Category Archives: Design

Signposts or Serendipity?

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There has recently been a fair bit of discussion online about immersive theatre, and what the implications might be for exhibitions (helpfully summarised on Ed Rodley’s blog). One thing that has struck me about this discussion is that people seem to fall into one of two camps: those who cheerfully check their inhibitions at the door, go with the flow and lose themselves in the moment; and others who are consumed by anxiety at not knowing where the whole experience is headed and whether they’re going to miss the most important bit because there’s no obvious route to find it. These are ideas I’ve circled around a couple of times in different contexts over the past few months – firstly in considering meaning making versus meaning reading, and later in a discussion on exhibition layouts.

It seems some people delight in the serendipity of not knowing what’s coming next, while others need their signposts - without them, they feel cast adrift.

This raises a couple of questions for me – are these two inherently different kinds of people, or do circumstantial factors (e.g., audience expectations, social context, design of the setting, how an experiences is framed from the outset) play a significant role?

The answers to these questions have important implications for visitor psychology in general and exhibition design in particular. If we are dealing with distinct personality types, how can they both be accommodated in a given exhibition experience? Is this even possible? If circumstantial factors are important, then which ones? How can we orchestrate experiences and design spaces that assuage the anxiety of the signposters without spoiling the punchline for the serendipitous?

 

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Exhibition Costs – what’s in *your* budget?

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One of the most popular posts on this blog is one from way back in mid-2011: Exhibition Costs – Constants and Variables. Working out what a museum exhibition should cost to develop is *the* FAQ that exhibition planners hear the most. And it’s a subject that’s featured in a recent article by Sarah Bartlett and Christopher Lee [1].

Compared to visitor numbers, data on exhibition costs are hard to come by. Many exhibition projects include, at least in part, contracts with outside design companies and exhibit fabricators, who understandably play their costing cards pretty close to their chest. Most of the available data is therefore derived from informal, self-selected survey responses. Also, whereas it’s pretty easy to agree on what constitutes a ‘visitor’, deciding what counts as part of an ‘exhibition budget’ is not so straightforward. Not everyone factors the same costs into their exhibit budget equation. So even when we do have numbers, it’s hard to tell if we’re comparing apples with apples (a point I have made previously).

Bartlett and Lee cite data from their own informal survey (the full report is apparently available on splitrock studios website but at the time of writing I couldn’t find it) based on 71 responses across the US. Responses were mostly from History / Natural History / Art Museums, with relatively few science centres and children’s museums (this contrasts the survey by Mark Walhimer that I reported in my earlier post, where more hands-on style museums were represented). In the Bartlett and Lee sample, the vast majority of exhibitions came in under US$100/sq.ft., although some were over 10 times this amount. This is reflected in the average cost for science / technology museums and visitor centers being over US$500/sq.ft.

But that’s far from the whole story, because survey respondents didn’t spell out what costs were included in their $/sq.ft. figure – and what was below the line. Bartlett and Lee identify the following categories that may or may not be included in an exhibit budget, to which I’ve added a few additional comments:

  • Differing base fit-out costs of a new versus existing building (to which I’ll add the complexities of working in heritage buildings or in spaces with limited access, which increases on-site costs).
  • Basic finishes such as painting, track lighting and flooring (it’s amazing how much it can cost just to get a space up to an ‘inhabitable’ standard!)
  • Changes to building infrastructure like new walls or electric/data cabling
  • Preparatory costs, such as research, planning, design and management fees (to which I’ll add formative evaluation costs)
  • Audiovisual and Electronic interactives (I’d say it’s worth adding that this could also include software and devices that are not strictly part of the fit-out such as apps or audioguides)
  • Staff costs, both in-house and contract personnel (I’m aware that it’s often hard to quantify the amount of in-house time spent on an exhibition, particularly if staff are not required to quantify hours spent. Anecdotally I’ve heard there is often internal resistance to the idea of doing such quantifying as staff feel they’re being ‘checked up on’)
  • Maintenance costs (to which I’ll add other post-opening costs such as snagging, consumables, staffing costs and of course summative / remedial evaluation!)
  • Object-related costs such as conservation, packing and loan negotiations.

