Name: Death Café
Location: Wellcome Collection

Spontaneous yet rule-bound, fun yet vitally beneficial – play shapes the period of explosive growth from birth to adolescence. This universal human activity not only helps us understand our social and cognitive development, but also offers us a glimpse into broader society.

Devika Madgavkar is a senior at the Dhirubhai Ambani International School in Mumbai, India. Her interests focus on the history of health and paediatrics. She has been a volunteer with play therapy programmes at the Dr Ernest Borges Memorial Home for paediatric cancer patients and at the Ummeed Child Development Centre, an NGO at the forefront of developmental paediatrics in India.

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Devika Madgavkar

Author

In pictures

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See saw waltz

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Our understanding of the importance of play in a child’s development has become increasingly sophisticated over the centuries. Explore the ways different eras have regarded childhood games.

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Woodblock: Ambrosia altera

Explore stories inspired by the objects, manuscripts and more in our archives.

Stories inspired by the objects, manuscripts and more in our archives.

Inside Our Collections

Born to play

People can get more out of a museum visit if they’re allowed to play games. Holly Gramazio argues for museums to embrace those visitors who prefer an unorthodox approach by encouraging self-directed play. 

I’m a game designer who’s interested in history and physical space, so I’ve worked in a lot of museums over the last ten years or so – and it’s definitely been getting easier to play in museums. 

In 2008, perhaps you’d find one or two members of staff at a given museum who were interested in play and willing to make arguments for it internally, battling their way through to the point where visitors were allowed to play an actual game. In 2019, people working in museums are way, way more interested in how play can help visitors explore ideas or spaces, engaging them in different ways and creating stories and shared experiences. 

Once upon a time games in museums were restricted to one-off events on a Tuesday in mid-September when the Assistant Director of Disapproving of Things was out of town.  Now they’re increasingly a core part of what museums offer to their visitors.

So that’s great news for people who like museums and games, right?   

If you’ve got a museum lying around somewhere and you want a game to put in it – or if, like me, you’re a game designer and you want a museum to work in – it’s great news. There are a lot of opportunities around, and a lot writing and research and thought that’s aimed right at you. There’s even a whole conference coming up at the V&A. But if you want to actually play, then the bigger picture of games and museums is pretty much irrelevant. 

Visitors get stuck into an evening of games at Wellcome Collection.

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A late night event at Wellcome Collection on the theme of play

I’m obviously more interested in games than most people, but I still go to museums based on what’s in them, their themes and cost, and whatever else I happen to be doing that day, not whether there’s a game there I want to play.

And if I do want to play in a museum, but the museum I’m in happens not to have something that suits me, then – well, I’m on my own. That’s fine for me: I’m a game designer, I’ll find something to do. Most recently I tried this game, and it was informative and also depressing:

(Adapted from a game by Harry Josephine Giles.)

While you’re walking around a museum or an art gallery, keep an eye out for sculptures of feminine-presenting figures.

When you spot one that interests you, make a guess: is it a woman, or a concept? A real, named person counts as a woman. A representation of sorrow or inspiration or justice or some other abstraction counts as a concept. A mythological or fictional character is worth half a point. 

But not everyone has a stack of games at hand, or even a sense of their own right to play in a museum. In fact, this sort of unilateral visitor-initiated play is something that a lot of museums are still resistant to, even museums that are at the forefront of thinking about the benefits of play and games. 

This makes sense: looking after a building full of visitors and staff and objects is hard; museums need rules to keep people and objects safe, and games can pull against those rules in sometimes dangerous ways. Museums also want to give visitors a certain sort of experience, and games can mess that up. Look at a simple game like this: 

Each time you see a cabinet, one player examines it first and finds one interesting fact. They then tell their companions that fact – and another that they’ve made up. 

When it’s your turn to invent a fact, see if you can get a 50:50 split between people who believe the truth and people who believe the lie.

It’s a diverting enough game, but there’s a downside: you’ll probably remember a few of the lies as true. When humans hear “this cool fact has been debunked”, we often forget the boring “debunked” part and just remember the cool pseudofact. A similar thing happens with games like this, where we remember the story, and don’t necessarily remember whether it turned out to be true. 

