Unravelling information and crocheting meaning: designing complex information for museum audiences

This paper discusses the designer’s role in presenting scientific knowledge to museum audiences using the Universe in a Virtual Room: Realising Einstein’s Universe, a stereoscopic 3D animation project at the Museum of Victoria, Australia, as a case study. The exhibition’s development by an interdisciplinary team shows knowledge differences between scientists, designers and audiences to be a fundamental problem for those philosophies of user-centred design that argue that the messages that resonate with audiences should be the basis for design. Other accounts of design see visualisation as more than the simple reproduction of content in the service of audiences, considering it to involve important dimensions of conceptualization on the part of the designer. Hence the questions: What is the scope for user-centred design when neither designer nor audience has sufficient grounding to master scientific knowledge? Can design processes and designers’ distance from science bring new perspectives to science-based information?