I really enjoyed their permanent exhibit Medicine Man, featuring the collections of their founder, pharmeceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome. During his lifetime (1853-1936) he made a huge collection of art and artifacts relating to health.
The objects themselves were fun (Florence Nightingale's mocassins!) but they also used some interesting display ideas. Labeling for the artifacts themselves was minimal: a number, object name, materials, date, accession number; some cases didn't even have that much. To find out more, you had to explore...
Text labels were 'hidden' in cupboard like this in the adjoining walls (note the little white knob on the right-hand door). Inside there was a thematic label (left) and detailed artifact labels (right), with the basic object information (as above) augmented by more background information on the specific object (for instance, the Florence Nightingale, a pioneering nurse, had worn those mocassins while working at Scutari during the Crimean war.) This way, the visitor could experience the artifacts with whatever level of info they wanted.
The left hand drawer had three push-button recordings of various people talking about what the objects in the case meant to them. In the case of the amulets, there was an anthropologist talking about the meaning of amulets in various cultures; a prominent Islamic author talking about how amulets had been a part of her everyday experience growing up and how strange it was to think of them in a museum context; and a well known British author talking about how he put more faith in amulets than in modern medicine. I could imagine lots of applications for the idea of using different voices to discuss the same objects in our galleries. These were pretty low-tech interactives, but they worked really nicely, much better than the more ambitious 'speaking chairs' that they had in another gallery that were already on the fritz only 2 months after opening.
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