ExhibiTricks: A Museum/Exhibit/Design Blog

Exhibits In An Archive: The Austin History Center

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Fri, 25 May 2012 10:38:00 +0000

Steve Schwolert, the Exhibit Coordinator at the Austin History Center, recently sent along some interesting comments about the differences (and similarities!) between museums and archives that I'd like to share with ExhibiTricks readers. As you'll see, Steve also sent along some cool photos and descriptions of a simulated Kinetoscope that he's made using iPods!

Enjoy what Steve has to say below:

The Austin History Center is not, strictly speaking, a museum. We hover somewhere between museums and libraries. We are, rather, a research institution that collects archival documents (records of all types, including over a million photographs, films and videos). It is a distinction that most people miss who do not use archives on a regular basis. Exhibits in our setting function to educate, promote our collections, and as a vehicle to encourage citizens to donate archival materials that record Austin’s history. Through our exhibits, and Community Liaison program to underserved communities, we’ve unearthed a number of significant collections that record our area's history. In many cases, it is unusual to have a vibrant exhibits program in archives, unless perhaps you are one of the big boys like the Harry Ransom Center or the National Archives. Though we rely on the skills of all our staff for research, I am the entire “official” exhibits staff. I do all the design and fabrication as well as the promotional graphics.

Figuring out how to make the distinction between archives and museums clear is something we at the Austin History Center are working on all the time. We need better “elevator speeches” and have put some effort into marketing ourselves in the last couple years. All that said, I get a lot of good ideas and inspiration from being a “fly on the wall” around people in the museum world. So the long and short is that there is some crossover, but archives are still a bit different. I will say that with the success of our exhibits program in the last few years, exhibits are now a core service whereas they used to be ancillary/optional.

Creating exhibits for an archive is unique in that we deal with 2D “objects” almost exclusively. Any 3D artifacts are usually more complimentary of the materials we collect – photos, documents, letters, architectural drawings, maps, film and video. I often joke that my world is one of arranging rectangles. Coming up with ways to present the materials in a dynamic way is always challenging. But we have found that exhibits serve to help us expand both our place in Austin’s cultural community and as a vehicle for expanding our collections, with our overall goal being to collect, preserve and provide access to the primary source materials that record our local history.

I am notorious for trying things I’ve never done before, so with our latest exhibit called “The First Picture Shows: Historic Movie Houses of Austin,” I wanted to give our visitors a sense of what it was like to watch movies in a context that has vanished. Giving a broader context in which to set the stories found in a local archive is something we try to do in each exhibit. Reading the ExhibiTricks blog inspired me in this way, and so I thought “why not?” and built a version of the Kinetoscope – the first device created by Edison and widely distributed in the US for watching movies. Edison actually imagined it first as a way to generate interest in his Phonograph, and thought movies would only appeal to a viewer more like an arcade entertainment. Edison’s Vitascope projector came along in 1896 and was the first system that was commercially successful in the US.

Our Kinetoscope runs on iPods – two for digitized Edison films from the National Archives and one for audio, all set to loop continuously. The iPods (Nano, 3rd and 4th generation) are AC powered using adapters and have been running continuously for well over a month now with no signs of quitting. The two iPods for films are rigged in a box approximately 12” deep with a glass magnifying lens scavenged from older magnifying glasses inserted halfway between where the viewer looks and the iPod itself. The boxes are then mounted into a sleeve inside the cabinet which I can remove as needed.

One concern was with accessibility, so unlike an original Kinetoscope, I made a window in the front of the cabinet for those who cannot look in from the top. To loop the media, I simply put the films and music into a playlist on iTunes and set it to repeat. The audio is a recording of an old piece of Ragtime piano music from our collections composed for the opening of Austin’s Paramount Theater in 1915. Ironically, movies, not to mention music, are moving back to the individual experience of the personal device much like the Kinetoscope was in its day. Maybe Edison understood something about film that only the technology of our era has been able to actualize.

We’ve discovered that movies really hit a nerve with just about everyone, and so we have created a way for visitors to contribute their own “Movie House Memories” by giving them a place to post them in the exhibit. I am periodically posting these memories on our Facebook page, taking that conversation one step further. Our tagline is “Discover Your Story” and it is my desire to create experiences that bring viewers deeper into our shared history as a community by sharing their own story. When a collection is donated to the archive and then used for research, this is exactly what is happening. Figuring out how to reflect that in our exhibits is “the dream” you might say. And I want that experience not only to be insightful, but fun. That’s why I built the Kinetoscope – for fun. Why not?

Thanks Steve! You can find out more about the Austin History Center by visiting their website or by checking out their Facebook page.

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Hayao Miyazaki's Ideas About Museums

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Fri, 18 May 2012 12:11:00 +0000

Hayao Miyazaki is a film artist who has created some amazing animated films for Studio Ghibli in Japan. (Some of my favorites include "Spirited Away" and "My Neighbor Totoro".)

To capture some of the spirit and history of the films and the film studio, there is a Ghibli Museum in Mitaka, Japan. I've haven't had the pleasure of visiting the Ghibli Museum in person (yet!) but as I was perusing the Ghibli Museum website, I noticed a link to "A Few Words from Executive Director Hayao Miyazaki"on the home page.

The Link leads to a mini manifesto from Director Miyazaki entitled, "This is the Kind of Museum I Want to Make!"

I think it is wonderful (and gutsy!) for the director of any museum to share the guiding principles behind the creation of their museum in such an up-front way, but I also thought some of the Director Miyazaki's thoughts were worth sharing here:

This is the Kind of Museum I Want to Make!
A museum that is interesting and which relaxes the soul
A museum where much can be discovered
A museum based on a clear and consistent philosophy
A museum where those seeking enjoyment can enjoy, those seeking to ponder can ponder, and those seeking to feel can feel
A museum that makes you feel more enriched when you leave than when you entered!

To make such a museum, the building must be...
Put together as if it were a film
Not arrogant, magnificent, flamboyant, or suffocating
Quality space where people can feel at home, especially when it's not crowded
A building that has a warm feel and touch
A building where the breeze and sunlight can freely flow through

The museum must be run in such a way so that...
Small children are treated as if they were grown-ups
The handicapped are accommodated as much as possible
The staff can be confident and proud of their work
Visitors are not controlled with predetermined courses and fixed directions
It is suffused with ideas and new challenges so that the exhibits do not get dusty or old, and that investments are made to realize that goal

The museum shop will be...
Well-prepared and well-presented for the sake of the visitors and running the museum
Not a bargain shop that attaches importance only to the amount of sales
A shop that continues to strive to be a better shop
Where original items made only for the museum are found

This is what I expect the museum to be, and therefore I will find a way to do it

This is the kind of museum I don't want to make!
A pretentious museum
An arrogant museum
A museum that treats its contents as if they were more important than people
A museum that displays uninteresting works as if they were significant

What do you think of Haya Miyazaki's ideas about museums? (Let us know in the "Comments" section below.)

Personally, his words make me want to visit the Ghibli Museum even more now!

And Director Miyazaki's mini manifesto also begs a question: What sort of message to visitors does your Executive Director post on your Museum's website?

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Portland Takeaways (InterActivity 2012 Impressions)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Sun, 13 May 2012 13:24:00 +0000

What do a Chinese Garden and a Children's Museum have in common? That's one of the things I'm thinking about as I ponder the conversations, lessons, and visits that have taken place this past week in Portland, Oregon as the annual InterActivity conference draws to a close. Over 800 Children's Museum professionals from around the world came to share the stories, triumphs, and challenges of their existing (or emerging) institutions.

Aside from obvious themes like the power of play in the lives of children, here are a few other common threads that I noticed during InterActivity:

• The Maker Movement has definitely gotten the attention of the Museum World in general, and the Children's Museum World in particular. Many sessions and hallway conversations focused on how museums can form additional partnerships with all segments of the "maker" community (inventors, artists, crafters, etc.) One big question is how to convince museum administrators to pony up the cash to hire and train additional staff to work in, and facilitate, museum maker spaces.

• Prototyping and testing: Several sessions focused on the many ways to prototype and test exhibit and program concepts with visitors. My favorite takeaway about prototyping from one of the sessions I attended was that, as far as prototyping is concerned, something is better than nothing, no matter what your museum's size or circumstances.

• Attention to detail(s) Little human touches and details really add up. In my visits to both the Portland Children's Museum and the Lan Su Chinese Garden (pictured at the top of this post) you could find small details seemingly around every corner. In both places a welcoming "human touch" was apparent. I especially admired the wonderful hand-painted murals and the thoughtful use of materials at the Children's Museum that said simply, "the person who made this really cared."

