Week 2 at GsmDesign

This week I have had a the task to start researching existent natural history museums as well as general visual inspiration for GsmDesign's soon-to-be project of designing Singapore's own museum celebrating the natural world. Of course the design team want contemporary and cutting-edge visuals, and to be honest, a lot of natural history museums, in my opinion, are, visually, very out of date; lacking in interactivity and technology, and are heavily reliant upon man-made models to tell their story. I know that GsmDesign are far more progressive in their ideas than this. A lot of my research, therefore, has been separating good from the bad exhibition designs. With those which are good, I have been compiling a power-point presentation. Proudly, the Natural History Museum in London is actually the best case-study so far. They have very recently opened the Darwin Centre with a wealth of genuinely interactive and insightful resources on offer to educate, stimulate and inspire:

Not only is the content of the exhibition state-of-the art, but the building itself is extremely impressive. I rarely go to South Kensington so have failed to catch wind of, what must have been , a massive construction project:

When I was first told about this research task, Yixian said that she wanted the exhibition to be IMMERSIVE I immediately thought of Richard Hamiliton's exhibition at the ICA, On Growth and Form from 1951 which was inspired and based around the ideas of the Scottish biologist, D'arcy Wentworth Thompson's, book of the same title. The exhibition (and book) used the notion of nature as a generator of evolving forms, that the image of nature was not fixed but continually growing; it was a process not a form. Here are some quote from an essay about On Growth and Form by Isabelle Moffat, "A Horror of Abstract Thought": Postwar Britain and Hamilton's 1951 "Growth and Form" Exhibition, juxtaposed with photographs of the National History Museum's Darwin Centre:
'surreal impression of being reduced to the size of blood cells and wandering among multiplying minute organisms and cell clusters'

'shapes and forms move on screens on the ceilings or on the floor. Projected on the ceiling was the drama of crystal formation; on another screen, sea urchin's eggs divided themselves...'. The sense of dislocation and spatial confusion.'

'Going through these rooms you seem to shrink like Alice in Wonderland and the things round you seem to grow larger and larger'

I thought of this scene from the film 'Bright Star' as an immersive experience of nature



and of these art installations