location: Jing’an Sculpture Park, Shanghai
Architecture
The museum is located in the sculpture park in the Jingan district. One side of the street is super modern business buildings while another side is a renovated historical block. The contrast along with the vast park-like area in front of the museum is quite fascinating.
The museum building is large and mostly white, with grid decoration, which has a little bit of scientific sense and is impressive.
On the top of the building, there seems to be a viewing platform, but the entrance is blocked for some reason. I think it’ll be great if visitors can access the platform.
Museum experience
The ticket to the natural history museum is mostly in a digital form connected to the Chinese id card, and the price is very low, encouraging us to visit more. The staff at the ticket center was a little bit unfriendly, however, and visitors were not allowed to get a physical ticket unless they didn’t have an id card.
Interaction
The way of showing the natural phenomenon and scientific facts varies in this museum. The animals are shown by models and specimens, and some of their survival skills are presented by different-sized dioramas. Some of the models and dioramas are dynamic, which is attractive to visitors and lively. However, one annoying thing is that some sound effects that imitate the roaring of the dinosaurs are just so loud that they can be distracting.
There are many interactive installations in the museum. One frequently-seen form is the small touchable screens near the exhibits. The information on the screens can be a good supplement for the exhibits. For example, for a bone fossil, the screen can show what the animal truly looks like with flesh and fur. And the screen can contain multilayer information.
Little screens mostly attract children’s attention, and it is great that some interactive screens are educational with rich information. However, some of the screens are not installed at an appropriate height for children. Some are just too high for a child (before primary school) to see clearly. As the day we took the field trip was Wednesday, most of the child visitors are really young, haven’t entered primary school. This problem was shown obviously. From my perspective, the design of these screens can be a difficult problem since the height of different-aged children varies. And I’m still thinking about it now, about how should the museum design become more friendly to children.
One of my favorite interactive media is a game that can compare one person’s weight and height to one kind of animal. This is a simple but funny game, showing the weight and height of the animal in an intuitive way. Adults and children can both enjoy the game. Also, the design of the interface is cute.
There are other interactive installations for visitors to listen to different sounds or audio, but some of them didn’t work. And that was actually a problem I found in the museum – there were many installations, a large number of them were broken, which may cause unpleasant experiences and confusion for visitors.
Facilities
We found one confusing part throughout the whole tour in the Natural History Museum. That is the confusing direction signs all around the visit route. For some parts of the museum like the one-way exhibition of animal samples, there is a clear visiting route that could be shown by signal boards. But there are also halls with exhibitions on the wall all around, without a specific order, which, in my opinion, don’t necessarily need to have a visiting indicator. However, there are many signals in different directions. These signals may be some careless mistakes but caused real confusion to visitors who pay attention to them.
Diorama
During this trip, we took a serious look at the dioramas in the natural history museum. There are different sized dioramas, some are still, some are movable. The one that attracted me most is the diorama showing the hunting process of spiders. A little mechanism is embedded in the diorama to make the models movable, making the whole scene interesting to watch. So I think it is a good way to explain the animals’ survival strategy through dioramas.
Story-telling
Generally speaking, there are several common ways that the museum uses to show the phenomenon or tell the story. Samples for showing different species directly; screening for uncommon natural phenomena and universe-related topics; fossils for historical species and the evolution on earth; also dioramas for some more lively scenes.
There are also special designs for a more immersive experience, like 4D movies. My favorite part of the natural history museum is the touchable horns. Several horns of different animals, like rhinos, are displayed in front of a wall of horns. There is a caption stuck on the board, encouraging visitors to touch the horns and get a deeper sense of them. This is kind of rare in the whole museum that visitors get a chance to experience the exhibits using different senses other than eyes.
And here are some of the good designs I found in the museum in showing exhibits.
Thanks for reading