Show time | The evolution of exhibition design

In 2004, Suzanne MacLeod, then a lecturer and now professor in museum studies at the University of Leicester, hosted Reshaping Museum Space, a conference that was a timely and serious exploration of the skillsets of interpretive exhibition designers. MacLeod recognised the importance of bringing together a generation of curators, educators and scholars of museums with those leading this still-emerging and expanding field.

It was a remarkable event, revealing the depth of imagination that was changing museology in the sector. It is recorded in Reshaping Museum Space, a 2005 publication that brings together the conference papers.

A second design-focused conference, Narrative Space, followed in 2010 along with a publication, Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions (2012). The University of Leicester gave us a platform to articulate our ideas, taking our evolving cross-disciplinary practice seriously as co-producers of museums.

Creative drive

MacLeod has continued to research and champion this field in publications and conferences, as well as hosting masterclasses and lectures with leading designers, both in Leicester and overseas. For more than 20 years now, museum studies students have been taught the principles of exhibition-making – the results are evident already in a more skilled generation of curators.

The next step in Leicester’s museum-making research is to set up an archive of museum design. It will begin as a pilot with the output of four practices – Event Communications (now Event), Land Design Studio, Haley Sharpe Design (HSD) and Metaphor. This body of work spans the 1970s to the 1990s, taking in the huge impact of the National Lottery Heritage Fund, which was established in 1994 and is one of the last bastions of public sector patronage and practice.

It is also timely as most of the practice founders – Celestine Phelan (Event), Bill Haley (HSD), Rachel Morris and myself (both Metaphor) – have stepped away. Peter Higgins and Shirley Walker (Land Design Studio) are still working. Steve Simons (Event) sadly died in 2019.

The archive also bookends a period in Leicester’s museum studies department. This starts with the scholarship of Eilean Hooper-Greenhill and Gaynor Kavanagh in opening up content, interpretation and visitor engagement, and in particular teaching and inspiring the Social History Curators’ Group in the 1980s.

The turmoil of the years when Margaret Thatcher was prime minister influenced a generation of students who became museum leaders, such as Mark O’Neill, David Fleming and Iain Watson. Future museum directors were influenced by what was happening in Leicester. Lots of them became our clients.

Telling tales of life

People’s experiences needed storytelling and we explored how their objects could speak for them. Since then, Richard Sandell, MacLeod’s colleague at Leicester, has widened the field to address questions of inclusion related to LGBTQI+ communities, people with disabilities and other groups, as well as looking at identity, decolonisation, human rights and co-creation. These issues are being embraced by today’s museum leaders.

In the most recent phase at Leicester, MacLeod and Sandell are undertaking collaborative research with cultural partners in the Research Centre for Museums and Galleries, which was established in 1999. It is easy to take the earlier ground-breaking thinking for granted now, but it is central to the work of access consultants, audience evaluators and others who didn’t exist when we began.

The four practices forming the pilot study have some funding to support it. Archivist and recent PhD graduate Peter Lester is going through what are disparate archives. Projects range from masterplanning to designing whole museums, from developing permanent galleries, temporary exhibitions and travelling exhibitions to creating expo pavilions, visitor centres, interpretive landscapes and cultural quarters at every scale. These have included national, regional and local projects.

In Scotland, Event has completed a suite of projects for Glasgow Life – Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Riverside Museum and most recently the Burrell Collection. And Metaphor has worked across National Museums Scotland’s sites.

Our work has not just been in the UK. Some of HSD’s best projects are in Canada, the US and Hong Kong. Event has worked in Denmark, Oman and Poland. Land Design Studio has developed a range of immersive expo pavilions, while Metaphor has done masterplanning around the world, including in the Middle East.

None of us imagined that our work would become a resource, but the variety and invention reflects the different practices. There are analogue artefacts, watercolours, models, renders, films, presentations and brochures. The archive also embraces complex collaborations with major graphic and interactive designers, film-makers and artists. Think of the ground-breaking PlayZone interactives that were created by Land Design Studio at the Millennium Dome in 2000.

Back to the future

The archive will be a fantastic resource for designers, curators and students. And it will be the students who, through projects, will help extend it to include the next generation of interpretive designers.

At the heart of the archive is one common thread shared by all the practices, the stage reports produced for the lottery funding process. These documents play back the intentions of the project to the institution, the funders and trustees.

The same process is followed broadly in overseas work. The reports are the place where gallery framework documents and design workshops are transformed into a picture of a complete visitor experience.

With roughly 1,500 projects, however, the next challenge will be how to make the archive accessible. We will devise ways to access them by museum type (national, regional or local); subject (fashion, design, social history, war, popular culture and so on); range (from the British Galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum to the Titanic Experience in Belfast); and by project, since often there are bids for a project or temporary exhibition in the same space.

Another element binding the archive together will be podcasts and to-camera interviews with the founders of the interpretive exhibition design companies.

None of us had the same qualifications. In the early days, there was no MA in narrative environments. Simons from Event had worked for Mischa Black at the Design Research Unit, an architectural, graphic design and interior design firm with a connection to the 1951 Festival of Britain.

Event’s Phelan was a television script writer, while Morris at Metaphor was also a novelist. Higgins and Walker at Land Design Studio had worked with Gary Withers, the founder of the immersive design company Imagination. Higgins had also been a set designer at the BBC. I was an architect, teacher and then editor of Architects’ Journal.

We each brought the experiences needed to become cross-disciplinary practices. We were all driven by convictions, such as a belief that the audience are the actors, that museums could be immersive and movies in space, that the exhibition itself should be a work of art, that the designer is an auteur, and the museum experience should weave personal stories and artefacts.

In 2004, Mark O’Neil from Glasgow Museums closed the Leicester conference with a paean to a phantom star guest, the Polish-American architect Daniel Libeskind. This was shorthand for the impact that big-name architects could have on reshaping museum spaces. We knew we were exploring a dissonance between the container and the content.

How were our narratives to be compatible with their expressive architecture, branded with their signature? We could not know then that Glasgow Life would appoint the architect Zaha Hadid to design the Riverside Museum, nor that the “Bilbao effect” (sparked by Frank Gehry’s design of the Guggenheim Bilbao, which opened in 1997) would become a more complex equation.

Needless to say, our four practices have worked with signature architects such as Hadid, Libeskind, Gehry, Foster and SnØhetta. This is another important research resource, as is the flip side – working with conservation architects on historic buildings.

Finally, do not forget the unprepossessing lo-fi buildings that sometimes concealed remarkable experiences that we made within.

Our successors can decide what they take from the archive of museum design as they face new and more daunting challenges than the ones that we had to overcome.

Stephen Greenberg is the founder of Metaphor