Once upon a time games in museums were restricted to one-off events on a Tuesday in mid-September when the Assistant Director of Disapproving of Things was out of town.

I once ran a True or False Tour around London, with tour guides who would tell duelling stories at each stop – one truth and one lie. Years later, I went on a different tour led by one of those guides, and he told the group one of the entirely imaginary stories that I’d made up. In the intervening years, he’d forgotten it was a lie, and only remembered the story.

White gloves on and ready to play in the archives.

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You should still consider playing Tour Guide; it’s a nice way to structure a chat if you’re in a museum with a couple of friends. But as a visitor, you don’t have a particular responsibility to make sure you don’t misunderstand anything about any given museum – whereas museums do have a responsibility not to mislead you.

Different games can fit in with a museum’s aims to different degrees. Some games for guiding a conversation aren’t at odds with most museums’ implicit aims in the way that Tour Guide is, but also don’t support them: 

Choose a question that can be answered using exhibits from the museum you’re exploring. 

You’re going to a party of extremely fashionable artists. You’ve got to make an outfit out of different items of clothing in the historical costumes section of the museum. What do you pick and how do you combine the different items?             

Oh no! A dramatic movie fight is about to break out in the museum! Each of you picks a character – a harried curator, a put-upon security guard, a master criminal, up to you – and takes turns to describe what your contribution to the fight will be. 

The entire museum is a “tag yrself, i’m…” meme. Find the piece of art you feel encapsulates you best. 

More explicitly ‘game’-y games, with win conditions and an ongoing score, can fall into this category too: 

Walk around a room in a gallery or a museum. You may not communicate with each other.

When you’re ready to leave the room, come back together, and on the count of three – still silent – nod three times or mouth the words or whatever works for you, and point at an object in the room.

If you’re both pointing at the same object, you win. 

Do the same thing in the next room, and the next, and the next. How many rounds can you win before you leave the museum? 

After you’ve explained the rules of this game, or suggested that you play it, you can not discuss strategy or plan how you will make your decisions; you may not speak again until you finish playing.

If we imagine a scale ranging from “supports the museum’s aims” to “pulls against the museum’s aims”, then most official games sit at the first end, followed by games like these that direct players’ attention in interesting but tangential ways, followed by potentially misleading games like Tour Guide. Theoretically we could go even further along this path, towards games that actively break the rules:

Whenever you’re in a museum, touch something. The oldest or most valuable thing you think you can get away with. 

If you’re caught and told off by museum staff – ever – then you’re out of the game for the rest of your life.

A friend of mine plays this game; I won’t go to museums with him, and I don’t think he should play it, although I do think it’s funny, and a pretty good piece of game design. 

There are less clear-cut ways to break the rules as well. I once worked on a game for a London art gallery, and we were asked to replace dice with spinners – because a dice might roll off under a piece of art, and then someone might try to get it out and accidentally topple a sculpture. As a restriction, this is both really sensible, and really really non-obvious. 

So where should you draw the lines for play in a museum? As someone who works for museums, I think it’s wonderful that museums are commissioning explicitly playful work, but I wish more of them also encouraged visitors to engage in self-directed play, exploring this space for playful activities that are currently permitted but not encouraged. Games that people make up on their own might not always be informative about the history of the collection, but having more ways to engage with the space and the objects is valuable in itself.

Finding new ways to play in the Reading Room.

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As a visitor, I feel that my responsibility ends at following the museum’s rules; I’m happy to play self-originated games that may subvert the curatorial aims. And the thing that museums can most easily do to help me play like this is to be explicit about what their rules actually are.

Only when museums are clear about exactly what is permitted in their spaces are people able to confidently judge what forms of play are allowed. I’ve worked in museums for a decade and I’m still sometimes not sure what the rules are in a particular space: do these white gloves by the book mean I can touch it if I put them on? If there’s not a no-photography sign, does that mean photography is always okay? Does that mean filming is fine as well?

Obviously no museum is going to put every possible restriction on a sign (“No dice-rolling! If you need a random number use an app instead”). But by communicating positive permissions as well as clear restrictions, museums can allow play-minded visitors to feel confident in their actions, comfortable about what they can and can’t do – and perhaps put them in the mood for a game.

