Foundling museums: exhibition design and the intersection of the vital materiality of foundling tokens and affective visitor experience

ABSTRACT

Exhibition design matters. It determines the way objects are presented, the stories they tell and the way visitors experience them. Using theories of vital materiality and affect as entry points into understanding visitor experience better, this paper explores and compares our affective responses as visitor-researchers to the exhibition designs of foundling tokens at the Foundling Museum in London and the Museum of the Ospedale degli Innocenti in Florence. The paper asks how sensitive and thoughtful exhibition design impacts our experience. The paper concludes that different design choices create subtly different affective flows and with them, uniquely personalised opportunities for engagement.

KEYWORDS:

• Exhibition design
• affect theory
• visitor experience
• foundling museums
• children
• post-qualitative research

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Adrian Wilson (1989, 111) rejects the word ‘abandonment’ as inappropriate given mothers thought they were giving children a better chance. John Ramsland (1992) also sees the Foundling Hospital as part of the ‘child-saving’ movement.

2 It is unclear as to whether the reference here is to the choice of murder or death by starvation through inevitable privation, or the more active practice of being ‘starved at nurse’ or ‘over-laid’ as a more purposeful death by neglect (Linebaugh 1991, 147).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jennifer Clark

Jennifer Clark is Professor of History at the University of Adelaide, Australia. Her research interests sit across memorial culture, museum studies and history including history pedagogy. Her most recent books include the co-edited The Routledge Companion to Automobile Heritage, Culture, and Preservation (2019), Teaching the Discipline of History in an Age of Standards (2018), and Teaching History for the Contemporary World: Tensions, Challenges and Classroom Experiences (2021).

Adele Nye

Dr Adele Nye is a senior lecturer at the University of New England, NSW, Australia. Her research interests focus on emergent practices in the history discipline including new materialism and affect theory. Adele's latest co-edited book, Teaching History for the Contemporary World: Tensions, Challenges and Classroom Experiences (2021), foregrounds the urgency, agility and value of historical work in precarious times. This book builds on Teaching the Discipline of History in an Age of Standards (2018) which spoke to the energy and diversity of the discipline in a period of regulation.