THE SECRET LIFE OF THE HOME
INTERACTIVE EXHIBITS
I started by making an exhibit explaining how electric motors
worked. This was followed by a hand-powered fridge, a hand- powered automatic washing
machine (with the front of the drum replaced by perspex to show what happens inside), and
finally a hand-cranked generator - which could make a fuse glow hot and then blow.
All these exhibits seemed dreadfully conventional and old fashioned, particularly because
they were all behind glass, with only the relevant handles etc poking through. (I had
decided to put them behind glass partly to be in keeping with the rest of the gallery, and
partly because I felt that many `open' exhibits I'd seen had become so dominated by their
protective perspex casings that the exhibit itself got rather lost.) I tried to cheer my
exhibits up by adding decorative
signs - motorised spinning sign for the motors, a washing line for the washing machine
and a frozen sign, with letters formed from copper pipe connected to a fridge unit so ice
formed on them, for the fridge.
|
CUT IN HALF TOILET
This shows how the siphon works, but the real entertainment is watching the turd go round
the bend. Will Jackson built this with a very ingenious mechanism to catch the turd, and
then lift it to drop itin the bowl again.
|
|
|
|
 |
|
PASSIVE INFRARED MOVEMENT SENSOR
An attempt to explain how these clever sensors work.
 |
|
LOUDSPEAKER
Turn the handle and the bike dynamo makes the cut in half speaker cone move visibly up and
down. If you turn it fast, you stop seeing the movement but hear the rising pitch.
 |
|
|
|
GENERATOR
This started as a much more complicated exhibit but Ifound that visitors really just
enjoyed turning handles. You now just plug in any one of the appliances and turn the
handle to make it work. (It's much harder to turn to make the fire element glow than to
turn the fan.
 |
|
TELEVISION SCANNING
You can move the magnet close to the neck of the tube to distort the picture, and move the
scanning coil away from the neck to collapse the picture into the red, green and blue
spots.
|
| I was very unconfident
about the exhibits at first, so I brought the prototypes to the museum for a few days.
Once they were set up, it was a wonderful feeling removing the screens and seeing visitors
swarm all round them. Trials are obviously a good idea if only for the morale of the
person building them. The old fashioned appearance of the exhibits didn't seem to worry
the public and most people spent several minutes playing with each one. Several people
said how much they liked the idea of exhibits about ordinary, domestic things they use
every day. It made me realise that though once very common, exhibits like this had largely
disappeared from the museum. |
More
Secret Life of the Home
An Initiation to museum design
|
