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Marketing: Outreach Ideas

- Poster 

- Exhibition flyer/card to put in museums to attract the museum goer audience 

- Advertisement on the NUA Gallery page 

- Exhibition catalogue 

- Pop up ‘curios’ cabinet or active ‘stuff box’ in and around the city to advertise the exhibit 

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Exhibition Sketches and Floor Plan

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Research: Example Floor Plans

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Content: Curating the Selection

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Research: Writing an Exhibition into Existence

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Research: Exhibition Design

Above are my attempts at mock ups of potential wall texts for the exhibition, floor plans and an exhibition poster for marketing purposes, however as the curator, I am not a particularly skilled graphic designer. I have been looking into museum designers and the types of individuals and groups that you could bring in to work as designers for the exhibition and if I were to do this in reality, with a big budget, then I would most certainly try and commission the MET Studio. With offices in London, Mexico and Hong Kong the studio is a highly rated and well recognised design company who have previously worked with the National Army Museum, The Institute of Engineering and Technology, Natural History Museum, RAF Museum, Science Museum and English Heritage, among other internationally recognised brands.

The Company claims: 

Our Services

We work with government, corporate or institutional clients, architects and engineers on projects ranging from huge-scale masterplans and strategic feasibility studies, to one off exhibitions, events and installations. We work as direct, client appointed consultants or on a turnkey, design and build basis.

We can provide the following services:

Design research, review and analysis

Interpretative and experiential masterplanning

Feasibility studies and business planning

Branding & experiential marketing strategies

Environmental design encompassing museums and galleries, visitor centres, visitor attractions, Expo pavilions, corporate brand experience, installations, events and more

Interactive exhibit design

Graphic design

Interpretation & scriptwriting

Multimedia design

Project management

We create engaging and relevant experiences to help you connect with your audience.

Here are some of the projects that inspired me to choose MET Studio:

http://www.metstudio.com/work/the-book/

http://www.metstudio.com/work/historic-duxford/

http://www.metstudio.com/work/museo-interactivo-sobre-las-adicciones/

I think that they would not only be a great company to design my current exhibition but in terms of taking the exhibition further and exploring the concept of digitisation more, some of their futuristic looking plans suggest this could be something they could work on, with innovative ideas for how design may reflect concept.

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Research: Please Touch Museum

Link to Museum Website -->

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Final Proposal: Do Not Touch

My final proposal for the exhibition is to explore material culture and the disparity between the values we ascribe to the exhibited every day objects and those classified as museum artefacts. Using environmental cues to steer the audience away or towards certain behaviours the exhibition will highlight the ‘no touch’ nature of the modern day museum, tantalising the humanistic urge to engage with tactile things.

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Proposal 2: The Virtual Cabinet

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Proposal 1: Cabinets of Curiosity

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Research: Materiality Matters -  Experiencing the Displayed Object

Materiality Matters is a paper written by Sandra Dudley exploring physical things and what it means to us to experience them, particularly in a museum setting. Interested in how people respond to objects and give meaning to inanimate things, and thus how objects influence and cement human relationships and societies, Dudley expresses that we are part of a material world, living primarily through and with things. Noting the increase in academic studies surrounding material culture, particularly in the last twenty years Dudley criticises these studies, stating that the sensory ways in which we engage with material things has been largely overlooked in comparison to discussions around the meanings, values, contexts and relationships of things.

Dudley states:

“so why does this absence of a proper focus on the physicality of objects matter? In scholarship on human culture, it matters because by missing a fundamental component in what makes objects and our world what they are, we also miss how far the form and material of objects influence, how, in the real world of day to day life, we actually engage with objects and attribute meanings and values to them. In museums, I argue that it constitutes a serious missed opportunity. Of course, first impressions could be that, unlike in much material culture scholarship, in museums the object is not missed out or overlooked. After all, we think of museums as places that hold, care for an display things - museums are temples of objects, material institutions per excellence. Yet, ironically, the very rationale and modus operandi of museums act to limit the extent to which people can directly, physically, engage with the things on display. “

Dudley goes on to critic the museum as essentially visual, ‘don’t-touch’ places, where visitors are prevented from physically encountering the past. Constance Classen and David Howes state that preserving artefacts for future view has become more important than physically interacting with them in the present, and as Dudley discusses this status given to museum objects is a stark contrast to everyday life, in which objects are held and change and decay, by interacting with the material qualities of an object experiencing its changing state, these qualities themselves have meaning for us and allow us to better relate to an object, its context, its history, but when objects become museum objects this object-person engagement is lost.

It is this concept of the ‘status’ of a museum object in comparison to that from every-day life that I have begun to explore more deeply for the concept of my proposed exhibition. The focus of the project has shifted slightly from why we collect and what we collect, to perhaps why we ascribe some things more value than others. Museology in todays culture has seen a shift in its context, we now live in a world where we curate ourselves and this has perhaps led to the success of such things as the Museum of Broken Relationships and the introduction of more esoteric, contemporary museums, moving away from the elevated and elitist origins of the more traditional museum.

Dudley believes that in museums we can and should exploit this active, two-way engagement between people and things, enabling the engagement to be as full, as material, and as sensory as possible, promoting that the experiential possibilities of objects are important and that this way objects can speak to us, even if we know nothing about them at all. I am really interested with tantalising this object-person relationship through the display modes of my exhibition. By using museum cabinets and cases, and the fact that it is an exhibition in a gallery space the public will almost fall into suit and believe that they should not touch the items or engage with them because they are in this set up, however this is ironic as the items displayed are in fact individuals every day items, held and interacted with on a regular basis, or alternatively left in a stashed up box, not exactly well preserved. By leaving the doors of cabinets open, or the glass tops of cases off, I think the exhibition could almost be like an experiment in itself to see how these representations of the museum as an institution affects our tactile engagement with the objects displayed, and questions perhaps as Dudley has with her research, whether museum exhibits should, where possible lean towards a more interactive experience.

I, like Dudley am interested in individuals subjective, physical and emotional responses to material things but responses that are inhibited by so much of what museums do and are expected to do, and how this is linear to my initial motives for this exhibition, a shift away from material things where experience of the real and material is inhibited by digitisation and computer or phone screens. I wonder if museums were, as the original wunderkammens, supposed to show the public the wonders of the world through its collected things, perhaps museums today, through a more sensory experience can remind us and re-engage us with the wonders of the real, material world we live in, and the powerful meaning of these objects, bringing us back out of the cyberspace we are constantly tapped into, even for a little bit. Dudley contests that although context does matter, of course, the thing itself must not be lost, things must not disperse into meanings, museums must seek to reduce this distance between person and thing. If displays and interpretations are constructed in such a way as to facilitate a wider or deeper sensory and emotional engagement with an object, rather than simply to enable intellectual comprehension of a set of facts presented by the museum and illustrated or punctuated by the object, might visitors actually be enable to appreciate more aspects of the object and its story?

Dudley concludes her paper with the understanding that for preservation reasons not all objects can be picked up, listened to, licked and sniffed, but where this cannot be allowed museums should be thinking more closely about what happens and what might happen when visitors encounter objects on display. Dudley argues that the museums where possible, should not inhibit visitors from engaging with and responding to an object in some way beyond passively looking at it, reading a label, and moving on, uninspired and unengaged. She highlights that the museums preference for information over the material and learning over personal experience may lead to the production of displays that inhibit and even preclude emotional or personal response. She hopes for this to change, for a return to the materiality of the material, a shift of attention back to objects themselves, focusing on their apparent trivial and obvious material qualities for the possibility of directly, physically, emotionally engaging with them.