To develop a touring interactive exhibition bringing the UK's largest oral history project to life, commissioned by the University of Manchester to mark the NHS's 70th anniversary in 2018. The exhibition needed to draw on thousands of hours of recorded memories from patients, doctors and staff, distil them into a coherent and emotionally resonant visitor experience, and travel to hospitals, GP surgeries, shopping centres, libraries and schools around the country, reaching people in the places where the NHS story continues to unfold every day.

Narrative Development | Concept Design | Content Development | Exhibition Design Integration

We began by immersing ourselves in the oral history archive, a body of material so vast and varied that the first and most important task was finding the lens through which to see it clearly. Through extended analysis of contributions spanning decades of NHS history, a pattern emerged: the moments that mattered most to people as patients, doctors, nurses, or staff, were not the headline events or the institutional milestones but the specific, often small experiences that changed how they understood what it means to give or receive care. We called these Moments of Care, and the framing became the key that unlocked the archive, giving us a principled, emotionally coherent way to select and edit from thousands of hours of material down to around a hundred audio clips of one to three minutes each.

We worked with photographer Keymea Yazdanian to meet, speak with and photograph archive contributors, adding a visual dimension that placed real faces and real presences at the centre of the exhibition. The exhibition design was developed with Mark Woods at Make Your Mark Studio: a robust, flat-pack system that could be easily transported and set up, and configured differently for different locations and spaces, combining Keymea's large-scale photography as the primary visual element with a seating feature where audiences could rest, an intentional design decision in spaces where people are often waiting, anxious or tired.

At the centre of the experience were the telephone interactives (real vintage devices restored and digitally adapted for the exhibition) and ‘phone books’ – visitors could browse the books and choose a person/story, pick up the receiver and ‘call the archive’ to listen to selected oral history contributions directly. The telephone, a familiar and intimate object with deep associations with care and connection, became the experiential heart of the exhibition.

We worked with Beaufort Bespoke to produce the finished exhibition and delivered it to the team in Manchester. Before it could begin its touring life, COVID-19 struck. A touring, interactive exhibition designed for hospitals, surgeries and public spaces became impossible to deploy. The exhibition has not yet had the audience it deserves.

The NHS means profoundly different things to different people, and not everyone's experiences of it have been positive. Working with material this personal, this politically charged and this emotionally significant requires the same commitment to listening without judgement that shaped the sonic portrait work with Tim Wainwright. The Moments of Care framing worked precisely because it did not impose a celebratory or critical narrative on the archive spanning more than seven decades of personal experience. Instead, it found a human register that could hold the full complexity of people's experiences, the transformative and the tragic, within a single coherent frame.

Finding that frame, the key that unlocks an archive, is one of the most important things TGA does, and one of the hardest to explain to a client before it has happened. It requires extended immersion in the material, a willingness to follow what keeps surfacing rather than what was expected, and the discipline to resist the temptation to impose a structure from outside before the pattern has revealed itself from within. The Moments of Care framing emerged from the archive itself. It was not where we started, or honestly, where we expected to go.

This project was also a direct continuation of the collaborative approach developed with Tim Wainwright, combining photography and voice to create a form of encounter more intimate and more direct than either medium alone. Tim passed away in 2018, the same year we undertook this project. The telephone interactive, the large-scale portraits, the careful selection of voices that speak without being told what to mean, all of it carries something of what he taught us.

Client: University of Manchester

TGA: Narrative Development, Concept Design, Content Development, Design Integration

Partners: Keymea Yazdanian (Photography), Mark Woods / Make Your Mark Studio (Exhibition Design), Beaufort Bespoke (Exhibition Production)