With this many variables in what people routinely count as part of the exhibition budget, it’s easy to see how you can get variations that vary by an order of magnitude or more. The most basic of exhibitions may draw upon the existing collection and not involve any changes to gallery infrastructure such as lighting, painting or display cases, and staff costs may be absorbed into day-to-day operating budgets rather than costed out. At the other extreme are highly media-rich and interactive exhibitions that involve considerable research and hiring in of a multitude of outside experts. Bartlett and Lee also identify geography as a factor in costs, at least across different parts of the US.

1. Bartlett, S., and Lee, C. (2012). Measuring the Rule of Thumb: How Much to Exhibitions Cost? Exhibitionist, Vol 31(2), pp 34-38.

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Free Choice and the “Forced March”

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Nina Simon has just posted a thought-provoking piece on her blog about linear storytelling and how it relates to the design and layout of museum exhibitions. She observes that while the digital world theoretically allows for infinite possibilities when it comes to navigation and storytelling, “simplicity trumps possibility” and most digital storytelling still has a linear backbone. She goes on to ask:

“[D]oes this preference for linearity impact people when visiting museums? Are people overwhelmed or confused by the “infinite paths” that we offer through galleries, collections, and exhibitions?”

Simon describes museums like the International Spy Museum and the US Holocaust Memorial Museums (both in Washington DC) as “fixed march” experiences: visitors are fed into a common entrance and the exhibition galleries follow a fixed linear path, like beads on a string. You always know you’re on the ‘right’ path because there is no real mechanism to stray from it. Simon, like a lot of museum professionals, was sceptical of this approach – aren’t fixed marches dictatorial? Are we sacrificing opportunities for visitors to do their own thing, make their own meanings, because linear exhibitions are easier to operate and manage? But she is now questioning this scepticism – museum professionals likely take this view because they know museums well. The standard experience seems boring and humdrum to them, and they want to explore different ways to subvert it.* But perhaps less frequent visitors like the comfort and grounding of knowing they are on the ‘right’ path?

 

My PhD research to date would suggest that most visitors like to know they are on the ‘right’ path, or at least that they haven’t missed anything. On accompanied museum visits I conducted last year, some of my research participants said things like:

 

“. . . it’s very difficult to choose where you’re going to go from here. You almost need like directions about where you should be starting. . . “

“. . .and it’s a bit of a maze, in a way, in terms of um there’s no obvious, um, path to proceed around, in terms of um you could just follow them around but there’s a lot of branches that you could, navigate . . .”

“Um I find it a little bit tricky because I like to, go through and know that I’ve seen everything, whereas if there’s lots of different pockets that you need to go past, um you lost track of which areas you’ve seen and which you haven’t.”

But it is also true that linearity limits a visitor’s options, particularly if they are more interested in seeing something in particular than checking out the museum in general:

“. it’s less linear in terms of, er, it’s not so, it’s um  .. .it’s it’s less like a sausage machine you’re going in one and coming out the other, you seemed to be able to get more lost and be able to go from one thing to another as we certainly did today.”

“. . .it’s a gallery to me that makes you wind around, which is probably intentional but, sometimes it’s nice to be able to see a big view and work out ‘yes I’m interested in one particular aspect I’m heading over there’, whereas you are forced to wander around, the gallery to find something.”

I visited both of Simon’s cited examples, the Spy Museum and the Holocaust Museum, earlier this year. While I understand what she means about the ‘fixed march’, the experiences did not seem overly restrictive to me. Yes, the galleries were in a fixed linear order, but once you were in a particular gallery it was sufficiently open and spacious that you could choose what you wanted to see or decide what would be a logical path (or how to navigate around the summer crowds). And you were able to tell when you’d seen everything and were ready to move on.