• This is your Brain on Exhibits: Many sessions and speakers dealt with the work scientists and researchers are doing that help us understand not only "what" our brains learn, but "how." Thinking about ways to translate brain research into exhibit development is fascinating. (Plus I learned more about dopamine than I ever expected to at a Children's Museum Conference!)

• The Power of The Object. Last, but certainly not least, Susie Wilkening of Reach Advisors spoke about her latest study of museums, and the memories people retain of their museum visits. A very interesting finding was how "sticky" objects are in visitors' recollections of their museum experiences --- even stickier than hands-on experiences! What this means to the bulk of Children's Museums (which are not collection-based institutions) is something very interesting to consider.

Congratulations to the ACM staff for putting on a great conference, and thanks to the staff of the Portland Children's Museum for being such great hosts!

If you attended InterActivity in Portland, what were some of your takeaways? Let us know in the "Comments" section below.

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Posting from Portland (InterActivity 2012)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:57:00 +0000

I had a great day (and night!) in beautiful Portland yesterday to kick off the 2012 InterActivity conference for Children's Museums.

The highlight (besides meeting old and new museum friends from around the world) was the evening PechaKucha event. I'm a great fan of the 20x20 presentation style (each participant gets 20 slides of 20 seconds each to make their presentation.)

We had an incredibly diverse set of topics courtesy of 10 amazing presenters!

Amongst the highlights:

Kari Jensen from OMSI started us off by talking about Green Exhibit Design (and sharing information about a great resource, The Green Exhibit Checklist.)

Sara DeAngelis from San Jose, shared her "hostess tips" for making museum visitors more comfortable.

Clifford Wagner showed us the graphs of joy, and spoke about the power of learning and practicing new skills.

Becky Lindsay from MindSplash advocated for MORE loose parts in museums.

All in all, a great event and a great start to museum mania in Portland. Many thanks to all the presenters (pictured above) and a special shout-out to my co-host Sari Boren.

P.S. Watch the Twitter-stream for ongoing conference updates this week by searching the #InterActivity2012 hash-tag.

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Looking Ahead to Portland for InterActivity 2012!

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 03 May 2012 18:02:00 +0000

I'm looking forward to the gathering of the Children's Museum clans, otherwise known as InterActivity. This year the conference will be in beautiful Portland, Oregon and will welcome folks from around North America and many international visitors as well.

I'll be giving both my brain and mouth a work out during the conference, and reconnecting with friends from Bulgaria as we start down the road to creating the new Children's Museum of Sofia!

I'm thrilled and excited to be co-hosting the conference kick-off event of PechaKucha on the evening of Wednesday May 9th in Pavilion West of the Hilton (that's the main conference hotel.) We'll have a great group of folks from around the country presenting in the zippy 20x20 format (20 slides of 20 seconds each for each presenter) and a cash bar besides. Don't miss it!

Besides having fun in a cool city (check out Voodoo Doughnut!) the best conference experiences give us all a chance to have the opportunity to connect with other folks who are thinking deeply about the current and future direction of the museum biz. Certainly two of my favorite Children's Museum "deep thinkers" are Jeanne Vergeront and Aaron Goldblatt (click on their names to find interviews I've done with each of them.) Definitely attend one of their sessions if you can.

I'll do my best to do some live tweeting (follow me on Twitter @museum_exhibits or search this year's conference hashtag #InterActivity2012 for updates) from InterActivity and at least do a recap blog post as well.

This is a really interesting time in the museum world, and certainly Children's Museums are creating a big part of that interest, so stay tuned for postings from Portland!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Occupy AAM?

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:47:00 +0000

I must admit I've become extremely ambivalent about the annual AAM Conference.

As time has gone by and the strictures (on methods and modes for presentations) and control (especially of the former "Standing Professional Committees") from AAM have increased, I often question the value (to me, at least) of attending the AAM Conference.

For those of you in the 1% (or thereabouts) of the museum profession who will be attending the festivities in the Twin Cities, I hope you'll take some time to think carefully about, and press AAM leadership on, whether changes to the Standing Professional Committee structure and representation (for example) are truly for the benefit of the 99% of the museum profession, or merely to consolidate control for the AAM administration.

Designer Toolkit: 100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 19 Apr 2012 14:35:00 +0000

Author Susan Weinschenk has put together a great reference for every type of designer called "100 Things Every Designer Needs To Know About People."

Inside this pithy volume, Weinschenk gives 100 examples of the psychology of design and why some design choices work better than others.

Dividing her 100 examples into thematic sections such as "How People See" and "How People Remember" the author not only provides illustrated examples of design approaches but provides links to research, websites, and online talks that let you explore specific design topics in more depth.

For example in item #12 "The Meanings of Color Vary by Culture" Weinschenk references the work and "Information is Beautiful" website of David McCandless and a "color wheel" that shows how different colors are viewed by different cultures.

This book is filled with the sorts of ideas that will immediately get you thinking more deeply about your design decisions.

You can get a copy of the book at Amazon or other online outlets.

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The Convivial Museum (and a CONTEST!)

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 12 Apr 2012 13:30:00 +0000

"The Convivial Museum" is a favorite book of mine because it touches on so many important aspects of the entire museum-going (and museum-making!) experience. So I was delighted to be able to review the book by Kathleen McLean and Wendy Pollock for the current issue of Exhibitionist, the journal of the National Association for Museum Exhibition (NAME.) My review first appeared in Exhibitionist (Spring 2012) Vol.31 No.1, and is reproduced below with permission.

To share my enthusiasm for both Exhibitionist and The Convivial Museum, I've decided to run a little CONTEST for ExhibiTricks readers --- I'll be giving away a copy of The Convivial Museum to one person and copies of the latest issue of Exhibitionist to two other winners.

All you have to do to be eligible to win is to either leave a comment describing your most "convivial" museum experience in the "Comments" Section below OR to sign-up to start receiving ExhibiTricks updates via email (by clicking near the top right of the blog home page) before Friday April 20th, 2012. I'll choose one random winner each from the new email subscribers list and the Comments Section for the copies of Exhibitionist, and award the copy of The Convivial Museum to the best comment overall.

So without further ado, here's my review of "The Convivial Museum"

What does it mean to foster a “convivial” museum? Co-authors Kathleen McLean and Wendy Pollock have answered that question masterfully in The Convivial Museum, a book that every museum worker should keep on a shelf nearby (or better yet, in the bag or briefcase you carry with you to work).

I found the book interesting from both a visual and structural standpoint. Rather than ticking through a checklist of convivial “dos and don’ts,” Pollock and McLean have instead packed their book with evocative black and white photographs as well as short text passages and quotations that serve as landmarks rather than mile markers to contemplate along the road to more convivial museums.. (Here each picture is certainly worth a thousand words!)

The Convivial Museum begins with a discussion of conviviality itself, then moves into broader sections of “Welcome, “ “Comfort,” “Being Alive Together” and “Convivial Practice.” Each one of these main sections addresses key components of conviviality in the form of “Entry” or “Seating,” as aspects of “Comfort,” for example. Every page offers words and images to help you consider (and reconsider) your own notions of conviviality in a museum context.

Early on in the book, the description of a dinner party effectively helps illuminate ingredients of a convivial social experience --- making people feel welcome and comfortable, and seeding interesting conversations. This social/food analogy is a good one since it emphasizes sharing and finding ways to entertain and delight guests. It sets up the notion of allowing museum visitors the time and space to approach things in a way that makes sense to them, to offer surprises, and to reward contemplation. This rather than setting visitors trudging along a path of knowledge in between paying their admission fees and exiting through the gift shop.

So what sorts of things make for a more “convivial” museum? Let’s take a brief walk through some of the key aspects that McLean and Pollock highlight in their book.

Welcome

Let’s start with “Welcome,” the place where every museum visit begins, even before you walk through the front door. As The Convivial Museum indicates, a museum with legible signs on nearby highways, a ramp for strollers and wheelchairs, a clear entrance, is truly open to all. There are thoughtful nuggets to consider here: Christopher Alexander says that if a grand museum building is not thoughtfully oriented to its surroundings, it will become “socially isolated, because you have to cross a no-man’s land to get to it.”   This is followed up with a series of images showing a variety of   approaches to museums, both inside and out.. While all these physical welcome sequences are different, they are all accessible with clear signage and orientation. Convivial.