Holly is a game designer, curator and writer based in London. She works both independently and as half of Matheson Marcault. Her recent projects include the collaborative drawing game Art Deck and the script for the video game Dicey Dungeons. She founded Now Play This, a festival of experimental game design based at Somerset House in London, and is interested in games that get people creating or looking at their environments in new ways. 

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Holly Gramazio

Holly's website

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How to play in a museum

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Some museums create games for visitors to play. In others, if you’re creative and inquisitive, you can make up your own. Find out how a game can give you a different perspective on art and objects.

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How to play between Stepney Green and Embankment

Game designer Holly Gramazio takes a journey though the history and culture of games, and invites you to turn your mind to play wherever you are.

How to play on the District line between Stepney Green and Embankment

How to play with drunk people

How to play with people who are better than you

How to play in secret

How not to play at all

How to play

All over the world scientists are hard at work researching, exploring and developing – but not in professional labs. Find out about the mixture of mavericks, artists, hobbyists and trained scientists getting their hands dirty at the forefront of DIYbio.

What happens when a shelf collapses and you don’t want to pay to fix it? DIY. But this roll-up-your-sleeves attitude isn’t just for home furnishings. It’s for biology, too.

From hobbyists drinking beer together to scientists pursuing passion projects, from artists exploring our place in the world to entrepreneurs making fabrics from mould, a diverse group of people are doing science outside professional labs. It’s called DIYbio. For many, it’s about a right to biology: we’re all made of it, so we should all be able to play with it. 

Biomakespace is a nonprofit community lab on the Cambridge Biomedical Campus. The organisation describes some of its primary activities as “curiosity-driven research” and “having fun”. It runs events such as introductions to soldering, synthetic biology forums, and weekly social meetups. About half its membership have some formal training in biology.

Current projects include making a cheaper bioreactor (a machine that facilitates useful biochemical reactions), or genetically engineering bacteria to change colour in response to light. 

‘Tramp’ from the series ‘First Kiss’, an homage to artistic creation and the chemistry of passion by Debbie Loftus. Petri dish, ink, watercolour, PVA, resin.

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Tramp. 2018. Petri dish, ink, watercolour, pva, resin

There are similar community labs in London, Manchester, Oxford and Nottingham, and far more in the US, as well as across the rest of the world. All operate on a similar principle of openness, sharing and curiosity. “Biomakespace has really been my avenue into synthetic biology,” says a member on their website.

Businesses are also building on the potential of low-cost science. In London, OpenCell rents lab space for biotechnology startups outside academia. Its residents use biotechnology to work on waste processing, agriculture and beauty, with shared lab access from £999 a month.  

While hobbyists are using accessible science to find answers in their free time, others are using it to ask questions about what modern biology means to us. In an installation at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht, artist Jeroen van Loon offered to sell 380GB of his own DNA data. His website shows him having blood taken in a lab, watching a scientist run the sequencing machines, and listening as the data is explained. 

This data is much cheaper to extract now, at $1,000 compared to the $14 million it would have cost a decade ago. And it’s worth a lot more, with fiercely profitable competition growing up around the deciphering and manipulation of the genome.  

On its own, van Loon’s sequence doesn’t mean very much. But compared to databases of other sequences, it can predict his propensity for certain diseases, and – without much certainty – some elements of his appearance and personality. This is deeply personal information, much of which would be valuable to an insurer or employer, who could impose economic penalties on those with the wrong DNA sequences. 

‘Tosca’ from the series ‘First Kiss’ by Debbie Loftus. 

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Tosca. 2018. Petri dish, ink, watercolour, pva, resin

By offering his data for sale, van Loon asks questions we may all soon find ourselves asking. How do we protect our privacy in an age when our most intimate genetic information is cheap and easy to decipher? Researchers have explored how to hide a genetically modified organism’s function by encrypting its genetic sequence, but no such hacks exist yet for human beings. 

There will be more possibilities for the kinds of large-scale production that could inadvertently supply dangerous activities.

Giulia Tomasello’s ‘Future Flora’ project offers a counterpoint to this dystopian economy of biology. Tomasello developed a kit that allows women to harvest and grow their own beneficial vaginal bacteria in a pad that can then be worn to help defeat yeast infections. She hopes the kit will encourage women to take an active role in their healthcare. “Being able to take care of your body is empowering… it’s knowledge, and knowledge is power.”

