Visiting the Museum

I visited the Queensland Maritime Museum today, in order to assess the design space and gain further inspirations for my design ideas.

As I expected there were many models of ships, and various artefacts on display, accompanied by vast amounts of text. There were a few "interactive" displays as well, such as the map of Australia, showing naval explorers' journeys with lights, activated by various buttons. Another was the "helmsman" display, allowing visitors to "turn" the ship port or starboard.

However, apart from the voice-over from the map of Australia display, there were virtually no aural displays. From my own experiences visiting other museums, I have noticed that the most successful/interesting ones have quite a few displays that utilise sound (whether it be speaking, sound effects or music) to better engage people with the museum experience. Most employ the use of a small booth to contain the display, so as not to interfere with the sound-scape of the rest of the museum. I plan to investigate designs that incorporate this technology.

Another section the caught my eye was the "Women at Sea" display. While it is currently only copious amounts of writing on the walls (and one very startling manikin), the stories themselves proved quite interesting. It is a shame that, at best, most people would only skim over a few of the texts and move on to look at something else more visually entertaining. From my experience the some of the more interesting displays tell the stories of people lives, from what their perspective might have been. I would like to see if I could use the content of this display for one of my interactive designs.

As I kept walking around, I took note of the different categories of displays. Boat designs, journals, naval jobs, various technologies, etc. Due to the lack of any sound, as I mentioned above, I thought about a category that appeared to have been neglected, music. My idea is mainly based around the time people first started immigrating to Australia. For such long journeys, some of the passengers and/or crew may have brought small instruments aboard to entertain themselves. Even those without instruments may have just sung songs of the time, or even sea shanties, etc. Now, I realise that it may not be the most prominent or obvious thing to include in a maritime museum, but with a little more research, I sure I can find enough content to warrant at least one display design.

I will research on each of my ideas further in order to better develop my interactive designs.