Telling Stories
A lot of museum interpretation is about telling stories. Highlighting personal stories is a good way to connect with audiences. It is much harder to remember facts or statistics than it is to remember stories and if we can personally relate to those stories we find them even more engaging. It is also helpful for visitors, especially children, to see that scientists are just people and that helps them to see that they too might be able to engage in scientific activity and maybe even make some discoveries of their own.
How Do We Look? – Exhibition Design Client: Francis Crick Institute, London. KCA London designed the Francis Crick Institute’s first public exhibition, How Do We Look? The exhibition profiled twelve Crick scientists through layered and multi-textual displays that included photos of the scientist, images of their work and audio of the scientist providing their own explanations, providing a personal and scientific context to the exhibition.
Francis Crick Institute – Open for Discovery. KCA London worked with the Francis Crick Institute to develop and design their first major public exhibition, Open for Discovery. Open for Discovery explores discoveries made by Crick scientists past and present and the impact and influence they have had for biomedical research and our lives today. These range from Francis Crick’s role in discovering the structure of DNA to contemporary Crick scientists Nobel award-winning research into personalised medicine. The exhibition combines archive news articles, objects, models, audio and graphics to tell the story of the Institute, its scientific legacy and the people who work there. The exhibition’s opening was featured on London Live and live streamed by the BBC News Facebook page Images: Copyright The Francis Crick Institute
'Royal Beasts' - Tower of London. In this exhibition KCA London untangled a multitude of story lines and primary accounts to create an emotive, powerful and accessible exhibition experience for the Tower of London’s present day audiences. We had a very tight budget but were able to deliver intuitive, simple and layered exhibits that told the stories of the animals and their keepers at the Royal Menagerie. Today, Royal Beasts is the third most visited exhibition at the Tower of London, engaging over 800,000 visitors a year. Royal Beasts is the winner of the Best Leisure Product Award 2011 (BETA).
'Move Over Einstein' - A travelling exhibition for the Institute of Physics. This was to mark the centenary of Einstein's release of his papers on special relativity (1905 - 2005) and it told the stories of a number of contemporary physicists who have built on his legacy. The content was difficult (such as the search for the Higgs-Boson particle, dark matter, and nano-bots), but we found ways to make it accessible by highlighting the personal stories of the scientists involved and by depicting them as ordinary people rather than in lab coats.