The Wellcome Collection and Visualizing Information

After all the information of a week in London- I went and did something only I would - GO GET SOME MORE!  I headed over to the Wellcome Collection first thing on Saturday morning.  The Wellcome Collection is a museum that is dedicated to the education and "the connection between, health, medicine and art".  It opened while I lived in London, and I remember going to their first anniversary with Emmie Joseph - where we listened to an amazing talk by one of the design leads at Timorous Beasties (his name escapes me at this moment).

So back to this time - the exhibitions were so wonderful, but not appropriate for visual documentation.  The first temporary exhibition was on Forensics, and really delved into how they figure out some of the more gruesome details about death (it was disgustingly fantastic!).  The second temporary exhibition was called "The Institute of Sexology" and presented both information and examples of the study and debates surrounding sex over the past 150 years.   Needless to say quite interesting topics to be discussed and thought about, and the collection very much so inspired reflection on change in society and how technology has assisted in this change of both information gathering and with it a greater understanding of our humanity in life and death.

I did take some pictures of the permanent collection - all about Visualizing information - something this museum does exceptionally well as it has art to making it meet the discerning aesthetic eye of the viewer while accurately communicating the data, a feat not to be diminished.  So - now - here's the pictures!!!

 These first two images are the volumes containing the human genome if it was printed into a book form - it would take this much space to print it all out and bind it - so amazing we can know what the genome is and can communicate it (and its really big)

 These were the most beautiful resin sculptures - each one was of a person thinking something different (I didn't remember to get that part down, I wonder what my brain looks like now?)

 These 3 images were of these 'drawers' in one of the drawing tables showing both the life of scientists and how people communicate some very difficult information to people.  They were so simple but also so very effective.

We need to ask Denise if we can get this book - if we don't already have it