In this sense I think ‘fixed march’ experiences are suitable for museums where a majority of your visitors are likely to be one-off tourists. I could imagine if you were a regular visitor to such museums, the need to trudge through a line of galleries to get to what you really want to look at would be a chore. It brings to mind a trip to Ikea where (except for a handful of easy to miss ‘shortcuts’) you are forced to walk through every section before you get to the checkouts. The rationale for their strategy is clear of course – I have never left Ikea with the ‘just one or two things’ I went there for!

As an alternative to the fixed path I would suggest layouts that incorporate a common ‘home base’ – for instance a central spine off which galleries radiate (like a lot of ‘traditional’ museums) or a hub-and-spoke or cloverleaf arrangement where all galleries open off a central hub or atrium. This is supported by space syntax [1] studies in museum spaces. Space syntax characterises spaces in terms of two main properties: connectivity (a highly connected room has many other rooms opening off of it) and integration (a measure of how directly you can move from any given room to another in a building). A highly connected central hub or spine (or atrium across multiple levels, as below) limits the linear trudge, while at the same time providing a common navigational reference point: all roads lead to Rome, so to speak.

The central atrium, National Museum Scotland

The central atrium, National Museum Scotland

The need for common points of reference in a building has been reinforced to me during some visitor observations I have been doing this week. Most of the exhibition spaces are in a long, thin building that spans four levels, with stairs and lifts at each end. I was tracking visitors in an exhibition space that takes up the entire second floor, where the ‘logical’ route would be to enter via the stairs/lift at either end, and then exit the other. In contrast, I observed several visitors traverse almost the entire length of the gallery, only to double back to enter where they came from. In a couple of instances, visitors did exit from the other end, but shortly thereafter turned around and re-entered the gallery to head back to the exit they came in from. Presumably ending up somewhere different from where they started meant they felt lost, so their solution was to retrace their steps. I would expect that common hubs (where practical) would eliminate this problem.

*Comments on Nina Simon’s blog suggests a cultural dimension to the distaste for linearity. One commenter observed that linear experiences are the norm in Germany, so it is something that German visitors do not question as it has been ever thus. I wonder if the US, as a highly individualistic culture, has more visitors with a yearning to be able to carve out their own path?

[1] Hillier, B., & Tzortzi, K. (2011). Space Syntax: the Language of Museum Space. In S. Macdonald (Ed.), A companion to museum studies (pbk., pp. 282-301). Wiley Blackwell.

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Mind the Gap

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Have you ever wondered how it is that so many of your visitors miss a prominent sign or installation – after all it’s in plain sight, right by the entrance? Chances are it’s in the Transition Zone.

Transition Zones were identified by Underhill [1] (see previous post on Underhill here) in his observational studies of retail spaces. When people first enter a store, they can be seen going through a reorientation and refocusing period – adjusting to their new environment, working out where to go next, and so on. In these few metres they are passing through the Transition Zone. In the Transition Zone, people are focused on where they are going, not where they are. Their immediate surroundings are, in effect, invisible to them.

I was reminded of the Transition Zone this week, as I am reading a doctoral thesis by Janine Fenton Sager [2], who applied Underhill’s methods to contemporary art exhibition spaces. Not surprisingly, the same Transition Zone effect applies – both at the entrance to museums as well as to individual exhibition spaces where there is a new environment and/or new topic to adjust to.

The South Australian Museum’s main entrance is a fairly typical example:

The main entrance atrium of the South Australian Museum. Visitors enter this space through a set of automated glass sliding doors, and pass through the second set before entering the entrance lobby proper.

I had discussions with the Museum about the use of this atrium space about a year or so ago, not long after I had read about Underhill’s Transition Zones. While I have not spent a lot of time observing how this particular space is used, the Transition Zone concept would suggest that most visitors have psychologically ‘exited’ the atrium pretty much as soon as they have entered it. They can see the information desk and key decision points in the main lobby beyond (the shop, cafe and galleries all fan off this lobby), and are probably already thinking about where they might go first. Consequently I advised the museum to keep this space minimal, and that any signage in this space would be as good as invisible to most visitors, at least on their way in to the museum. (I notice some brochure racks have crept in since then, and I wonder how well and at what stage of the visit they are used . . . perhaps they are picked up on exiting?)

