London: Dec 10: V&A Museum (again)

On Friday, December 10, 2010, my outing was once again to the V&A Museum, a museum I've visited numerous times before. I was there to see its new displays. I want to comment on two of them.

I took some pictures in the museum during this outing.

I went to a cute exhibit on Charles Holden and on the many tube and rail stations he designed in the 1920s and 1930s as chief architect for the Underground / London Transport. He was a prolific architect; the exhibit proclaimed he probably designed enough buildings in London to rival Christopher Wren.

The other interesting exhibit was on Isotype, a method to "present social facts [statistics] pictorially" in a way young and old and even people who don't read the language can understand. I liked this exhibit because I'm always interested in how to present detailed, complex statistics in clear, elegant ways. Maybe Isotype over-simplifies at times--one practitioner said that "to remember simplified pictures is better than to forget accurate figures"--but it's still commendable for its clarity. (Besides, maybe precision isn't as critical as people make it out to be.) Also, this exhibit showed examples of using similarly simple, Isotype-like presentation methods to teach (e.g., science) and to convey instructions (e.g., in case of disaster do this).

This was a fun little outing.