Ways to soften the often monumental stairs and entrances of the classical “Temple of the Muses” approach are featured in the “Welcome” section as well: a long bench in front of the sidewalk entrance to the Tenement Museum, or entrance doors for cyclists during “Bike Night” at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. There are no “right answers” or dreaded “best practices” here, just good ideas to pick and choose and adapt.

Comfort

Next we follow the convivial path to consider the importance of “Comfort” in a museum-going experience. How do you make everyone in your museum, from senior citizen to babe in arms, feel “at home”? No small task, but it is surprising how often simple elements, like seating, are glossed over, or worse, deliberately eliminated from museum spaces. The call to arms (or bottoms) in this section of The Convivial Museum may well be “more places to sit, please!”

No matter how well designed an exhibition space may be, or how carefully cultivated the “vibe” of a particular institution, McLean and Pollock rightfully point out that no single space, however well designed, will meet the needs and preferences of everyone. So another takeaway from the section on “Comfort” might be to emphasize the need to vary or even change up the rhythms and types of spaces, even within the same institution. These types of possible variations are explored through words and images that ask the reader to consider where concepts such as “Ambience,” “Light,” and “Sound” fit into the convivial mix. It is interesting to consider how much emphasis museums and exhibit designers may focus on lighting while often being deaf to the cacophony inside exhibitions that detracts from the overall experience.

Being Alive Together

In the final broad section of The Convivial Museum, the authors take up the social construct of museum experiences, the notion of “Being Alive Together.” As McLean and Pollock posit, “It is not enough to bring people together. There are plenty of places where people congregate, socialize, and talk. Convivial museums deepen the conversation and foster a genuine meeting of minds by offering up somethird thing as a focus of common interest or concern.”

In a way, this part of The Convivial Museum asks the reader to move back and forth (like a visitor) between the “active” experiences and objects in the galleries, to the “interstitial” spaces like lounges and cafes that hold the entire convivial experience together. How can we encourage active participation or deep contemplation in our museums, but still offer places for a “time out” ? There’s lots of good stuff to consider here.

Convivial Practice

The Convivial Museum ends with a coda of sorts, by offering up its final section, entitled “Convivial Practice.” And here Pollock and McLean help us consider, and wrestle with, aspects of museum and exhibition practice that might well be “baked in” challenges to conviviality, like the notion of admission. If we as a field are truly willing to consider Elaine Gurian’s premise that “... general admission charges are the single greatest impediment to making our museums fully accessible...”(2006) what do we do about it? How do we unspool or recast a huge institutional and cultural notion to become more truly convivial?   Again there are no clear prescriptions here, but there are examples and thoughts to help us consider such roadblocks (or merely speed bumps?) on the road to more convivial museums.

The section on “Convivial Practice” ends by acknowledging one of the primary difficulties in becoming a more convivial practitioner, or of helping to foster or create more convivial museums: running out of time. While every museum job description seemingly includes the phrase, “and other duties as required...,” The Convivial Museum asks us to step back from our sometimes overwhelming quantitative concerns and to slow down, try things out, and talk things over. In our headlong rush to “keep our numbers up” we need to acknowledge that the qualitative aspects of our jobs and institutions are essential as well.

The Convivial Museum is very much a work that asks you to take the time to consider these qualitative properties of our museums. This book makes you think and ponder. Like a satisfying museum experience, it sets the stage carefully for contemplation and rewards your patience and consideration. Pollock and McLean help you remember the types of museum experiences that got you into this business in the first place. And what could be more convivial than that?

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ReWind: Museum "Easter Eggs"

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 00:33:00 +0000

In honor of the season, we repeat our homage/post to museum "Easter Eggs." Enjoy!

Museum designers often add "Easter Eggs" to their work. But not the brightly dyed or chocolate-y varieties --- these are more akin to the hidden "Easter Eggs" that you may stumble across (or deliberately search out) inside video games, crossword puzzles, or DVDs.

For visitors, it's fun to feel like you've found a little "secret" inside a museum building or exhibition, and for designers it's a little "trick" to reward visitors for carefully observing and examining things inside the museum.

"Exhibits as advent calendars" as Dan Spock has observed (to mix religious holiday metaphors a bit!) So here are a few of my favorite museum easter eggs:

• The Hidden Cat: Starting with the picture at the top of this posting is the "cat" hidden in the atrium of the Science Discovery Museum in Acton, MA. It's fun to point out to visitors, and it really reflects the playful nature of the building and exhibits inside.

• Secret Elves at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science: Artist Kent R. Pendleton worked on many of the Museum's dioramas, but supposedly he wasn't allowed to sign his name to his work. Instead, Pendleton included little "elfin" figures hidden throughout many of the displays. There's a great blog posting (with video) about Pendleton's retro easter eggs!

• The Magic House Mouse: The "Magic House" Children's Museum outside St. Louis has some wonderful exhibits, but one of my favorite "hidden gems" is the tiny decorated mouse hole near the baseboards in one of the galleries. If you were just whizzing around you might not ever see it, but if you're willing to get down on your hands and knees you might see (as in the photo below) a "presidential" mouse:

• The "Hidden Tunnel" at Casa Loma: Casa Loma is a gigantic historic house outside Toronto that is filled with enough crazy details to keep even little kids interested during the self-guided tours. One of the things I remember from a family visit (nearly 40 years ago!) was the cool secret tunnel, nearly 100 feet long, that was hidden behind a pivoting wall section (just like in all those scary movies --- but this was real!) that led to the Casa's underground wine cellar:

Of course some museums, like The City Museum, also in St. Louis, or the Museum of Jurassic Technology in L.A., are practically interlocking collections of "easter eggs" or in-jokes, but that's certainly one aspect that makes them so popular.

What are some of your most memorable "Museum Easter Eggs"? Let us know in the "Comments Section" below!
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Play On: An Interview with Amy Dickinson

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 29 Mar 2012 02:43:00 +0000

In Spring, a designer's mind turns to ... PLAY!

Well at least mine did when I was given the opportunity to interview Amy Dickinson from the play-minded group KaBOOM! for the most recent issue of the Association of Children's Museums' (ACM) journal called Hand to Hand.

The post that follows below is based upon that interview, and is posted with the kind permission of ACM.

By way of reference, Amy Dickinson is the manager of training and education at KaBOOM!, a national nonprofit working to create a great place to play within walking distance of every child and dedicated to advocating for play in the lives of children and communities. She holds a B.A. from Syracuse University and an M.F.A. from the University of Massachusetts, and has served in both AmeriCorps and Peace Corps.

ORSELLI: What is the minimum kit of parts or the minimum requirements to make a good playground?
DICKINSON: I have a really expansive notion of what a playground—or any playspace—can be. You don’t need a lot: any area where there are things that children can manipulate, have fun with and get engrossed in is playspace. Are you familiar with New York’s Pop-Up Adventure Playgrounds? They put together reused and recyclable materials and take them out for a day or an afternoon to a park, a block party, a street closed to traffic, a festival—any public space—and invite the community to come and play: to build, paint and create as they see fit.

ORSELLI: This collection of modular play materials builds on the tradition of adventure playgrounds, started in the U.K. and Europe, that took familiar materials and twisted them into playful situations.
DICKINSON: Exactly. Morgan Leichter Saxby, one of the two people who started Pop Up Adventure Play, was a U.K.-trained playworker who had worked with the well- known British playworker Penny Wilson. Trained playworkers are key to adventure playgrounds, and Pop-Up Adventure Playgrounds are based on similar principles: supporting and facilitating the play process and acting as advocates for child-directed play when encountering adult-led agendas.

ORSELLI: What are some of the biggest impediments to fostering children’s play in any environment?
DICKINSON: The first one is a lack of safe places to place. Only one out of every five children has a park or a playground within walking distance of his/her home. A second impediment that is definitely transforming children’s play is rising media usage among children and youth. And a lack of awareness about the importance of children’s play is impeding active play. And third? Less and less time for recess as we increasingly focus on standardized tests. Children’s time is getting more and more overscheduled—too many structured activities like soccer practice or music lessons rather than time to just roam around on their own and play in a child-directed way.

