The residency period of the Thackray Museum of Medicine finished in July 2024, and culminated in the launch of a new six-month exhibition: You Choose. The exhibition explores the role of choice and personalisation in medicine and healthcare, using facial prostheses, such as artificial eyes, pills, and wearable devices. It features both historic materials from the Thackray’s amazing collection, as well as digital interactives and insights co-produced with local communities.
The production of the exhibition moved rapidly after an initial period of creative exploration, and it launched on 20 July 2024. It invites visitors to consider their own agency and the choices which they might make in relation to their own health and care, but also to reflect on the challenges presented by choice and how personalised treatments might rest on the sharing of large amounts of personal and health-related data. As they go round, visitors have the chance to complete one of our questionnaires about personal health choices, and are the asked if they are happy to share these answers with the museum or not, and to drop their questionnaires in the “Yes” or “No” baskets. Around two-thirds of visitors have chosen to make this information available, revealing fascinating insights into how people feel about their own health and wellbeing.
Members of the LivingBodiesObjects team worked alongside Thackray staff to develop the exhibition, taking inspiration from immersive technology tools, visits and field trips, and texts and objects held at the museum.
In the exhibition, digital interactives feature a screen which can change people’s eye colour – even making the irises transform into sunflowers – in real time, and a “digital twin” station which imagines visitors’ bodies as constantly changing streams of data.
Our project Research and Documentation Fellow, Dr Lynn Wray, worked with local community groups – The Brunswick Centre yOUTh Halifax and Dewsbury Groups, and Harehills Creative Women – to run craft workshops designing imagined personalised pills, and these became the Community Pharmacy display in the gallery. As well as the You Choose gallery itself, Research Assistant Dr Claire Turner developed a new area of the Normal + Me permanent gallery to explore personal experiences of cochlear implants.
Several members of the project also took part in a panel discussion at the Museum Association Annual Conference at the Royal Armouries in Leeds in November 2024. Their “Embrace the Chaos” session drew an audience of around 160 and reflected both the content of the final exhibition and the lessons learned from the open-ended, exploratory development process.
You Choose runs until 5 January 2025. We have also created a digital version of the exhibition, which you can visit here.
To use the eye swap filter developed for the exhibition, please try it on instagram here download Meta’s Spark Player from here and the eye swap filter here