Audio Pen Kiosk – Buxton Museum

Located in Derbyshire the Buxton Museum and Art Gallery focuses its collections mainly on History, Geology and Archaeology. One particularly interesting space in the museum is the William Boyd Dawkins Study. This study was bequeathed to the museum complete with furniture, books and scientific instruments. W. B Dawkins was an archaeologist and geologist, well known for his research into the antiquity of man.

Although an interesting space in its own right, there wasn’t a great deal in the way of interpretation until recently, visitors are only able to walk a short way into the room where they are met by a length of cabinets. From here they can view the room although are unable to move in for closer inspection. Hoping to elevate visitor interactivity in the room, and provide a means of interpreting the significance of each historic item, Buxton Museum hired Dan Boys from audiotrails.

Dan formed an interpretation plan that involved a clever use of two touch pads hosting a virtual tour of the study, and two IR audio pens. It was due to these IR audio pens that Dan enlisted our help.

We were asked to design two purpose built kiosks for presenting these pens to visitors, incorporating some kind of signage that dictated how they were to be used. We created a wooden kiosk that would blend in well with the other furnishings in the room, with clear, easy to understand instructions of “Point, Click, Listen” included on front facing signage.

Visitors can now grab an audio pen from the cradle and point it at ‘tags’ dotted around the room next to various points of interest, pushing a button on the pen whilst aimed at these tags activates some informative audio from both William Boyd Dawkins and Dr J.W Jackson.

This adds a nice interactive element to the room while providing a fun way to learn more about the significance of Dawkins and Jackson.