ORSELLI: When I was a kid in Detroit in the late '60s and '70s my parents didn’t have any compunction about letting me or my siblings spin around on our bikes or go off with our friends and come back hours later. And this was in the pre-cell phone era when parents couldn’t be electronically tethered to their children. Is it harder now for parents, rightly or wrongly, to turn their kids loose in unstructured play situations?
DICKINSON: Yes, and changing community life has a lot to do with it. When I think about my childhood, and the ways that I played—my parents were rarely in the picture. I roamed around freely with neighborhood groups of kids. But now in a lot of places people don’t know their community and they don’t spend time outside getting to know their neighbors either—kids don’t play in their front yards. Some parents are scared to let their children outside. They have a perception that it’s not safe—and maybe in some places it isn’t. Without knowing who lives around them, parents are frightened to let their children out into the unknown. Parents are also under a lot of pressure, including social pressure, to make sure that they are doing the best possible things for their children.

ORSELLI: “You’re a good parent!”
DICKINSON: Yes, but sometimes being a “good parent” is actually to the detriment of the child. Even with the well-meaning intentions of taking the best care and making sure that nothing happens to your child, in actuality, kids need some chances to fail, to make mistakes and to mess up so they can learn. It’s completely understandable that a parent wants everything to go well for their child, but with the social pressure from other parents, many parents feel like they’re being judged. Are they successful parents? Are they setting the child up for success by enrolling them in this activity or that sport? It has become a little cycle that some people want out of. But it’s hard when you feel that social pressure.

ORSELLI: What aspects of play that KaBOOM! fosters might be transferable to other play environments, including children’s museums?
DICKINSON: I’m not an expert on children’s museums, but last fall I visited the Providence Children’s Museum where it was wonderful to see kids so engrossed in many different child-directed play environments. Everything and everyone in that museum encourages play—interacting with multiple sensory materials, multiple environments, both indoor and outdoor. And the museum offers a lot of different ways that kids can experience risk or challenge themselves by moving up in different levels of an activity whenever they’re comfortable.

They have an awesome climber outside. In terms of physical structure, I’ve never even seen anything like it before. The whole museum is very thoughtfully designed for caregivers as well. The Power of Play exhibit, for example, has a lot of activities where children can direct their own play and try things out, like shooting little scarves through tubes. But the exhibit also has quotations, books and other prompts that encourage parents to stop and reflect on the importance of play. The exhibit both encourages children’s play while it encourages parents to stop and think about how their children are playing and the kinds of play that are occurring. One of the most eye-opening experiences for any adult is to watch children play without interfering with them and just think about what’s going on there. You gain a sense of awe about what happens when kids are playing.

ORSELLI: What is your take on indoor playspaces versus outdoor playspaces, especially in terms of safety and perceptions of safety?
DICKINSON: Play can occur anywhere. Outside play is important especially nowadays when children are spending less and less time outside. But playing inside is valuable, too. If it’s not possible to go outside because of neighborhood safety concerns, then create indoor play environments.

As far as physical safety goes, kids encounter safety concerns no matter where they play. You can get hurt doing anything. Heights come with the possibility of falling; sharp jutting things can cut people; people can get tangled in dangling ropes or fabrics. The idea is to weigh the benefits of an activity versus the risk that some type of harm might happen. When we walk, we could trip, fall and get hurt but we don’t ban walking.

Interestingly enough, if we try to make an environment too safe, we often encourage children to seek out other types of behavior that might bring the risk of more serious harm. British child development expert Tim Gill, author of the 2007 book No Fear: Growing Up in a Risk Averse Society, talks about moving from the idea of “risk aversion” to “risk management,” and that makes a lot of sense to me. By simply starting conversations about play and risk and by encouraging people to observe children’s play and to think and talk about what they see happening—the risks they see being taken and the things that might be learned from them—can do a lot in terms of changing attitudes. And remembering how we played as children and by making it a point to take time to play—to experience the wonder and discovery of it for ourselves—helps us understand and value it.

ORSELLI: Are there any specific play researchers that you admire?
DICKINSON: The American Academy of Pediatrics’ statement on play is one of the best and most comprehensive documents. It includes not just impediments to children’s play, but the benefits and value of play for children and for families. It’s easy to access online as a free, downloadable PDF. Dr. Ken Ginsburg, who I believe was its main author, is an eloquent spokesperson on behalf of children’s play, their rights and general wellbeing.

I also love The Playworks Primer written by British playworker Penny Wilson and published by the Alliance for Childhood. It captures what’s important about play, but is written in such a whimsical way that it doesn’t lose the magic of play. And is also available online as a free, downloadable PDF. Wilson is another powerful play advocate and somehow manages to capture your imagination and make you remember what it’s like to be involved in play—to give yourself over to it. That’s still an important feeling for children.

Joe Frost’s decades-long body of work on children’s play and designing environments and identifying obstacles to children’s play is invaluable. Roberta Golinkoff and Kathy Hirsh-Pasek are doing great work on the value of play in educational settings. The work of Tim McGill, mentioned earlier, on the topic of risk has helped shape the way I talk with people about what to include in play environments and how important challenge is for children—thinking about risk benefits, not just being averse to the idea of risk.

ORSELLI: Do you mourn the loss of monkey bars, seesaws or their equivalents?
DICKINSON: The seesaw is my absolute favorite piece of playground equipment. I have a scar on my hand from falling off a seesaw. It’s ironic that I lament the fact that it’s really difficult to find an old teeter-totter, just a plank of wood going up and down. But equipment like teeter-totters teach us to overcome our fears; they also teach us to fall down and get back up again.

ORSELLI: And to be careful with who’s on the other side of that seesaw!
DICKINSON: Right—social learning! It also teaches us how to do it better the next time. Learning self-regulation and how to work in groups comes into play a lot when kids have the opportunity to direct their play. Our tendency is to intervene when we see children roughhousing, which I relate to this whole conversation about risk.

Last fall I was working at the Ultimate Block Party in Baltimore where we had Imagination Playground blocks set up. Two young boys were sword fighting and hitting each other with foam pool noodles. I almost intervened, but I thought, “Practice what you preach. Let them go.” And so I did, and no other adults stepped up either. They played like this for a long time, and it came close to ending when one of the boys got a bloody nose at which point they both put the noodles down. The bloody-nose kid walked away and got a Kleenex. When his bloody nose was over, they went back to playing but in a more restrained way. They had taught themselves some limits—how much they could hit and not have someone get hurt.

ORSELLI: Have you noticed any commonalities or contrasts among people in different parts of the world in the way they think about play or play environments?
DICKINSON: Wherever you go, kids play in very similar ways although they might use different materials, from manufactured soccer balls to balls made from rags tied together. When I lived in Paraguay, my thinking about children’s play underwent a revolution, and it had more to do with the adults’ attitudes towards children and their play. Kids played with things there that would shock people in the United States. Paraguayan children are given a lot of independence, but they also live in very tight-knit communities.

Big extended families live near each other, and people often stay in the communities in which they grew up so they know each other really well. I was in a fairly rural area where everyone knew all their neighbors. This allowed children a lot of freedom to run around and play with whatever they could find. There was a play structure in the town where I lived that would never be considered safe here in the United States. And interestingly enough, no one ever got hurt playing on it. Kids would play with whatever they could find, like scraps of lumber. They made their own mini-adventure playgrounds. And they just ran around a lot.

The other thing I noticed there that you don’t see very often in the United States was cross-age play or multi-age play—two-year-olds up to sixteen-year-olds all playing together. If I could change anything about play or community life in the United States it would be more opportunities for multi-age play. Young kids learn a lot when they play with older kids, who in turn learn through their teaching and watching out for the little ones. When you give kids independence they can manage a fair bit of it.

ORSELLI: Other than your seesaw scar, do you have any other play-related memories?
DICKINSON: My dad was in the military, so we moved around quite a bit when I was young. Seems like we always ended up in developing towns, often in the Southwest, with lots of building going on. We didn’t have playgrounds or parks near us so we would go into houses under construction and find materials laying around—boards, nails and other hardware—and take them and go off and make forts. (Now when I think about it, it reminds me of an adventure playground.) We didn’t think of it as stealing. We considered scrap materials just laying around up for grabs.

Once, my brother and I and a couple other neighborhood kids took some lumber from a construction site and made a little clubhouse in a nearby stand of trees. My brother, the clubhouse president, inscribed his name “Casey Dickinson, President,” and phone number. My dad got a phone call the next day from the construction workers!

We also played a lot of games that sound really boring in retrospect but they were endlessly fascinating to us. We played physicist, which involved turning your bike upside down and using it as your “laboratory equipment.” We spent hours putting reeds or sticks through the spokes or pouring water over our pedals or things like that.

