art and Environment in Oceania showcases artistic responses from coastal communities in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands to the impact of both rising sea levels and plastic pollution. The exhibition features an installation called Bottled Ocean 2123, imagining a future underwater scene of severe plastic pollution, but rendered as beauty. The point that Maori artist George Nuku is making with the work is that the plastic we currently discard so readily is in fact the product of millions of years of the earth’s natural systems working to produce the raw materials involved in its manufacture, and that we should respect, venerate and reuse it accordingly, rather than tossing it away.

So, tidal turbines, solar-powered water heaters, whales, jewellery, dresses and plastic bottles as art are just a small sample of how we continue to develop the National Collection. Will what we collect today matter tomorrow? We certainly hope so…

Dr Ellie Swinbank is senior curator of technology at the National Museums Scotland

How contemporary collecting will show future generations who we are