Heavy Duty Handsets & Open Frame Screens – Museum of Farnham

The Museum of Farnham displays a collection of items that combined help form a social history of the town and it’s surrounding villages. The result is a large collection broadly divided between Archaeology, Archives, Fine Art, Textiles and History. These themes run through the various events available here, including kids crafts, interactive workshops and the newly opened exhibition; ‘Reflecting on 60 years: Our Untold Stories.’

The Museum of Farnham wanted to share stories from a range of communities within the area. Collaboration with the Ahmadiyya Muslim Youth Organisation, Hale History Group and Polish School of Surrey allowed them to do just that.

The result is a pop-up exhibition that provides insight into the history of each community as well as an overview of those organisations involved.

The exhibition offers a sampling of each community in multiple forms, including imagery, clothing, physical objects, and audio visual interpretation (which is where we got involved).

Heavy Duty Handsets were used alongside our SoundClip audio players sharing various clips with visitors, as well as our Open Frame Video Screens which allow visitors to investigate different multi-media collections on display with button triggers allowing visitors to select what they wish to watch, adding valuable interaction to the displays.

The Open Frame Video screen is one of the easiest ways to add video content to an exhibition thanks to the in-built video player and mounting options, as Emma Croft-Smith, Duty Manager at the Museum of Farnham explains…

“We used the Heavy Duty Handsets in our ‘Reflecting on 60 years’ exhibition, which will be open from July 26th to December 16th. We also use a screen for our Kitty Melroy mural exhibition, which I’ve certainly found to be convenient and easy to use. It’s very quick to set up the video in the morning and then customers can simply click play to view further information on the murals, and it’s similarly low effort to disconnect when I close the museum. As a small museum, experimenting with technology and interactive exhibits is reasonably new to us, and we’ve had a great experience so far with Blackbox-av.”