ORSELLI: Describe your dream play environment—the sky’s the limit.
DICKINSON: If you have dirt, water and materials you can move around, that covers it. When I think of my dream play environment, I think of my neighborhood growing up. There was a ditch behind our house. When it rained it would flash flood with all this rushing water and mud to play around in. There were little sandy parts, with reeds and other plants growing that you could pick and put together to make things. And other kids played there. A favorite playground is one where you have people to play with.

Thanks Amy! It was fun interviewing you.

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The Missing Letter

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 15:31:00 +0000

I had never been to a museum like this! Around 1971, my family took a trip to Toronto. Just a few years before, in 1969, Ontario Science Centre (OSC) had opened up and immediately started changing ideas about what an interactive science museum could be. (In one of those zeitgeist-y moments in history, the Exploratorium opened in 1969 also.)

I'm not even sure how my parents found out about OSC and knew to take my brothers and me there, but from the moment we rode the escalators "through the trees" to enter the exhibit halls we were all excited and showing each other new things we had found. In addition to the interactive components, I know I was especially fascinated by the live demonstrations --- somebody just blew a hole through a brick with a gigantic laser!

After we returned home to Detroit, I wrote a "fan letter" to the scientists at Ontario Science Centre and asked them if they could send me science experiments that I could do at home. To my delight, a week or two later, I received a kind reply on official OSC letterhead with a little booklet of cool chemistry demonstrations. WOW!

One of the experiments allowed you to create a "carbon snake" with sulfuric acid(!) and sugar. I showed my grade school science teachers the letter and chemistry experiments, and asked if they had any sulfuric acid I could borrow. They did! So I took the big glass bottle with the faded label home as fast as my bike would carry me.

I didn't have any beakers, but my mom thought an empty jar would do the trick. So I went into the basement laundry room with my supplies and started pouring sulfuric acid into the jar that had some sugar in the bottom. Once the acid hit the sugar, bubbling and smoking commenced and an evil black looking cylinder snaked up and out of the mouth of the jar accompanied by the strong smell of burning sugar. "Look! look!" I said to my family as I showed them the "carbon snake." I tried other experiments with different amounts of sugar and acid to see how I could change the resulting "snake." Everything was going great until I had the bright idea of quickly pouring some of the sulfuric acid into the jar with sugar in it and then screwing the lid on to see what would happen.

BOOOOOM!

Thank goodness the laundry sink was deep and made of sturdy metal, since I hadn't been wearing any gloves or goggles. After the smoke cleared, and I cleaned up all the broken glass that the deep sink had captured after the jar exploded (and after my mom was done freaking out!) I learned a valuable (and memorable) lesson about the effects of containing a strong exothermic reaction in a closed jar.

Somewhere along the line, that letter and booklet of chemistry experiments have gone missing, although I had them for a long time. I often wonder if any museum would be crazy enough to send some kid experiments using sulfuric acid anymore. Probably not.

I also think of all those letters I sent to museums (in pre-email and Web days!) asking for a job when I was about to graduate from college. And how much the letters that offered even a small bit of encouragement or an idea or suggestion meant to me, especially compared to the obvious form letter rejections --- or no response at all.

Those messages that we as museum workers send, intentionally or unintentionally, can have a big impact on our visitors, and our potential future colleagues.

Electronic communication and the world-wide reach of the Web means that I often get messages from people asking for advice or for jobs, and I really try to give a thoughtful answer to each one of those folks who took the time to write me --- because I still remember how much receiving that letter from the Ontario Science Center meant, and I suppose still means, to me.

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Design Inspiration: Project RE_

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 13:27:00 +0000

"Using familiar things in unfamiliar ways" is one wonderful definition of creativity.

Project RE_ is a great place to get ideas that play with the notions of upcycling (increasing the value of broken or unused objects by giving them new functions or forms) and creative reuse.

Project RE_ was started by Samuel Nelson Bernier, an industrial designer from Quebec as a university research project.

There are some really novel DIY ideas on the Project RE_ site, and each idea features a materials list and instructions for you to make your own "upcyclables"!

So look through your junk drawer or attic and head over to Project RE_ to get inspired to start your own project!

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A Repertoire of Experiences: An Interview with Maria Mortati

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 08 Mar 2012 12:24:00 +0000

Maria Mortati is a Museum Exhibit Developer and Project Planner. She lives and works in the Bay Area on a variety of projects that span the temporary to long term, and are often experimental in nature.

Maria was kind enough to answer a few questions for this ExhibiTricks interview:

What’s your educational background?
I have a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Colorado in Boulder and an MFA in Design from Stanford University. I also spent some time in between those two degrees studying graphic design. I learned User Interface design on the job in the 90’s and taught in HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and basic mechanical engineering design classes at grad school.

What got you interested in Museums?
I was always interested in art, drawing, and design from a young age. My parents took us to museums, as did my school, sometimes unrelentingly. They let us know this was important in some way, even if I wanted to (and did) kick my brother.

Museums and galleries became my go to place as a young person. As a teenager, contemporary art museums especially resonated. Modern art at that time was still “modern”. I used to haunt the galleries in Greenwich Village and go home at night with my friends and draw. Nerds, I know.

After the inevitable post-BFA pay-the-rent-jobs, I worked in visual and user interface design for about a decade. It was fun, I learned a lot about engagement, identity, and teamwork.

After a while I wanted to do more conceptual work and work on larger ideas and environments than the Internet offered, so I went to get my MFA. During those 3 years I did an installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and a series of thesis projects that could be best summarized by “is it exhibit or is it art?” They were physical, highly interactive and often social in nature.

From there, the melding of my new creative skills and the museum world seemed a natural next step.

Given your varied background, is your approach to exhibition development different in the context of different museum types?
Do you mean I take a different approach based on the project? Not really, there is always the essential getting to know you, and development phases that help structure the work. Given that these are often large projects, good fences make good neighbors.

What is the San Francisco Mobile Museum project?
The San Francisco Mobile Museum (SFMM) is a “pop-up” project I developed in 2009. I’ve had two exhibitions and it has shown in a number of locations, primarily outdoors in the Bay Area. The SFMM is a platform that can be broken down to fit in my car. Past exhibits have been participatory with the public responding to a theme or prompt by making something. The next exhibition will be moving away from that model, and will focus more on onsite engagement. It will be called “Observatorium” and I’ll be posting about its progress on our blog.

(If you want to learn more about the San Francisco Mobile Museum project, there is an article on it coming out in Spring 2012 issue of Exhibitionist.)

Tell us a little bit about how your mobile projects inform your exhibit design work?
They help give me some grounding in reality. My work projects tend to span years into the future and don’t offer much room for experimentation. However, there is often a lot on the line. Having the SFMM there to test things out gives me some solid experience (if even on a tiny scale) with an idea or an approach. It’s not that I’m exactly testing out an idea for a specific project, but if I want to be a part of the conversation, then I need to be participating in the conversation.

A project I did in 2010 with Machine Project at the Hammer Museum (The Giant Hand) was also very important in terms of how it shaped my professional perspective and gave me insights. I had a chance to be both artist and designer, so I stumbled into some unique issues and challenges that museums face and got to be creative while doing it.

What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?
The report recently released by Machine Project on the above-mentioned residency at the Hammer Museum. And not just because I’m in it! It’s a great resource for exploring the potential of a museum.

Exhibit developers come in all types- that's’ good because museums do too. So there is no one compendium I turn to, but I do visit a lot of museums, take pictures, and write about it when possible. It’s good to always be developing a repertoire of experiences.

What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing aspects of storytelling into their exhibitions?
Storytelling or narrative is a tool or technique that is quite powerful- when dealing with human stories (as we often are). They are the glue that can give a visitor a point of access into a world of ideas.

With the SFMM, we let the visitors “tell” their own stories about their objects, but we provided the framework. Another project that did this very well was the Denver Community Museum, who we collaborated with on our inaugural exhibit. It’s a good and simple mechanism to draw participants out and the public in.

Storytelling isn’t the only approach. For example, Olafur Elliasson’s work: would it be more impactful if it had a storyline?

Each work, exhibit, or installation has its own set of options. The bigger question that helps sort out which way to go is what is your ultimate goal for this exhibit? There is a logic that flows from there to help drive which techniques to play with.

I tend to approach exhibits with the question: what can I do that would be fun or innovative to explore this idea? For the visitor, the institution, and of course, myself.

For smaller museums, determining the best impact you can have with your resources at hand is the central challenge and their greatest source of strength. It is their key differentiator. Edit down to a few powerful ideas and then save the others for another exhibition. Then find the most impactful technique to bring that choice to life.