The large iron meteorite on display in here is an interesting one – it’s an impressive object and possibly sufficiently unusual that visitors may be stopped by it. However it may be more readily noticed on the way out than the way in, and I also wonder what role children play in whether the meteorite is noticed and stopped at. (I suspect children are less susceptible to Transition Zone effects but I’m not sure if this has actually been studied or observed).

These nuances aside, the lesson here is not to position important orientation or introductory signage right by the entrance – it’s too close to the Transition Zone and will end up being missed by the majority of your visitors.

[1] Underhill, P. (1999). Why we buy – the science of shopping. New York: Simon & Schuster.

[2] Sager, J. F. (2008). The Contemporary Visual Art Audience: Space, Time and a Sideways Glance (Unpublished Doctoral Thesis). University of Western Sydney.

 

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Compare and Contrast: Diorama Design

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The diorama, typically comprising “preserved organisms and painted or modelled landscapes” (Tunnicliffe and Scheersoi, 2010, p. 187), has been a mainstay of Natural History museums for well over a century. While they are often much maligned as old fashioned by many museum professionals, they continue to be popular with visitors and can be valuable learning tools (Tunnicliffe and Scheersoi, 2010).

My recent visit to the US as well as my own research have got me wondering about the essential ingredients of ‘diorama-ness’. What would a psychological schema of a diorama be from a visitor’s perspective? When does a diorama stop being a diorama?

I would suggest that the displays at the American Museum of Natural History would be the closest to the traditional diorama archetype.

Diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, New York. There is relatively little interpretation beyond the description of the region it depicts.

Traditional dioramas attempt to re-create a naturalistic setting as closely as possible. The back wall of the diorama is often curved to enhance the effect of a foreground and a horizon:

The sand in the foreground and the painted background merge together to create a distant horizon

The dioramas are the principal focus of the exhibition, with the surrounding areas kept in relative darkness:

View into the African Dioramas in the American Museum of Natural HIstory

By contrast, the mammals displays in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History take a different approach. Rather than a sequence of identically sized and evenly spaced dioramas, the space is more open and varied in height and scale:

A general overview of the Mammals area in the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History

While backdrops are still used to evoke a habitat or setting, there is no attempt to make these look realistic. Rather, the multiple layering of two-dimensional images gave a ‘picturebook’ feel to the displays:

Picturebook dioramas – the animals’ habitat is eluded to rather than directly represented

The Smithsonian displays also sometimes showed multiple levels of the same scene, something I don’t recall seeing in the AMNH dioramas. For instance some dioramas included peepholes to see creatures hiding below ground:

Peep-hole displays showing life above and below ground. The label in the foreground asks “What does this coyote smell?” A beaver hides beneath.

While I’m happy to consider these displays as a version of a diorama, I wonder if other visitors’ interpretation is as flexible. Consider the Biodiversity Gallery at my research site, the South Australian Museum:

A view of the South Australian Biodiversity Gallery. Interpretation is via touchscreen rather than traditional labels.

As with the Smithsonian, these displays are a variation of the diorama archetype. While the displays have quite realistic foregrounds, these are set against a simple blue background:

A desert diorama. The blue is evocative of the clear blue skies of inland Australia, although this link is not made explicit.

Beyond the dioramas, there is further use of design to evoke the habitat – in the forests area, lighting combines with a ceiling feature to create an arboreal feel to the space:

The forests area of the SA Biodiversity Gallery

However, this effect is subtle for those not attuned to seeking out design features. It was not explicitly mentioned by most visitors who I accompanied through this space, suggesting they either didn’t notice it because their attention was absorbed by the displays themselves, or they didn’t think it was worth mentioning. (Some noticed a change in the feel of the space but couldn’t quite put their finger on what was different.)

Design concerns aside, do the displays in the Biodiversity gallery count as dioramas? In the words of one of my research participants:

It’s not even a proper diorama, because the background’s missing. . . . 

Further probing revealed that the painted background on a curved background (creating the artificial horizon) was an essential part of the diorama ‘schema’ for this visitor. However she continued to use the word ‘diorama’ to describe the displays, presumably in the absence of a more appropriate word.

