Exhibit Design: The Language of Artifacts
This article originally appeared in Exchange,
a newsletter published by the Wisconsin Historical
Society. (Volume
24, Number 6, November/December, 1982) It is the
eighth in a series of articles titled Exhibiting
Local Heritage. The series features information
about planning, designing and constructing interpretive
museum exhibits. This article was written by Tom
McKay, retired local history coordinator for the
Wisconsin Historical Society.
Exhibits are a form of communication. In part, successful communication in exhibits depends on the written word in the form of labels. However, exhibits go beyond written labels to communicate their message. Exhibits carefully organize artifacts, labels, physical space, and fabrication techniques to interpret historical information to visitors. Effectively ordering these elements represents the key to designing exhibits that communicate.
Of all the elements in exhibit design, the use of artifacts comes first and foremost. Artifacts serve as visual memory keys that help the viewer understand and retain the historical information and ideas in an exhibit. Visitors may learn the date at which a pioneer brickyard was founded or its levels of production from a label, but it is the image of the brickyard in an early photograph that later calls the information back from their memories. Visitors may read of the large number of local buildings constructed of these bricks, but it is the color of a sample brick in the exhibit that helps them recognize these buildings around the community. Artifacts-the objects, photographs, and documents of the past-are the medium of exhibits. Good exhibit design is like writing with artifacts.
Writing with artifacts means learning their "language." Although this language has many complexities, beginners in exhibit design should concentrate on three basic parts of the language of artifacts: (1) selection; (2) prominence; and (3) relationship.
Though it seems amazing, with some frequency the artifacts selected for exhibits by museums are not germane to the subject being interpreted. Sometimes selection is completely in error, such as a broadax included as an example of tools used in construction of a balloon frame house. More often exhibit planners slightly miss their mark in selecting artifacts. Planners of a recent major American history exhibit, for instance, loaded its farming section with kitchen equipment. These artifacts, to be sure, belonged in farm kitchens. However, they would have been found in equal numbers in country, town and city kitchens alike. For a rural exhibit, plows, scythes, and chicken incubators instead of kraut cutters, frying pans, and canning jars ought to have predominated.
To emphasize historical importance, exhibits usually need to make some artifacts more prominent than others. Assume that you are preparing an exhibit on a nineteenth-century pottery and that the development of a new glaze ensured its financial success. Important as that fact is, one of the first pieces with the glaze might still look dull and undistinguished alongside other products of the pottery. If so, the exhibit designer may have to employ a technique to make this early piece prominent within the exhibit. The design could raise this piece above or set it out from a group of other ceramics from the pottery. The early piece could be the first artifact in the exhibit. It could have special lighting or be placed against a block of color. The piece could be presented completely alone in the exhibit or, as part of a mass of pieces with this special glaze if they were available. In the language of artifacts, any of these design techniques would achieve prominence.
Interpretive exhibits order and group artifacts to portray relationships.
They look beyond individual artifacts to ask, "What do these artifacts
mean together?" A hypothetical exhibit, "Repair Not Replace," provides
an example. The subject of the exhibit would be the
19th-century practice of making individualized repairs rather than
the current system of completely replacing broken parts or objects.
The exhibit would touch on many local nineteenth-century craftsmen,
including the blacksmith. In the case of the blacksmith, artifacts
to interpret the idea of repairing, not replacing, could include a
plow with a handmade repair; an anvil, hammer, and tongs; a photograph
of a blacksmith at his forge; and a blacksmith's account book turned
to a page listing repair work. Each of these objects alone can tell
the visitor something about blacksmithing, but it is their relationship
together that helps interpret "repair
not replace." Artifacts in combination can represent trade, contrast,
ownership, manufacturing process, then and now-in short,
an almost endless variety of relationships.
The most important measure of exhibit design is whether the exhibit
works. A successful interpretive exhibit communicates to the visitor.
If exhibit design is like writing with artifacts, the exhibit planner
must master selection, prominence and relationship to become fluent
in the "language" of artifacts.
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