An Exhibition of Ourselves, in the Hall of Human Biology, is the largest exhibition opened in recent years in the British Museum (Natural History), London (Miles and Tout, 1978). It covers about 1100 square metres, was opened in 1977, and is now known simply as Human Biology. Characterized by critics as ‘rather like a cheap disco’ and ‘a hideous portent of modernization yet to come’, it has always been extremely popular with visitors and, according to our evidence, successful. The primary purpose of this paper is to look below the surface of such conflicting responses, and examine the theoretical foundations of the exhibition’s design. In the late 1960s and early 1970s a small number of American workers developed a general theory of exhibition design based on current educational and psychological research (e.g. Shettel et al., 1968; Screven, 1969; Shettel, 1973; Lakota and Kantner, 1976). The importance of Human Biology, and the reason why it is worth additional study, is that it was a comprehensive attempt to apply and test such a coherent theory in a large, permanent educational exhibition. And it is timely to publish this account now, because the major work of evaluating and revising the exhibition has drawn to a close. The role and status of a theory of exhibition design have been summarized by Shettel et al. (1968):