One of the major aims of our exhibition was to invite audience participation: both in a more physical sense with the sandbox, letting audiences literally uncover the artefacts left behind, as well as the more mental case of trying to figure out what happened between the Codans and the Arbors. Burke and Tattersdill describe museums as inviting viewers to “deploy their own imaginative processes, building a wider world on the basis of both the material on display and their prior experience with museums and fiction.” (2022:314), which is exactly what we wanted to achieve, and to do so we needed to figure out what needed to be withheld for them — elements of the story that our group would know, but ones the audience would have to figure out — essentially giving them a puzzle that needed to be solved. 

This was primarily done through the didactics created this week, describing what the museum speculated and theorised as to what happened, refraining from outright stating that the Codans and Arbors went to war over chemical engineering of the Arbors. The main goal was to, as Burke and Tattersdill describe, create an experience for the audience — even if not 100% accurate to the actual story — based on the artefacts recovered at the time. Deciding what to show or not show, especially in the didactics, which bore the brunt of explaining the artefacts to the audience, was the major challenge this week in the construction of our museum’s narrative, and one that I hope we’ve put enough thought and planning into where it elevates the final experience on exhibition day.

Burke, V & Tattersdill, W 2022, ‘Science Fiction Worldbuilding in Museum Displays of Extinct Life’, Configurations, vol. 30, no. 3, pp. 313–340.