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15. Exhibition Design at Deaf Museums

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Intro Chapter 15

Intro Chapter 15

Mainstream Museums have to be accessible to Deaf visitors and to other visitors with disabilities. Deaf Museums have to   take the needs of hearing visitors into account, as well as the needs of visitors with disabilities.

Most Deaf Museums do not have the resources for grand, immersive displays. Many don't even have the means to display their photos, books and objects in a safe way, protected from age, climate, visitors, and other hazards. Possibly unique objects or books may be at risk of being stolen or damaged. In this chapter, you can see examples of the displays used in Deaf Museums.

15.1. Exhibition Displays at Deaf Museums

15.1. Exhibition Displays at Deaf Museums

The Deaf Museums in Europe vary widely in the design of their displays - mostly depending on the budget that they have available.

The temporary exhibition in Paris, The Silent History of the Deaf (Histoire_silencieuse_des_Sourds, 2019) used state-of-the-art and very large display panels. 

Norsk Døvemuseum

 The Norwegian Museum of the Deaf uses professional and often interactive displays for its exhibits. 

Utstillinger Norsk DøvemuseumUtstillinger Norsk Døvemuseum2

Museum of Deaf Education

The Museum of Deaf Education in the Netherlands (now closed) was located in the chapel of the old school for the Deaf, two large spaces. Special 'pods' were used to divide the space. In each pod, a classroom was reconstructed from a different time period.

MuseumofDeafEducation1

Musée d'Histoire et de Culture des Sourds

The Musée d'Histoire et de Culture des Sourds on the other hand, uses more basic (and probably less expensive) display cases and panels.

Deaf Museum and Archive, UK

The Deaf Musseum and Archive in the UK also uses basic display options, too. 

15.2. Immersive Experiences?

15.2. Immersive Experiences?

Visitors who recognize the photos, videos and objects in a Deaf Museum, will relive their past experiences, even without state-of-the-art display techniques. For them, the display cases or panels are far less important than the memories that are triggered by the exhibits. Or by the tour guide who tells the stories. 

Peter Jackson at the Deaf Heritage Centre, UK

Visitors who are new to the Deaf world, but also younger visitors and children may expect the kind of displays and the interactivity that mainstream Museums offer.  The importance of display techniques then also - or mostly? -  depends on the target audience of a Deaf Museum: who are the persons that the Museum wants to welcome as visitors? More about this in the next chapter. 

Hands Up, Rom X, Dialogue in Silence (Dialog im Stillen)

The Hands Up exhibition in Vienna uses immersion techniques to let hearing visitors experience - if only for 45 minutes - what it is like to be deaf and to communicate in sign language. The visitors wear headphones and are not allowed to talk. Rom X at the Deaf Museum in Norway and Dialogue in Silence (Hamburg) use similar immersion techniques. Of course, the experiences for Deaf visitors are very different: finally, an exhibition where everyone speaks sign language!

handsup1

Source: handsup.wien/dialoghaus 03

source: https://hamburgtourist.info/attraktionen-in-hamburg/dialoghaus-hamburg.html

15.3 Accessibility and Deaf Museums

15.3 Accessibility and Deaf Museums

 Deaf Museums have to be accessible to people with disabilities, like all Museums. Deaf Museums have two special groups to take into account: non-signers, and Deafblind persons.

Non-signers

Visitors, deaf or hearing, who do not know the national sign language. Of course, they will have to feel welcome, too. 
Fortunately, there is an easy solution: QR codes. With a mobile phone, visitors can scan a QR code next to an exhibit. The QR code will send the visitor to a webpage with information in his or her preferred language. This can be the national sign language, a foreign sign language or International sign. But it can also be a spoken text in the national language or for instance spoken English. The spoken texts can be generated by a computer (text to speech conversion), or the audio can be a recording of an actual speaker. 
There are computer programs that can convert written text to a signing avatar, but this is time consuming and still needs a lot of human help. So it may be easier to film a real live signer. 

Videos in sign language will need subtitles, closed captions and/or a voice-over, for non-signers. On websites, it is best to add text transcripts also for Deafblind visitors..

Deafblind visitors

 At the Norwegian Deaf Museum, we found two good examples of access to exhibits for Deafblind visitors. Other Museums may have more or better examples, but we did not ask about this in our Survey. 

Example 1: text on drums that can be turned round and round. When the drum is turned, text can be higher or lower, adapted to the height of the visitor. But as you can see on the photo below, the text drum also included text in Braille. 
  

