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Historians have given much attention to museums and exhibitions as sites for the production and communication of knowledge in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. But few studies have analysed how the activity and participation of visitors was designed and promoted at such locations. Using Francis Galton's Anthropometric Laboratory at the International Health Exhibition in London 1884 as the empirical focal point, this paper explores a new mode of involving exhibition audiences in the late nineteenth century. Its particular form of address is characterized by an ambition to transform the visitors' self-understanding by engaging them with various techniques of scientific observation and representation of social issues. By analysing the didactics of this particular project, I argue that the observational ideal of 'mechanical objectivity' and associated modes of representation in this instance became an integrated part of a political vision of self-observation and self-reformation. Thus the exhibit and related projects by Galton not only underpinned a theoretical lesson, but also were part of an effort to extend a complex set of practices among the general public.

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”Museums of the future [...] ought not to be as I would like to have them, but as the visitors and users would want them if they knew what makes a museum.” Otto Neurath’s vision in 1933 of the future development of the museum as a public space, and as a pedagogical and social project, gives a good idea of why he is often mentioned in handbooks on the history of museums. But considering the rapidly growing number of studies since the 1970s of Neurath as a philosopher, economist and sociologist – the literature on his many exhibition projects is still very small. These projects and his writings on museums have usually been treated as a slightly anecdotal part of his career; a separate, straightforward and practical undertaking, only indirectly linked to his supposedly more serious and theoretical pursuits. The exception is the fairly large literature on ISOTYPE, the standardised graphic language for visual education, developed in the latter half of the 1920s at the “social and economic museum” in Vienna. However, rather than analysing ISOTYPE as an integrated part of Neurath’s many-faceted museum project, these studies have mostly treated the exhibitions as a given, as the historical circumstance for the birth of a new kind of graphic design.