In the 16th century the astronomer and engineer Galileo built workrooms in his house where craftsman assisted with experiments. He was university educated, but many of his works were written in Italian, rather than Latin, for non-scholars to read, and explored the then non-academic field of engineering. He combined the methods of craftsmen with the theory of scholars to push science further forwards. Scientific scholarship now included the work of getting your hands dirty in the laboratory or the workshop. 

Critics of DIYbio level the charge that, in practice, the time and cost involved renders citizen science exclusionary, accessible only to those with the right resources. Not all of us have Galileo’s wealth. But part of what DIYbiologists are trying to do is to make that better. Projects like the bioreactor at Cambridge Biomakespace could reduce costs for any lab with poor access to the usual scientific equipment.

‘Carmen’ from the series ‘First Kiss’ by Debbie Loftus. 

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Carmen. 2018. Petri dish, ink, watercolour, pva, resin

Many biohackers and DIYbiologists come from academia. The annual iGEM (International Genetically Engineered Machine) Competition for university students is a common way in. “‘Garage’ biologists is a word people use,” says Brett Edwards, a researcher at Bath University. “No one’s in the garage. They’re just sat in the lab after five.”

Those in the DIYbio community take responsibility for setting norms of safe practice for all. A code of conduct was produced in 2011 by DIYbio.org, an online organisation for DIY biologists. At Biomakespace, any proposed project needs the same risk assessment that would occur in any mainstream lab.

So why does public coverage of DIY biologists often panic about poorly regulated hobbyists? “Amateur scientists don’t fit in with ideas about what innovation should be: capitalist and driven by industry,” says Edwards. 

He thinks this discussion represents a deeper anxiety about our ability to keep cutting-edge science safe. “To get funding, high-flying scientists promise that their science is new and unprecedented, but controllable by existing systems and regulation. Of course this seems strange.” We feel safer about professional science when it’s compared with dangerous amateurs.

‘North’ from the series ‘First Kiss’ by Debbie Loftus.  

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North. 2018. Petri dish, ink, watercolour, pva, resin

The real risks are not always the ones we first think of. Edwards uses the drug market as an example. Fentanyl is a pain medication, often illegally manufactured for recreational use. It’s also highly toxic. “It’s more of a concern than ricin. People produce this at scale, illegally, for profit. That can be moved over easily to a terrorist application.”

Sometimes it’s hard to see the connections between the artists, businesses, enthusiasts and researchers who fall under the description of DIYbio. They each form part of a broader uncertainty about how we proceed with increasingly powerful technologies.

We’re not at a point with amateur biology where the clandestine, dual-use marketplaces that Edwards describes exist. London Biohackspace has 268 members on its Meetup group (at the time of writing), with around ten attendees per event. 

But as science progresses, the market grows and the entry point lowers. There will be more possibilities for the kinds of large-scale production that could inadvertently supply dangerous activities, and this is a problem if we want to ensure our constantly expanding knowledge is used for good. But DIYbio might also be part of the solution: creating a dialogue about synthetic biology that is open, curious and joyful. “They just really like playing with biology,” Edwards says. “And that’s cool.”

Anna is on the Wellcome Trust graduate scheme. She has also written for Mosaic, and her fiction has been published in Speculative Cities and the Isis magazine.

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Anna Lewis

Reinventing her studio as a laboratory, Debbie Loftus borrows from scientific techniques and takes an experimental approach to materials, colour and light in creating her artworks. Employing diverse materials and found objects, she blurs the boundaries between drawing and photography.

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Debbie Loftus

Debbie's website

Artist

Article

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Zed. 2018. Petri dish, ink, watercolour, pva, resin

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Amateur scientists have inspired all kinds of frightening scenarios, from Frankenstein’s monster to ‘The Fly’ and ‘Breaking Bad’. But it can be a force for good. Today’s DIYbio enthusiasts are having fun – and even making lucrative breakthrough discoveries.

Bringing biotech to the people

One way to tell whether you are dealing with a saint is to sniff them. Osmogenesia, or the Odour of Sanctity, is the sweet and pure aroma that Christian saints and even their dead bodies are said to produce. The floral fragrance of a medieval saint was in vivid contrast to the body odours of others, who were told perfume was sinful and bathing a health hazard. The past was a place of smells both divine and disgusting.