Norsk Døvemuseum5

Source: https://www.facebook.com/NorskDovemuseum

 Example 2 is a photo that has been converted into a 3D model, so that blind and Deafblind people can 'see' the image with their fingers. 

 Ragnhild Kåta2Ragnhild Kåta3

Source: https://www.facebook.com/NorskDovemuseum

The photo is of Ragnhild Kåta. Raghnhild was born in Valdres in 1873. When she was three years old she got Scarlagens fever and lost her hearing, sight and sense of taste and smell. When Ragnhild was 15 years old, she was allowed to attend the deaf school in Hamar. Here Ragnhild learned to read, write and speak. She became a master of understanding what others were saying by placing her fingers on their lips while they were talking. Ragnhild had lovely handwriting and liked writing letters. 

 Further Reading:

backtotop

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Quotes:

  • "Deaf mute, deaf and dumb, hearing impaired – the choices are many and not without consequences. Words have many meanings, they convey attitudes and prejudices and may hurt, even when used in a well-intended context."
    Hanna Mellemsether, in:  Re-presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, 2013
  • "The most significant function of museums is as centres for cultural democracy, where children and adults learn through practical experience that we all have cultural rights. Having the opportunity to create, and to give to others, may be one of our greatest sources of fulfilment. Culture is everywhere and is created by everyone."
    Source: A manifesto for museum learning and engagement
  • "Museums can increase our sense of wellbeing, help us feel proud of where we have come from, and inspire, challenge and stimulate us."
    Source: Museums Change Lives
  • "Access to and participation in culture is a basic human right. Everyone has a right to representation and agency in museums, and communities should have the power to decide how they engage."
    Source: A manifesto for museum learning and engagement
  • “If you do not know where you come from, then you don't know where you are, and if you don't know where you are, then you don't know where you're going. And if you don't know where you're going, you're probably going wrong.”
    Terry Pratchett, I Shall Wear Midnight
  • "Museums can increase our sense of wellbeing, help us feel proud of where we have come from, and inspire, challenge and stimulate us."
    Source: https://www.museumsassociation.org/campaigns/museums-change-lives/

  • the past can hurt

    From: Walt Disney, The Lion King

  • "An important matter for any minority group is that written documents in public archives are often drawn up by the majority group and do not always reflect a minority as it sees itself. Thus, preserving sign language narration is of the utmost importance and a challenge to those working in the field of Deaf history."
    In: TIINA NAUKKARINEN, Finnish Museum of the Deaf: Presenting the Life of Carl Oscar Malm (1826–1863)
  • "The Deaf community is international. What binds Deaf people, despite their different national sign languages, is their shared visual communication, history, cultural activities, and the need for a Deaf “space” where people come together."

    from: The Cultural Model of Deafness
  • "Histories have for too long emphasized the controversies over communication methods and the accomplishments of hearing people in the education of deaf students, with inadequate attention paid to those deaf individuals who created communication bridges and distinguished themselves as change agents in their respective field of endeavour."
    from: Harry G. Lang, Bonny Meath-Lang: Deaf Persons in the Arts and Sciences, 1995
  • "Nina Simon has described true inclusion in a museum context as occurring when museums value the diversity in their audience, value those individuals’ potential and contributions, when they actively link those diverse people across differences, and when the organisation reaches out with generosity and curiosity at the core.
    On a practical level this sort of museum practice would see widespread inclusion of people with disabilities in the planning of museum exhibitions, on museum boards and steering committees, and working in curatorial roles."
    In: Corinne Ball: Expressing Ourselves, 2020
  • "What has become clear is that museums don’t just function as custodians of the past anymore; instead, they have embraced their responsibility towards the communities of the present: a responsibility to represent them, to speak to them, and to be open to dialogue with them."
    Tim Deakin, August 2021
  • "Inclusion is moving from “we tolerate your presence” to “we WANT you here with us”.
    Jillian Enright in The Social Model of Disability, 2021

