ABSTRACT
Over the past century, natural history museum exhibitions have seen significant shifts in tone and approach—augmenting the tradition of labeled specimens with stories, context, and relevance. Yet the core of the visitor experience remains unchanged: audiences expect to feel wonder and curiosity as they marvel at amazing objects collected from around the world. The dynamic tension between celebrating iconic objects and giving them relevance is at the heart of imagining the future of natural history museum exhibitions. In recent decades, our conventional natural history exhibition techniques of objects in cases and dioramas modeling the natural and cultural world have been supplemented with multimedia and more in-depth interpretation pertaining to science, scientists, and the scientific process. In the late 1800s, dioramas became a popular mode of interpretation, particularly for anthropological content. Miniature models debuted at the world's fairs of the day and then made their way into museums halls as semi-permanent versions of a studied social/cultural life.
