Page 91 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

MEDIA || 75

The mediatic museum

In 1972, the director of the Natural History Museum in London decided to
redesign its exhibits. It was felt that ‘the existing exhibitions were dull, old-
fashioned, irrelevant and too technical’ (Miles 1996: 184). The ‘New Exhibition
Scheme’ at the museum drew on three sources to reinvent how the exhibits
addressed visitors and how the design and production of the exhibitions were
organized. These sources were: the Isotype system invented by Otto Neurath
between the 1920s and 1945; programmed learning, an educational approach
that originates in the work of B.F. Skinner in the 1950s and is based on a notion
of interaction as reinforcement (see behaviourism); and Frank Oppenheimer’s
Exploratorium in San Francisco (established in 1969). The New Exhibition
Scheme began in 1975, introducing professional designers and exhibit
researchers into the museum. They were to work in consultation with museum
experts – curators, scientists and educators – to produce specifications for
the exhibition designs, which would then be built by artists and technicians.
The scheme resulted in several innovative and notable exhibitions – Human
Biology (1977) Introducing Ecology (1978) and Dinosaurs and Their Living
Relatives (1979) (Stearn 1998: 371). However, by 1991 the team was disbanded
and the museum began to contract out their exhibition design to independent
companies. Roger Miles, who implemented the scheme at the museum, said in
1996: ‘This was a retreat from the high ground of our original hopes and
aspirations, in the face of the realities of working in the museum’ (Miles 1996:
185–9).
The case of the Natural History Museum in London, as recounted by Miles,
connects late twentieth-century museum practice with specific developments in
education theory and exhibit design between the 1920s and the late 1960s. All
of the three sources that inspired the New Exhibition Scheme were concerned
with the processes of education, and two of them, Neurath’s Isotype system,
and Oppenheimer’s Exploratorium, grew out of socialist political engagement.
Both Neurath and Oppenheimer came to museums from an educational back-
ground, and both came to believe that the museum was the best means to
inform and educate a mass audience. Both saw museum education as poten-
tially liberating, empowering people with little social power by making argu-
ments and facts accessible to them, and enabling them to better understand a
complex natural and social world. Both believed that education should be par-
ticipatory and saw the museum visitor as an active learner, capable of grappling
with difficult concepts.
In this section we will consider the work of Otto Neurath. Neurath was a
member of the Vienna circle of philosophers, and his Isotype system
(International System of Typological and Pictorial Education) was a visual