  • "Deaf people have always had a sense of their history as it was being passed down in stories told by generations of students walking in the hallways of their residential schools and by others who congregated in their clubs, ran associations, attended religious services, and played in sporting events.
    With these activities, the deaf community exhibited hallmarks of agency — an effort to maintain their social, cultural, and political autonomy amid intense pressure to conform as hearing, speaking people."
    BRIAN H. GREENWALD AND JOSEPH J. MURRAY, in: Sign Language Studies, Volume 17, Number 1, Fall 2016
  • "After all, we are all of us explorers, and we all have much to bring to each other from our own
    journeyings."
    Ladd, P. (2003). Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood.
  • "The UN Declaration of Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community”. This is based on the principle that citizens are not just consumers of cultural capital created by others; we have agency and the right to contribute through culture to the wider good of society."
    Source: A manifesto for museum learning and engagement
  • "It was only during the past decade that recognition of the importance of preserving Deaf history has emerged. In the main, Deaf heritage, culture and folklore has been passed down from generation to generation via the medium of sign language and fingerspelling. (..) It is also vital that the history of Deaf people is made available to future generations, especially Deaf schoolchildren as part of their history lessons."
    A. Murray Holmes,  in: Cruel Legacy, an introduction of Deaf people in history, by A.F. Dimmock, 1993
  • "Opening ourselves to the Deaf community, listening to and respecting them as co-creators and experts telling the stories they want told, makes our practice richer, and has ongoing positive effects for the community.
    These embryonic relationships hopefully encourage Deaf people to feel welcome in our space — it’s their space too.
    For both side, communities and museum professionals, while genuinely, openly and truly committing to working together can be time-consuming, it repays any investment many-fold."
    Corinne Ball: ‘Expressing ourselves’: creating a Deaf exhibition", 2020
  • "The Finnish Museum of the Deaf) was founded by deaf people, and, thus, its task has been to strengthen their identity and historical communality.

    Most of our materials have a connection to the key experiences that generations of deaf people have shared. These are important in understanding the past and keeping the collective memory alive."
    In: TIINA NAUKKARINEN, Finnish Museum of the Deaf: Presenting the Life of Carl Oscar Malm (1826–1863)
  • "And yet, even within a large and, in many ways, traditional organization such as this (Trøndelag Folk Museum, Norway), the museum's encounter with Deaf culture contributed to profound changes and a process, still underway, which challenges our own understanding of what a museum is today, our role in society and our obligations towards more diverse audiences than those we had previously engaged or even recognized."
    Hanna Mellemsether, in:  Re-presenting Disability: Activism and Agency in the Museum, 2013
  • "Until the fall semester of 1986, the history department at Gallaudet University had never before offered a course in the history of deaf people.
    In the 122 years, to that point, since the founding of the university, which was specifically intended for the education of deaf peoples, no one had ever taught a course about this very group of people.
    In all of those years the history department had offered courses on a wide range of topics but never deaf history. "
    ENNIS, WILLIAM T., et al. “A Conversation: Looking Back on 25 Years of A Place of Their Own.” Sign Language Studies, vol. 17, no. 1, 2016, pp. 26–41. 
  • "This (Deaf) Museum is not intended as a casual show, to be seen once and forgotten. Its pretensions are nobler; it has a humanitarian aim. By its solid and tangible evidences, making history memorable and attractive by illustration, it serves a double purpose: to dispel ignorance and prejudice regarding the deaf, and to raise the victims of this prejudice and ignorance to their true level in society."
    The British Deaf Monthly, Vol. VI (p.265) 1897. In: Deaf Museums and Archival Centres, 2006
  • “Stories of disability are largely absent from museum displays. Where they appear, they often reflect deeply entrenched, negative attitudes towards physical and mental difference. Research reveals that museums don’t simply reflect attitudes; they are active in shaping conversations about difference.
    Projects created with disabled people show that museums hold enormous potential to shape more progressive, accurate and respectful ways of understanding human diversity. Why wouldn’t we take up this opportunity? ”
    Richard Sandell, co-director, Research Centre for Museums and Galleries, University of Leicester
  • “One story makes you weak. But as soon as we have one-hundred stories, you will be strong.”
    Chris Cleave in "Little Bee", 2008
  • "As recently as the 1970s, deaf history did not exist. There were available sketches of various hearing men, primarily teachers, who were credited with bringing knowledge and enlightenment to generations of deaf children, but deaf adults were absent."

    In: Preface to: "Deaf History Unvailed, Interpretations from the New Scholarship". John Vickrey van Cleve, editor
    Publisher: Gallaudet University Press, 1993
  • "For many members of the Deaf community their shared history is both personal and social. Deaf people will have gone to the same school, in many cases boarding schools where most of their younger lives will have been spent together, and then met again at their Deaf clubs, Deaf social events, reunions and other more personal events.
    One of the first things a Deaf person will often ask on meeting, before asking your name, is what school or Deaf club you go to. Making this connection is an important part of any greeting, as it will then help an individual to understand what shared history or people in common you may have."
    from: The Cultural Model of Deafness
  • "Beyond works of art and objects, museums collect shared heritage, memories and living cultures as well as what we call intangible collectables."
    Source: We are Museums