What are the essential ingredients of a diorama to you?

Reference:
Tunnicliffe, S. D., & Scheersoi, A. (2010). Natural History Dioramas: Dusty Relics or Essential Tools for Biology Learning? In Anastasia Filippoupoliti (Ed.), Science Exhibitions: Communication and Evaluation (pp. 186-216). Edinburgh: MuseumsEtc.

 

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Compare and Contrast: Art and Anthropology

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Both The Met and the American Museum of Natural History have displays of objects from the Pacific region. What I found interesting were the similarities and differences between the two display approaches – in one museum the objects are presented as works of ‘art’, whereas in the other they are presented as ‘artefacts’ of culture.

An overview of the Oceania gallery in The Met.

The Margaret Mead Hall of Pacific Peoples in AMNH

The AMNH exhibition looks considerably older than the display at the Met, and the one in the Met is definitely lighter, more airy and spacious – both in respect to the space itself and the density of objects on display. But there are similarities in the colour palette used in both with the dominance of a light, slightly grey blue (ignoring the red-earth inspired colour scheme of the Australian display to the right of the AMNH picture above).

AMNH display cases – a more traditional approach

Displays at the Met – more open and with a greater attention to the aesthetic.

Of the art museums I visited in the United States, The Met was the only one to have dedicated any appreciable space to art from the Pacific region. It turned out there was a reason for this. The Met had acquired the collection of the erstwhile “Museum of Primitive Art” that had been founded by Nelson Rockefeller in association with Rene d’Harnoncourt in 1957. (The museum closed in 1974). These items were part of this so-called “primitive art” collection, along with items from Africa and the Americas. This term betrays a cultural legacy that gave me pause to ponder.

Plaque on display at The Met

Coincidentally, I’ve been reading about Rene d’Harnoncourt’s influence on exhibition design in a recent article[1]. He was director of MoMA from 1949-1967, and in the 1940s was responsible for taking new approaches to display of art, in particular items from the Pacific. He introduced varied colour schemes, theatrical lighting and a decluttered approach to case layouts in a way that both borrowed from and influenced shop window displays. His work was influential in positioning such objects as works of art, rather than just ‘ethnographic curiosities’. He was also interested in creating a market for Pacific art.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of Central Park, the AMNH takes a more anthropological view of its collections. Rather than works of art, the same sorts of objects are shown as representative of a culture. In these displays, the purpose is more to show the ‘archetype’ objects rather than the more pure aesthetic approach of the art museum, even if the objects are pretty similar to untrained eyes such as mine.

AMNH grapples with its own historical legacies in the way that it depicts ‘other’ (i.e., non-Western) cultures. Some of the displays seemed anachronistic in their depictions and terminology. They are presumably products of their time and I can’t imagine displays such as these being conceived today.

A human diorama of ‘pygmies’ in the AMNH

There was something about this that range a vague bell at the time, and later I realised I was recalling Bal’s 1992 critique [2] of the AMNH’s ethnographic displays and the historic cultural assumptions upon which they were based. While that paper is now two decades old, it looks like many of the displays described in that paper haven’t changed radically in the intervening period. It was interesting to re-read the article, now having some knowledge of the spaces it describes.

[1]  Foster, R. J. (2012). Art/Artefact/Commodity: Installation design and the exhibition of Oceanic things at two New York museums in the 1940s. The Australian Journal of Anthropology, 23(2), 129–157. doi:10.1111/j.1757-6547.2012.00178.x

[2] Bal, M. (1992). Telling , Showing , Showing Off. Critical Inquiry, 18(3), 556–594.

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Is your signage “crowd proof”?

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Yes, yes, I know – I visited some of America’s most popular museums at the height of summer. If there was one thing I was going to have to contend with, it was crowds.

Crowds at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, attempt to catch a glimpse of ‘The Starry Night’ by Van Gogh

For those museums that are not at the top of every summer holidaymaker’s ‘must see’ list, the issue of too many people probably sounds like a happy problem to have. But not necessarily. The summer high season may well bring in valuable income, but all that crowding and queuing can lead to a less-than-satisfactory visitor experience – not to mention the maintenance costs associated with having hundreds of thousands of feet and fingers interacting with your building and your exhibits.