What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?

I think museums need to excel at creating and joining ideas in ever-freer ways, and less focused on traditional notions of silo-ed curation and exhibition. I’m not alone in this idea and I’m also not saying throw our expertise out the door though. Keep it.

We have established dominance in framing and synthesizing concepts, now lets get serious about “engagement”. We are uniquely poised to claim this space, but it’s been slow going due to our institutional make-up and value systems. I'm talking about a paradigm shift from collect and preserve to select and engage.

If a museum could focus on one area it would be to foster an outlook that they are a place of creative production. One way to get there is by having a sense of flexibility with their content. Then having some staff that can design, develop, and produce. Be open to being sites of creation by others such as artists, scientists, thinkers and doers.

This takes a sense of experimentation that is often hard to make room for, but what else are we going to do if not be the best?

What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?

Oh wow that’s hard. There are so many that I see and they are incredibly diverse. For nostalgia the MoMA, for local I like the diversity at the de Young, for wonder the Exploratorium of course, and for power of story on a visit, the Bird Museum in Iceland.

Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?

At the moment I’m working with the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art on a new exhibition plan. They have been doing innovative work engaging the public with art, and they want to push the envelope further.

I’m also working on the next iteration of the San Francisco Mobile Museum.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?

I’d turn my garage and the apartment in our house into a collaborative exhibition residency with ongoing talks, exhibits, and studios. It would be a blast.

Thanks again to Maria for sharing her insights with us! To find out more about Maria Mortati and her work, check out her website and blog.

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Rhythm in Exhibitions

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:49:00 +0000

Why is there such a desire to touch things in an art museum? Does all that concentrated looking create a pent up demand to use our other senses? Or do we long to get a better sense of how an artist created something, and the materials they used? Can a museum experience be "interactive" if you don't touch anything?

I was thinking about these things after a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with a group of my graduate students from Bank Street's Museum Education program. (Yes, that's us touching sculptures in the picture above.)

Not in any way to pick on MoMA (since it's one of my favorite museums) but the galleries there (and in many other museums) often seem to lose track of the intellectual and design values of rhythm.

Rhythm in the sense of changing up and varying the sensory stimuli and patterns for visitors. In the case of MoMA, a visitor is faced with the classic "pure white box" style gallery repeated over and over. And within each pure white space, artworks are arranged linearly or in grid patterns on the walls or floors. Couldn't an occasional gallery wall be painted red or blue?

I'd contend that one reason for the amazing success of recent shows by Tim Burton and Olafur Eliasson at MoMA was (aside from the great art) that each installation deliberately broke away from the white/grid aesthetic.

And lack of rhythm in exhibitions isn't just an Art Museum issue. My kids once remarked on a History Museum exhibition as a "bunch of old brown things" because the furniture, textiles, and documents on display were all old and brown! The visual rhythm of "brown" and "old" became a sort of unvarying metronome that overwhelmed the ultimate content goals of the designers. Each object in every glass case was set on sepia or earth-toned backgrounds as well.

Have some museum genres become like particular radio stations for both exhibition designers and visitors? Tune into pristine white spaces on the Art Museum channel, and dimly lit galleries full of "old brown stuff" on the History Museum station?

Are the typical design "rhythms" of many science centers filled with bright colors, neon, and wildly varying architectural forms really conducive to thinking deeply about tricky scientific content?

How can we as exhibition creators find our "design rhythm" to help create more interesting museum spaces and content-driven experiences for our visitors?

Please share your own experiences or examples of rhythm in exhibitions (good or bad) in the "Comments" section below!

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Hidden Tech and Stealth Evaluation?

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 23 Feb 2012 02:12:00 +0000

I'm hoping ExhibiTricks readers might provide some good examples of two interesting types of exhibit/design challenges:

• "Hidden" Tech: by which I mean exhibit components that make clever use of technology by making it integral to the design and essentially invisible to the user. The exact opposite of the "shiny new toy" syndrome where touch screens (or tablets, or iPads, or projection surfaces) are so out front that it looks like a Best Buy store.

• "Stealth" Evaluation: moving away from people with clipboards (or the digital equivalents) to looking for exhibit design aspects that provide both quantitative and qualitative data about visitor experiences and content acquisition. An example (pictured above) is the "Would you go to Mars?" digital counter gates. A matching set of gates is placed at both the entrance and exit of the Ontario Science Centre's Facing Mars traveling exhibition. Visitors (and museum staff) can see how opinions might be different before (and after) finding out more details about potential space missions to Mars inside the exhibition.

What are some of your favorite examples of hidden tech and stealth evaluation? Post your examples (with links to websites and/or images if possible) in the "Comments" section below, or send me an email with more info.

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Thanks Dad!

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Tue, 14 Feb 2012 18:07:00 +0000

Today would have been my father Orlando Orselli's 78th birthday.

My dad worked most of his adult life for The Ford Motor Company, first at the Rouge Plant, and then at the World Headquarters building (The "Glass House") in Dearborn, Michigan. He was a Stationary Steam Engineer, which basically means he worked with BIG boiler systems.

Even though he didn't go to college, my dad instilled a love for books and learning, and the importance of education, upon myself and my two younger brothers while we were growing up in Detroit.

Because he worked the midnight shift, he made time to go on school (or scout or Boys Club) field trips during the day and then take a nap before he would drive to work later that night. He thought it was important that my brothers and I helped him fix things around the house and knew the names and uses of the tools in his basement "workshop".

When people ask me how I got into the museum business, I am sure memories of the day when my father took me when I was little (by myself, without my mom and brothers, for some reason) to Detroit's "Cultural Center" to visit the Historical Museum (the streets of "Old Detroit"!) and the Children's Museum (things I could touch!) and the Institute of Arts (Mummies!) all in one long afternoon have something to do with it. Many, many family trips involved museums, or zoos, or nature centers.

Even though my career choice might have puzzled my father a little bit, he always told me, and other people, how proud he was of the work I was doing.

Please never underestimate how important museums can be to people, especially kids and the adults they will become.

Thanks Dad!

Another Visit With The Exhibit Doctor: Don't Touch The Walls!

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 15:43:00 +0000

In our continuing "Exhibit Doctor" feature, here's a common problem that ExhibiTricks reader Mary Anna Murphy raised:

This isn't a very knotty problem, but I've run across it again and again in installing 2d works in a non-traditional gallery setting such as a mall, an office that worships its walls, or even the Russell Senate Office building rotunda. None of those places have walls that want nails or hangers. I'd be interested in seeing how other folks have managed to make their displays. Oh, and it always has to be low budget.

Ian Simmons from the Centre for Life in the UK puts in a vote for Velcro:

We have the same problem as Mary Anne in some of the places where I need to hang 2D stuff, and I swear by industrial grade Velcro, which avoids having to make holes for anything. This can keep up an amazing weight of stuff pretty securely, depending on how much you use, but it does need the venue to be relatively sanguine about any paintwork as it will take paint with it when peeled sometimes, but if they are cool about having someone just come round to do a touch up it works really well. It has to be proper Velcro brand Velcro though, none of the knock-offs are anywhere near as good.

Thanks, Ian! (You can find "industrial strength" Velcro at Amazon, amongst other suppliers.)

For a different approach, Dana and Kathy Dawes from ExhibitShop shared some of their work from the Palouse Discovery Science Center (PDSC) in Pullman, Washington (pictured below.)

While we haven’t come up with anything particularly elegant, we’ve come up with two solutions to hanging 2D displays in the parts of our local science center that has concrete walls. One is to use GridWall panels connected into three-sided prisms, “X” or “H” shapes, or zigzag walls. We’ve been able to get these from industrial/commercial liquidation sales for very reasonable prices. We like them in our space because they are not visually intrusive; the downside is that some people don’t care for the industrial look.

The other solution is to use door slabs connected together to create temporary walls. We can get hollow-core, primed hardboard door slabs made up in sizes from 1-6 x 6-0 to 4-0 x 8-0 and the prices are very reasonable. Our favorite way to assemble them is with bed-rail hangers mortised into the edges of the doors. If necessary, we’ve finished the exposed edges with tee-molding or stained/varnished wood. To make them easier to assemble, we have routed slots in the bottoms as well and use a t-shaped wall brace to align the bottoms of the panels.

Nice work! Thanks for sharing Dana and Kathy.

Hopefully those ideas will help Mary Anna (and other museum/exhibit/design folks) break through some institutional "walls" (at least design-wise!)

