The Spaceship Tent Appearing in By The Wales Millennium Centre, Roald Dahl Plaza



See the No Fit State Big Top tent be erected in super-duper time!

Exhibition Development Training Day

With 13 eager listeners, Lucie Connors explored the multi-layered approach to exhibiting used by the Cardiff Story Museum.

A lot of research has been used by museums that takes into account how people absorb information

So all the senses are used to convey information, but printed information remains a prominent part because its the easiest way to convey in-depth information. It is also cheapest, which is the other side of the see-saw of what ideally you would like to do in an exhibition. The No Fit State exhibition obviously has a specific budget as part of the Heritage Lottery Fund, and is necessary a limiting factor.

The Archive Project Volunteers did a lot of brainstorming

A lot of the brainstorming involved what aspects of No Fit State Circus's 30 years of life were the most important to show:

what themes were there and, given the idea that 5 or 6 themes were a comfortable amount for people to absorb at any one time, which were the top ones to use.

We were asked to map the resources we had to utilise for the exhibition

Catrin and Lauren are the volunteers given the task of creating the exhibition, Catrin's particular interest stemming from exhibition development being a part of her course in museum studies, and Lauren's from an artistic aspect.

Key Message

Lucie introduced the idea that one aim of the exhibition should be to get a key message across to visitors, the one message you want people to take away, that they would tell other people in answer to the question of "what was it like?". For instance, for the Cardiff Story Museum it might be simply they explored Cardiff's history, or hopefully something like they found out about Cardiff's history through the stories of the people who have and do live here.

So everyone wrote a key message on a post-it and stuck it one the wall, and then everyone stuck a dote on the one that resonated most.

We’re not a normal circus

                 It is a Welsh cultural hub

                          ‘The nofitstate story’ exhibition

                                        Nofitstate tells its 30 year-old story

Run away with us!

                 Performance

                            It’s 30 years old

                                        What is nofitstate?

                                                   To learn about nofitstate and what they are about

Nofitstate circus Cardiff born & bred 30 years -   1 vote

The new circus is not the old circus                 -    2 votes

The story so far (an ongoing adventure)           -    6 votes

What is, what was (nofitstate circus)                 -  10 votes

The next idea was how to breakdown the one overall key message into bite size pieces - the themes of the exhibition. More brainstorming!

The themes were voted on again to find ones felt to be most important 

Lucie emphasised the need to put peoples learning styles to the forefront of the design of an exhibition. One of the aspects that emerged was that learning through play is not confined to children, and is a major tool used to make this modern museum fun.

With the exhibition being held at Four Elms the audience is expected to be two-fold: the local population and the circus-interested population

It was a really worthwhile, info-packed and useful day of training, that created a lot of valuable threads that can be picked up and woven into a multi-layered, thoughtful and fun exhibition at the ned of the year. Lucie did a great job teaching, and the Cardiff Story Museum http://www.cardiffstory.com
is a brilliant little museum and resource, and lets hope it gets its Phase 2 funding in the not too distant future, so that the whole multi-cultural and music and arts side of Cardiff's history can be told.


NoFit State's exhibition will take place at the end of the year at Four Elms - watch this space!