Museums and a Sense of Space

I have had to write this blog post several times. At one point it was a 12 page essay that frankly nobody should ever have to read. So today I will try and keep it short and sweet. The problem is that for me, a sense of space is an intuitive idea, one that is easier to feel than it is to understand. So you must forgive me if everything that comes next is total nonsense.

What is a Sense of Space?

When visiting a museum I always ask the question, would this topic be better taught with a documentary or a book? Sadly, for many the real answer is perhaps a yes. So instead we need to ask the question: What is the advantage of this being a museum? 

For me then the inherent advantage is that a museum is located is a place that you must go to (digital collections and virtual museums are a discussion for another time). It is a good idea then to use the experience of being in a physical space to your advantage. This is what a refer to as a sense of space, a leveraging of the physical surroundings.

How to Build a Sense of Space

This sense of space can mean many different things to many different museums. For a science centre it can be about having bright colourful artwork, high tech displays and the booming sound of science experiments. For a historical collection it could be that it is set in an ancient castle where the rooms are set up as they would have been at the time.

Some places come with an inherent sense of space, such as the Intrepid Museum being contained within an old Aircraft Carrier. Others have to build it through careful use of displays, scenery, and even a little lighting and sound design such as my top rated museum of Berlin, Samurai Museum Berlin.

Image of the Outside of the Intrepid Museum (Image from the Intrepid Museum)

Whatever you do it comes down to an idea of making sure that when the person is in the space physically, they are also there mentally. It’s about making it more than just a collection but a whole experience surrounding that.

Not Just Immersion

An experience being ‘Immersive’ is one of those terms being bandied about a lot at the moment to the point where it doesn’t really mean anything anymore. There is also a potential accusation that what I'm advocating for is the dressing up of a museum to be a theme park. Something that focuses on style over substance. 

This is categorically not what I'm recommending, but that’s not to say that we can’t learn and take things from theme parks. Consider for example the difference that could be made (especially for child audiences) by having museum staff in some basic costuming that makes them look like adventurers or scientists. How far even a small amount of scenery can really enhance the feeling of a space. Or just how items can be displayed in a cabinet that’s a bit more interesting than another plain white background.

This is something that display boards, audio guides, tours, lightning, and every single other part of the design of the space could be used to help with. It shouldn’t be the sole goal of an exhibit but with some mindful consideration it can really help bring a space to life.

Image from the British Library’s Fantasy: Realms of Imagination Exhibit that uses moody lighting and some Theatre style scenery to help build a sense of space (Image from the Urban Explorer)

A Feeling

As mentioned I have tried to pour out the words to describe exactly what I mean but I have failed time and time again. It’s one of those ‘I know it when I see it’ type things and hard to discuss in the abstract. This is highly annoying for perhaps one of my most foundational tenets of museum design, but I hope that in this brief consideration that it has given you some idea. I am always open to discussing it further especially in relation to something specific.

A Tale of Two Polish LEGO Museums

I am, of course, a big lover of museums but I'm also a big fan of the building brick toy LEGO. So when I saw that Krakow contained not one, but two different museums about LEGO I was pretty excited.

However, my experiences at the two could hardly have been different and one of them was a great delight while the other was only mildly interesting. And I think the reasons why exposed a larger problem with museums generally but also Polish museums specifically.

The two museums were The World of Little Technicians and Brick and Figs both of which boasted large collections of LEGO sets that were fully built and set in display cases along with labels telling you what they were, how many pieces, and the year they were released.

They both seem to spring from a genuine love for the product and both seem to offer play areas for kids and all the usual museum trappings. On the face of it they are seemingly very similar places (albeit with Brick and Figs clearly having a bit more money behind it) but the experiences couldn’t have been more different

Image of the LEGO Technic Collection (Image from Swiat Malych Technikow)

The ‘Stuff’ Problem

I have often derided the idea of a ‘Stuff’ Museum. That is to say a place where lots of stuff is put on display and whilst it might be cool stuff there’s not much interest or context to it.

By and large what the actual items you have on display are rarely all that interesting in and of themselves. Outside of famous paintings, or obviously important things like spaceships the interest in anything a museum shows has to be in the story that is told about it. Some hypothetical document in a display case could be the missive that changed the course of a medieval war, or it might just be a request for more toilet paper to be ordered for the castle. If you don’t tell me then I don’t know.

This was endemic in the Polish museums that I visited. There was a lot of stuff but because there was very little information about that stuff I couldn’t exactly be all that interested.

The LEGO museums however have a bit of a leg up here. A LEGO set is probably, to the average person, more inherently interesting than an old roof tile. And it being in a dedicated museum is an interesting novelty which sparks a little more interest. However ultimately both of these museums were ‘Stuff Museums of the highest order’

Image of the Bricks and Figs Collection (Image from Bricks and Figs)

The collections, whilst both very expensive and impressive, were presented in display cases largely without comment. The World of Little Technicians had an advantage as it focused exclusively on LEGO Technic branded sets and displayed almost every single released set in broadly chronological order. The Bricks and Figs collection on the other hand was somewhat more haphazard, grouping similar sets or collections of minifigures from the same brands together but with no clear overall structure.

This is all well and good, great for a little browse. But then that’s all it’s good for. A quick 10-15 minutes wandering around looking at particularly interesting sets and trying to find sets that I own or did own as a kid.

The Personal Touch

It is here that the experience between the two differs wildly. At Bricks and Figs you were given nothing but the cabinets to wander around. There were QR codes on the wall and I had initially hoped this would be some kind of audio guide but all they seemed to lead to was a laggy website that allowed you to more closely examine the minifigs getting individual details on its name, price, and year of release.

At The World of Little Technicians however I got a tour from the owner Piotr Miedziński. He guided me through the collection, both his personal experience in his first sets as a child, the machines the sets are based on, and the progression of LEGO design over the years. Mixed in with some good humor his genuine love and passion for the LEGO shone through and I was with him for a good hour. We both would have happily continued for much longer had his (I assume) wife not come down several times to remind him he had other people waiting for a tour, and somebody else who was coming to pick up a set from their shop.

Pitor doing the grand opening of the museum (Image from Swiat Malych Technikow)

That tour transformed what could have been a short, mildly interesting, browse into one of the best experiences of my trip where I genuinely learnt more than I did in almost any other museum.

This experience reminds me of visiting Tallinn as a teenager and going to a tiny museum about coins (some googling suggests that it no longer exists) that consisted of just a single room with various drawers containing a variety of coins. The very definition of a ‘Stuff Museum’ except that the person on the front desk launched into various stories about some of the coins, what they were, what they represented and crucially why they were important enough to display in a museum.

You Can’t Give Everyone a Tour

The two LEGO museums I think sit at two points of a spectrum. A personal tour isn’t sustainable except for the smallest of museums with only a small footfall whereas the total lack of any kind of guidance leads to a short and unfulfilling experience.

The trick then is finding a balance between the two. There are lots of options from having actually useful labels and display boards, audio guides, or even dedicated tour guides. Tour guides as I discussed briefly in my blog about Auschwitz can be a double edged sword. Display Boards and Audio guides are also not free to produce and it can be a struggle to cover all of the items that you may want to display.

My solution to this is to largely bin the idea of a ‘Stuff Museum’ they certainly have their place and I can understand the desire to show off a vast and interesting collection but I think where a museum really shines is when the audience can understand what it is they are seeing which then allows them to appreciate it. And if you’ve got a lot of stuff like this, then you need somebody like Pitor to get you excited about it.