Museums and silent objects: Designing effective exhibitions

摘要

This is an excellent, thought-provoking work that focuses on those less conspicuous museum exhibits many visitors walk past, barely noticing their presence - even though these exhibited objects might have been intended as an important part of an exhibition. Curators and museum visitors will be familiar with this phenomenon. Monti and Keene describe these inconspicuous exhibits as 'silent objects' - an apt term. These 'silent objects' are often overshadowed or overwhelmed by more conspicuous adjacent objects. These other objects dominate the visitor's experience so much that visitors leave the exhibition without the enriching discoveries revealed from these 'silent objects'.