Now I should point out that I’m not very good with crowds and I’m an impatient queuer. Being short means I find it hard to navigate large numbers of people because my head is at shoulder height of many of the people around me. This physical characteristic combines with the psychological uncertainty that makes waiting in line torture at the best of times. In these circumstances I guess it was inevitable that some museums would have me in a twitching, toe tapping mess before I even crossed the lobby. At some point I decided to put this enforced waiting time to good use, and notice how well site signage was working under these very trying conditions.

Multiple desks, multiple lines, multiple signs

I arrived at the American Museum of Natural History just before opening time, and a fair few number of people had already begun to congregate on the front steps. The first bottleneck was having to clear security (In more or less every American museum there was security screening of some sort as you entered. An unfortunate sign of the times.). The next step was then to work out which ticket line was the right one to join. AMNH is one of the venues in the New York City Pass scheme (excellent value btw), which is meant to give you express entry although is sufficiently popular that in many cases it just means you get to join a shorter queue rather than walking right in. Security guards directed us to the right, and immediately to the right was a desk. But this wasn’t the right desk (still not quite sure what that desk was but the people behind it gave us vague onward directions), and it was a bit of a challenge to find where the right queue was and where it started.

The lobby of AMNH shortly after opening time. The green banner shows where the front of the line is, but where is the back?

As it turned out, the back of the queue was marked, clearly enough, by one of those standard signs you fit to tensabarriers. The problem is, there were sufficient number of people that this sign was obscured by people the majority of the time.

Ah – the back of the queue! It took a while for this sign to become visible among the throngs.

It really needed to be positioned a lot further back into the lobby than it was, or be reinforced by additional signage closer to the entrance. I encountered this issue on more than one occasion, where tensabarrier signs were positioned in such a way that they were obscured by people as the crowd overflowed beyond the anticipated area.

Now as I said at the outset, I was visiting in peak periods when visitor management strategies were being tested to their limit. So I don’t want to come across as too nit-picky about this (and I don’t mean to single out AMNH either). However, with that number of people arriving all at once, even the slightest bit of ambiguity or confusion is likely to make the bottlenecks even worse. So for me it was a reminder that our signage strategies and visitor sight lines should be tested under all circumstances – what makes sense in the relatively calm periods when we often plan signage may be far less obvious at peak times.

 

 

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Museum App Review: MCA Insight

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I recently visited the newly re-vamped Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. One of the recent additions to the visitor repertoire is the MCA Insight smartphone app, and I thought I’d give it a go.

The MCA Insight home screen

Choosing the ‘Explore’ option takes you to a clean and easy to use interface that lets you look for specific works or see a map of the gallery. It uses the Museum’s wi-fi to locate you so can also select the option for it to only show works that are near you. This works most of the time but in some cases it got a bit confused due to the location of gallery walls – sometimes you were physically near something you couldn’t actually get to.

The “Explore” screen

If you were looking for something in particular, you could use the app to locate it in the gallery. If you were already nearby the work this was helpful, but the lack of gallery labelling or signposting of locations beyond the level number and the location of walls could make it difficult if you were using this as your principal way to find your way around.

The location of a work on MCA Insight

As you walked around, the Insight app gave you more information about the works. In most cases it was nothing different from the label, but it was often easier to read the text on your phone while standing back to take a work in, rather than having to peer at the text on the wall. Overall I found the app quite easy and fun to use.

An example of a label on the MCA Insight app

I was a bit underwhelmed by the follow-up though. On the way you were able to collect works to add to ‘My Gallery’.  Then, if you enter your email address, the app promises to send a record of your visit. I think I was a victim of my own expectations here – I was expecting to receive something akin to what you get with MONA’s “O”. This sends you a wireframe model of the route you actually took through the museum as well as the artworks you selected. I was looking forward to seeing my meandering route through the museum rendered in 3D. However, what I got was a straightforward list of the works saved in My Gallery (mine is here), along with some additional details about the works and the artists. This was good enough (except in the cases where the only additional information was the page where you could purchase a $49.95 catalogue), but I was a bit disappointed because of my loftier expectations. I think it would be better if MCA re-worded how they describe the ‘record of your visit’ so that it’s a better description of what is actually offered by the app.

