Mocking up

Many people find it hard to imagine how we get started with the mechanical and physical interactives you see in the new re-developed National Museum of Scotland. Here is one example of the process of paper ‘mock-ups’..

Family Belongings:

This interactive can be found in the Patterns of Life gallery. It started with some wonderful photographs we found, in a book called ‘Material World’ by Peter Menzel. The photographs show families from around the world outside their homes with all their possessions. The working title for the ‘Patterns of Life’ gallery was ‘People and Possessions’ and so the photos felt like a very good fit. We sought permission to purchase the rights to use the images and were granted.
Next, we felt that the exhibit would really benefit from an active way in which visitors could discover the images, and also place them in a geographical context. So I bought a large geopolitical wallmap and inserted some of the images into the map behind flaps. We tested this on gallery with our visitors and it proved to be extremely popular with families.

Paper mock-up

The next problem was what kind of map to actually use in the gallery. We noticed in our testing that visitors really enjoyed looking at a reasonably detailed map showing the location of countries they had visited or heard about or read about. We felt strongly that our map, while simplified, had to retain that level of detail.

The gallery Patterns of Life is divided into four regions – Africa, Asia, Middle East and Americas. Each area in the gallery has a colour, and so to link this exhibit with the rest of the galleries we used the same colours in our map.

The final exhibit:

Image coyright: Jenni Sophia Fuchs

Aboriginal Shield interactive

From this:

Paper prototype

To this:

Image copyright: Jenni Sophia Fuchs

You can really see with this exhibit that we were almost there at paper-prototype stage. This exhibit is for the Living Lands exhibition at the National Museum of Scotland. It sits in the section about the traditional lifestyle of the Australian Aboriginal people, and looks at how nomadic people can have many uses for one object. It sits beside a showcase display of shields from the museum’s collections.

Introduction

Image copyright: Jenni Sophia Fuchs

I am an interpretation professional, with a background in science communication, interest in sustainable development and ten years’ experience in cutting-edge museum work.  I work on both exhibitions and events using many different media including hands-on exhibits, interactivity, dialogue and active learning and engagement.

This website and blog is a chance for me to showcase my work and also tell you a bit about the processes behind the scenes that go into producing the exhibits and events the public see.