How do we tell our stories from the past to children in a way that engages them, and inspires them to learn?
What is this?
The Making History Fun Again Toolkit is a collection of co-creative activities that can help museum space designers design historical exhibitions that allow children to engage with historic material. This toolkit has been created within the beliefs of participatory design.
Who is this for?
This kit is made for museums looking to transform their exhibition into fun, engaging and inspiring experiences for children. It is to be used by the teams who are in charge of designing the exhibitions, the artefacts it might show, the story it might tell, and the layout it has. The kit will allow you to work together with your target audience, the children, and their parents. The ultimate goal in the activity plans provided by this kit are to enable museums to develop insights for exhibition designers allowing them to build experiences that are truly engaging and inspire children.
What is included?
Included in the kit are instructions with visual explanations, example materials and example prompts. These example materials are created for a specific historical context; the prehistoric hunter-gatherer period. These materials are context specific, because they are meant to immerse the participants into the specific historic context, to allow them to come up with creative ideas about how to show it. Your museum will likely aim to tell a different story than the example that is taken here. Therefore you will have to tweak the material to fit the story your exhibition is trying to tell.
Some Recommendations
We recommend doing the activities with small groups of 4 to 10 children. Doing the activities with more groups will generate more insights, but there is already value in doing it once.
The instructions in this workshop are targeted at small groups of children who are 7 to 12 years old.
Make sure the children involved in the workshop activities have some understanding of the historical context. If you have an existing exhibition that you are improving, let the children go through this exhibition. Other options are to teach a class about the subject before the workshop, or let the children watch a documentary about the subject. You want the children to understand what the subject is about to get their best input.
Introduce yourself and the project you are working on. Be honest and open about yourself, your job, why you are here, and what the children will do today. This helps children feel open to share their thought and opinions more easily, and makes them engaged in the workshop when they know that there are real life consequences.
Guide
Child
Teacher
Parents/Caretakers
Exhibition designers can even take into consideration the different people that a child might interact with in a museum, or when engaging with history in general.
Parents/caretakers will be with the children during their museum visit. They might function as someone who explains elements, guides the children.
Guides are present in some museum to give visitors more information and make people feel welcome. They might interact with kids directly, or talk to them through their parents.
Teachers might also play a role in the child’s experience of a museum, when schools visit museums as groups.
Thinking about museums, from various perspectives
Doing service design means looking at the service from a broader perspective before diving in to the small details of it. It is useful to investigate the journey of families going to exhibitions, from doorstep to museum to doorstep. What might happen here, and how could a museum play into events that might come up?
We can then take a more specific look at the various touch points children have inside the museum. What objects, spaces and people do they run in to? What kinds of interactions might happen here. Museum elements might be targeted at the different senses of children. We noticed that any element in a museum will have one of the following goals:
immersion elements such as wallpaper, built structures, sounds or lights can portray an environment, making the children feel more like they are ‘inside’ history.
Play things that can be touched, picked up and played with allow children to engage with material.
Exhibition artifacts placed behind glass directly show children snippets from the past.
Promote curiosity elements of surprise can tease the children to explore the space and find new things.
Get in Touch!
Tom van Wijland | Anjuli Acharya | Siqi Zhang
This project was created as a part of a project in Umeå Institute of Design, Sweden for a master’s project in Communication Design for Co-creation.
Read more about our project on Medium!
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