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Museums as Battlefields in the History Wars

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This is the title of the guest post I’ve just written for the Museum 2.0 blog by Nina Simon. I’ve long been a fan of the blog and it’s exciting to be able to make my own small contribution to it.

The blog post is part of a series called the Blueprint book club – a series of reactions to the book Blueprint, the story of the Dutch Museum of National History. This project to build a new national museum was cancelled in 2011, and this book is a way of recording the plans and vision of the project from its inception to its demise. My take draws parallels between the Dutch museum’s fate and the slightly shaky early history of the National Museum of Australia.

There will be more instalments by other guest contributors over the coming days and weeks. So why not have a read and contribute?

 

 

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Review: Bouncing Back from Disaster, Queensland Museum

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The Queensland Museum on South Bank has just re-opened after being closed for refurbishment for a few months. Since I happened to be in town, I thought I’d drop by and have a look. More on the museum as a whole in a later post – for this one I’ll concentrate on the Bouncing Back from Disaster exhibition about the Queensland floods, which devastated many parts of the state just over a year ago.

As the one-year anniversary has only just passed, it is a very recent event that’s still fresh in everyone’s memories. The exhibition focused not just on what happened, but the resilience of the people who picked up the pieces and moved on in the wake of the disaster. Australians who followed the event on the news will remember this resilience embodied in Queensland Premier Anna Bligh’s emotional “We are Queenslanders” speech:

And in the exhibition we get to see a facsimile of her handwritten notes from that day:

Graphic about resilience including Anna Bligh's notes from her famous "We are Queenslanders" speech.

This is very much a story-led, not an object-led exhibition. There is a great selection of images and dramatic footage of rescue efforts. The relatively few objects are everyday items that had been retrieved during the clean-up. I found that there was an understated power to these objects:

A mud-caked record player retrieved from the wreckage

A sizeable portion of the exhibition is dedicated to a space where visitors (many of whom would have been directly affected by the floods) are able to share their stories (I blogged about the role of museums in sharing these kinds of community memories at the time):

Part of the wall that people could stick up their own experiences of the floods. Note the exhibition has only been opened for a couple of days and there are already a considerable number of contributions. The writing table is to the right and the wall continues to the left of this image.

 

A poignant personal story of survival and loss

The design of the exhibition is evocative of the ‘rebuilding’ theme – the exhibition panels are mostly bare plywood attached to vertical timber supports, with construction fencing and plastic sheeting used to enclose certain spaces (see above). The design of the graphics (white text and straight lines on a blue background) looks like it is intended to represent the blueprints of a rebuilding project – but this is just a guess on my part. Overall the design fits in well with the story being told.

However, I found the exhibition sections that attempted to put the flood disaster into broader scientific context (i.e., natural disasters across geological timeframes) a bit out of place. For me this was primarily a story of human experience and this alone was strong enough – it didn’t need to be placed in a planetary context. I wonder what the rationale for including this additional content was:  To show that this was not an extraordinary event in the global scheme of things? That life on Earth has adapted and responded in the face of disaster since time immemorial? Maybe something a little less remote from living memory and human experience may have been a better choice if this was the interpretive intent (e.g., the cleanup of the 1974 floods in Brisbane).

One absent story (assuming I didn’t miss it) was the experience of the museum itself during the flood – the South Bank precinct was certainly affected and the museum presumably had to make efforts to ensure collections weren’t damaged or lost. Perhaps this ‘inside story’ was more of interest to people like me and my visiting companion (another museum person of sorts). But even so, making the museum part of the story (instead of just the reporter of it) may have added another dimension to the exhibition – the museum is as much a part of the community as any other public institution. As such, it shares our achievements and challenges.

 

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