Dr Ben Gazur has a PhD in biochemistry but gave up the glamour of the lab to be a freelance writer. He specialises in history, science, and the history of science.

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Ben Gazur

Follow Ben on Twitter

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Saint Simeon Stylites the elder

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It’s the tenth century and your local ascetic has died. Remarkably, his body emits a sweet, pleasant smell, and fragrant oils instead of foul liquids and odours. Read on to find out how this could be.

The smell of saintliness

Artist Deborah Kelly invites you to join a series of free workshops to collectively devise and realise an intimate life-sized portrait of artist, activist and drag star Danny Smith.

You’ll explore craft skills and artistic approaches to creating collage, and collaborate with others in a series of unhurried, hands-on, open-ended tasks. The collages you make will be created from discarded reference books and magazines.

The portrait that you make of Danny will become a part of our collection and will be on display in the ‘Being Human’ exhibition.

There will be nine sessions in total and you’ll need to be able to attend a minimum of two. You’ll need to arrive at the beginning, but you can leave earlier if necessary.

Deborah Kelly has been investigating the expansion of the humble, lo-fi art of collage since 2011. Her epic collaborative portrait project ‘No Human Being Is Illegal’ was commissioned by the Biennale of Sydney, then toured Australia 2014–18. In November–December 2019 she is Artist-in-Residence at the Wellcome Trust in London.

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Deborah Kelly

Danny Smith is a multimedia artist whose art embraces performance, film, drawing, painting and photography. He says, “First I was a baby and I was handsome, then when I was a teenager I became more who I am. My art comes from my heart.” Recent exhibitions include ‘Rising’, a group show by Shadowlight Artists at two venues, the Old Fire Station Gallery and Modern Art Oxford. He is currently on an international tour with Drag Syndrome.

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Danny Smith

Award-winning creative arts company and charity Heart n Soul are residents of The Hub from 2018 to 2020. Their research project is led by people with learning disabilities and autistic people and is about exploring the value of difference and questioning what is ‘normal’.

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Heart n Soul at the Hub

Heart n Soul at The Hub website

Collaborator

<p>A practical activity where you will create something or develop skills.</p>

Workshop

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Workshop at Wellcome Collection

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We’ll be in a space called Henry’s. To get there, go to the Information Point and you’ll be escorted up and through the staff doors to this behind-the-scenes space.

Henry’s

Join a series of free collage workshops with our Artist-in-Residence Deborah Kelly.

Collective Collage Workshops

Schools

Your students will join us for a whole-day session full of creative and discussion-based activities on the theme of body image as seen today, in the past and across different cultures. They’ll have the opportunity to discuss, debate, be creative, and present ideas inspired by our objects and artworks from our two permanent galleries. Looking at ethical questions that arise from the themes of mental health and the body, your students will think about how culture has defined beauty and the 'ideal' body, and how we create space for individual expression.

We have developed this study day for groups of students aged 14 to 19, studying GCSEs or post-16 qualifications at school or sixth-form college. You can bring 20 to 30 students, accompanied by staff at a ratio of 1:10.

Due to the small scale of our free programme, we take bookings exclusively from schools in the Greater London area.

Study day

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Body image study day

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We’ll be in the Studio on level 1. When you enter Wellcome Collection, head up the stairs or take the lift, then follow the signs.

The Studio

Your school or college can book a maximum of two study days per term. To secure your booking, you'll need to complete and return the required forms promptly.

All study days and events are free, but we charge a fee for cancellation or significant changes to your group size made within three weeks of your visit. Both policies are explained fully in the agreement we ask you to sign ahead of your visit.

School booking conditions

Your students will join us for a whole-day session full of activities on the theme of body image.

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Medicine Now gallery

Active and engaging, to drive your students' creative and critical skills.

The free museum and library for the incurably curious

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The free museum and library for the incurably curious

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Collective Collage Workshops

Body Image

AD Tour of Being Human

Body Offerings

Life Drawing

HIV and AIDS

Grief Gatherings

Head Space

Daily Guided Tours and Discussions