Have some of your own "off the wall" design ideas to share on this topic? Let us know in the "Comments" section below. Also feel free to pose your own question or design challenge to The Exhibit Doctor below as well. Lastly, don't forget to check out previous Exhibit Doctor posts.

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Designer's Toolkit: Gear Ties

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 19:40:00 +0000

Gear Ties are one of those forehead-slapping inventions that makes you wonder "why didn't I think of that?" Basically, Gear Ties are reusable rubber twist ties that come in a variety of lengths, thicknesses, and colors. While one of the primary purposes of Gear Ties is to wrap around things like computer or electrical cords, you can also make simple hooks or hangers from them, or temporarily bind things together as well.

The body of each Gear Tie is striated with parallel incised ridges, so they stay in place.

While all these attributes are great to keep any museum workshop or designer's space in order, I couldn't help playing around with the Gear Ties as toys and seeing the possibilities to use them as exhibit pieces (either for building or creative spaces) or to use during the exhibit prototyping process by holding pieces together or for changing configurations rapidly.

You can see the range of Gear Ties yourself over at Amazon. Let me know how you end up using them!

(A special tip of the ExhibiTricks hat to Peggy Monahan for showing me Gear Ties in the first place.)

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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ReWind: Building Internal Capacity

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:46:00 +0000

In honor of an article I have in the current (January-February 2012) issue of ASTC's Dimensions magazine entitled, "Internal Capacity: Making a Good Museum Great," I thought I'd reprise the post below. Enjoy!

If there is one silver lining to the continually oppressive economic news, it's the opportunity for museums and other organizations to focus (or re-focus) on building their internal capacity.

It might sound funny for an independent museum professional like myself to advocate for museums being able to develop and create programs and exhibits internally, but I am a strong believer that all types of museums should build upon the strengths of their existing staff and other institutional resources, rather than automatically looking for outside help. (See my recent posting on the importance of in-house exhibit workshops, for example.)

One way for museums to stretch their resources in these tough times is to look for ways to increase such internal capacity.

Art Museums, as one obvious instance, are starting to think more carefully about how the items in their collections might be reinterpreted or redisplayed to create new exhibitions, or even "mini-exhibitions" of a few works, rather than booking traveling shows, or trying to mount expensive "blockbusters."

Any type of museum could benefit from taking a fresh look at their programs and exhibits to try and creatively, and economically, improve them. Is there a way to slightly change or reconfigure a troublesome exhibit component to make it more interesting for visitors? Can you rethink or revitalize an exhibit in storage, and bring it out of retirement? What about building upon a current news item to rapidly develop a combined education program and mini-exhibition on the topic?

So why not try to stretch your museum's ideas (and budget!) by thinking some more about internal capacity?

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What Real World Advice Would You Give to a Museum Education Grad Student?

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 00:57:00 +0000

Once again I'll have the pleasure of teaching the graduate class in Exhibition Development at Bank Street College this semester.

While I'm continually impressed by the high caliber of the students I work with, I always feel compelled to share "real world" museum advice with them --- especially with the job market so tight.

So I'd like to harness the brain power of all my ExhibiTricks readers and ask you to please share (anonymously if you'd like) in the Comments Section below one bit of advice about the museum business that will help my grad students as they move forward and consider their place in the museum ecosystem.

Thanks!

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Turn the Content Around and Around: An Interview with Lyn Wood

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Tue, 10 Jan 2012 13:10:00 +0000

Lyn Wood founded Hands On! in 1984 as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation for “the promotion and expansion of science education opportunities through the development of participatory science centers and youth museums,” particularly in communities that do not have such resources for children and families. Shortly after its founding, Hands On! teamed with the Junior League of St. Petersburg, Florida, to co-found Great Explorations, the Hands On Museum, and helped operate it for several years.

That accomplished, she spun off Hands On! to apply her knowledge of exhibition design, visitor behavior and operational sustainability to more than 50 projects all over the world. Projects range from helping museums that are in the process of re-imagining their institutions to small start-up museums to expansions of major science centers. Lyn is pictured above in a Hands On! exhibit at the Don Harrington Discovery Center in Amarillo, Texas. Photo: © Oscar Williams.

Lyn was kind enough to share her thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers:

What’s your educational background?

My Bachelors degree is in Industrial and Environmental Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology. I think I was the only native Miamian in school there. Experiencing cold and snow for the first time caused me to stay indoors and attend classes or spend long hours on projects in their wonderful shops. I was able to score a great first job doing commercial exhibition design back in Miami, but by then my heart was (perhaps always was) strongly leaning toward the museum field. I received my Masters in Museum Education from George Washington University and was slightly less cold than when in Rochester.

What got you interested in museums?
My family is a tribe of adventurous travelers, and we marked time abroad pre-travel tour days. Pan Am and Eastern Airlines were doing a booming business from us then. My parents always took us through museums, and they all seemed fascinating and strange to me. I don’t think I actually encountered an American museum until I was a young adult and, by then, I was marinated in the eccentric collections and presentations I had seen while growing up and traveling.

You can imagine me in graduate school with all kinds of enthusiastic questions about these new-to-me American museums. And let’s just say, back then when I was taught, children’s museums and science centers were not yet on the syllabus—not quite accepted into the hallowed halls of museum academia. So, of course, I developed an immediate thirst to learn more about what, at the time, seemed forbidden. This ultimately led to the founding of Hands On! Inc.

How does working with museums worldwide to create exhibits inform your design process?
Given that I already had a healthy amount of exposure to different cultures, it has been relatively easy to work on the fantastic variety of projects that have come our way. I think that having such basic curiosity about the world inevitably makes great questions come up, causing delightful explorations that can then lead toward interesting solutions.

Tell us a little bit about how your industrial design skills inform your exhibit design work?
I am very open to what I don’t know as a designer, but if you can ask good questions, then a new universe of design answers open up. Getting to good design solutions really is mostly about opening up the possibilities. That being said, if I were not surrounded by a host of smart, talented people, then I would not get the added benefit of different voices, skills and knowledge to help drive a project to an interesting and rewarding conclusion.

What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?
I am not someone who spends a great deal of time online, and the literature I tend to read is, well, literature. I think I gain more information about exhibition development from talking to people in the field. I find that our field is really quite generous about sharing information, and we try and do our part in sharing things we have learned as well. I like the camaraderie and earnestness that is a big part of our field.

What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing a broader “worldview” into their exhibitions?
I am thoroughly convinced that just about anything can be turned into something interesting and worthy of inspection. You just need to turn the content around and around until it has a compelling twist or angle to it. If you can see the content as something beautiful or even strange, then perhaps you are on to something that will intrigue visitors.

What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?
I am a fan of the basic core of what I see our field can do. Life can be tough, so if we can inspire, help folks get a fun taste for learning and maybe even facilitate bringing someone into a lovely state of wonder, that’s so important. I am attaching my NYC sister’s letter to me just after 9/11 that touched on just this thing. It doesn’t get more basic than that.

What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?
The Hamar Bispegaard Museum designed by the beloved Norwegian architect, Svere Fehn. The building, delicately suspended over medieval ruins, serves as structure for both preservation and a grand space for exploration. You can take in the ruins of this 12th century cathedral while perusing early Norwegian artifacts presented in utterly the most handsome way I have ever seen. Now there was a designer who wasn’t constrained by any precedent of exhibition design whatsoever! Here are a couple of my photos plus some links.

Here’s an artifact lovingly presented (top image on this blog): http://iitcoa3rdyr.wordpress.com/tag/sverre-fehn/

Here'a a Flickr set of the building: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/53521870@N06/4970197411/?q=hamar%20bispegaard%20museum

Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?
Imagine walking into an Enchanted Physics Forest. Well, that is exactly what we are making right now for Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena! An arroyo will soon replace the empty plot of land. The trees will be going in soon. Mixed in with the forest will be plenty of different-scaled interactives to explore and contemplate. A family might just sit down under the shade of a tree for a while. We are absolutely thrilled to be working on our first major outdoor exhibition and environment.

And all this we get to do with the wonderful scientist Dr. Mike Brown, the CalTech professor of Plantetary Astronomy (and author of “How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming”), who is a board member at Kidspace. This generous and gifted (funny too!) scientist has been such a pleasure to work with as we have developed the Enchanted Physics Forest. He can hardly wait to play there together with his 5-year-old daughter.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?

If money were no object then we might as well place it in Paris where we all would be required to meet often for lunch at a café while brainstorming how to reach the incredible vision that our client has laid out to our crack team. You would be there, of course, Paul. And, aside from all my pals here at Hands On!, I would also want bring back from the dead my favorite architect Sverre Fehn to include his sensibilities. The artist Theo Jansen would be with us too. Perhaps it is a museum/laboratory on biophilia. We all would be required to have an extended stay at our client’s country home in Brittany to do extensive prototyping, and Theo would bring his Strandbeests.

Thanks again to Lyn for her thoughtful responses! To find out more about Hands On! check out their website.

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Who Searches For Museums?

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:55:00 +0000

Google Correlate is a type of search engine off-shoot that finds search patterns which correspond with real-world trends. For instance, researchers noticed the relationships between "flu related" searches (such as "what should I do if my child has a high fever?" or "what is the best cold medicine?") on Google to the spread of actual flu cases around the U.S.

The exploration of such relationships was the genesis of Google Correlate. I thought it would be fun to see what sorts of search correlations show up when the term "museums" was used.

As you can see in the screen shot above, the term "breeding" has one of the highest correlations with the term "museums"! Now before you start increasing the number of "Singles Programs" or "Adult Only Nights" at your museum, you should know that when I did a regular Google search on the term "breeding" the bulk of the initial results relate to animal husbandry and genetics in animals.

Perhaps something of more immediate practical use for museum folks are the terms "rock climbing" and "club." It looks like there may be practical programming and exhibit opportunities to capitalize on there.

The last cluster of search relationships tie into homes and housing concerns, as well as garage plans. Do search engine users (or real estate agents!) see a relationship between museums in a community and home values? Could those with garage plans be thinking of creating their own museums?

There are lots of fun ways to play with search data correlations (including varying time sequences and differences between countries) in Google Correlate. Who knows what insights you might find by clicking on over to do a little data mining specifically related to potential exhibit topics, or even the name of your museum?

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Your 2012 New Year's (ExhibitFiles) Resolutions

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 19:04:00 +0000

I normally hate the idea of New Year's resolutions. Why wait until January to start making improvements?

But here are two easy resolutions for museum/exhibit/design folks to make (and keep!) as the yearly calendar transition approaches: 1) Join ExhibitFiles 2) Post something on ExhibitFiles.

What is ExhibitFiles you ask? ExhibitFiles is a website (funded by the National Science Foundation) for museum professionals (and aspiring museum professionals) from around the world to post Reviews of exhibits they've seen, or to post Case Studies of exhibition projects they have been involved with. (There's even a category called "Bits" that lets you quickly post bite-sized observations about a particular exhibit element or feature you may have seen.)

So what are you waiting for? Click on over to the ExhibitFiles website now. (It's a lot easier than resolving to lose ten pounds!)

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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More Voices at the Table: An Interview with Chris Burda

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 11:00:00 +0000

Chris Burda is Senior Exhibit Developer with the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM). She translates science concepts for lay audiences through art, narrative and creative learning experiences. Over 25 years at SMM, Chris has had a hand in the development, design, production and management of many exhibits and public programs. Chris is currently lead developer on an SMM team charged with inventing engineering exhibits for the new Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas.

While doing graduate work in San Francisco in 1985, Chris was employed as an assistant graphic designer and exhibit builder at the Exploratorium. The experience piqued her continuing interest in the physics of natural phenomena and honed her ability to communicate difficult subjects. In 1992 she joined staff at the Minnesota Children’s Museum to help develop their programmatic master plan and lead the development of a science gallery for young children. Chris is a regular presenter at museum conferences and consults with non-profits in exhibit and project planning. As a community activist and volunteer, Chris applies her talents to climate change education and action. She looks forward to skating and cross-country skiing.

Chris was kind enough to answer a few questions for ExhibiTricks readers:

What’s your educational background?
I have a Bachelors degree in art education from UW Madison, which was an interesting place in the 70s. I keep my K-12 teacher's certification current.

In the mid-80s I took time out for a Masters degree in museum studies at John F. Kennedy University near San Francisco. I tailored the program to include several internships at the Exploratorium. My thesis examined techniques science museums use to communicate controversial issues. Parts of this project included an evaluation of the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Bionics and Transplants exhibit and a survey of all ASTC museums. It should have been a doctorate degree!

I’d like to note an excellent Project Management course I picked up some years back from University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, taught by Best Buy’s lead project manager. Assignments immersed participants in team-based reality projects that addressed current situations in local and regional businesses. Post-it notes were a ready staple, which only fed my worsening addiction.

What got you interested in Museums?
What drew me to the museum field, rather than any heart-felt interest, was a tip from a friend who knew of a job opening in the fabrication shop at the Science Museum of Minnesota (SMM). Exhibits Director Terry Sateran, who came from the theater world, hired me on the spot. He was building a new museum and needed folks with diverse skills. I came with experience in art, theater, education and fabrication. I learned they all come together in creating public spaces and visitor experiences.

Flashback to elementary school. Field trips introduced me to the Chicago giants—the Shedd Aquarium and Brookfield Zoo, Adler Planetarium, Field Museum of Natural History, Museum of Science and Industry, and the Art Institute. The little gems around town were never on the itinerary.

Early museum memories include a real submarine, suspended airplanes and an amazing model train; a theatrical immersion deep into a coal mine; and cave people dioramas. I can’t forget the dinosaurs and mammoth; the mysterious Foucault pendulum (which I never understood); a series of nine pickled human fetuses; and Colleen Moore’s elaborate Fairy Castle. Seeing live zoo animals—swinging monkeys, leaping dolphins and pacing wolves—was interesting, but I always felt sorry for them. Also memorable were smelly lunchrooms, crowds and long bus rides.

Akin to museum experiences of my youth were annual family excursions to Marshall Field’s to see their Christmas windows. The displays magically animated scenes from a story, with mechanical characters and props enacting a tale that unfolded as you walked along State Street. (Over years they became less animated and, finally, useless.) A visit to Santa capped off this holiday tradition, along with lunch in the Walnut room, sitting next to the crackling wood fire and the multi-story Christmas tree, which gawkers glimpsed through the clerestory as they rode the escalators.

Being raised by a first grade teacher helped set the stage. Her classroom was a museum, full of treasures from nature, Native American culture, her own family history and the livelihoods and hobbies of her students’ families, who regularly did show-and-tells. She was like Ms. Frizzle in the Magic School Bus, often role-playing characters in costume. I helped illustrate murals and posters for her bulletin boards. Readying her room was a family project. It was our entrée into object-based learning, entrenched in personal story making.

How does working with local communities to create exhibits inform your design process?
It’s a wake-up call. I’m due for another jolt. Working with communities keeps me in touch with reality. The real-world work of community groups out there in the field reminds me that science museums hardly have a corner on informal science education.

In working with community groups to plan, develop and design exhibits and other projects, I learn how important it is to capture everyone’s ideas along the way. People need to feel heard. I use an active listening process, recording, grouping and connecting ideas visually at the same time, sketching little pictures to animate the emerging storyboard. People are often surprised to see their ramblings taking some form in real time. Visualizing the process helps folks focus, make decisions and prioritize their work.

It’s been several years since I’ve worked with Twin Cities Area community-based science organizations (CBSOs), but the impact lingers. As part of the Community Partnerships Serving Science initiative I led five six-week-long project development workshops for 75 CBSOs, inviting in guest museum specialists to assist. CBSOs are groups of impassioned folks, usually unpaid, engaging their local audiences in every science topic you can imagine, from breeding daffodils to advancing renewable energy, inventing robots or brewing beer. They’re often reaching audiences that museums simply miss.

The CBSOs would come to the Museum for workshops; I met them at their respective sites for strategic planning sessions and to coach them in writing project or exhibit proposals. They all received $600, and it was amazing to see what they could accomplish with such small stipends. A few more substantial monetary awards allowed a tight SMM team to collaboratively work with four CBSOs to build small traveling exhibitions. When I meet these folks at events about town, they say that their work with the museum honed their message and broadened their visibility in the community, which increased their membership. It’s rewarding to hear.

I’ve always enjoyed collaborative, community-based projects and find energy in facilitating the group process. Old Mickey Rooney movies are my inspiration. Pooling meager resources, he and his high school friends—including Judy Garland, of course—always managed to create a rip-roaring show in someone’s borrowed basement, barn, garage or the school gym.

My first collaborative design project with community happened in Marshfield, Wisconsin back in the 70s. I taught high school and, as Senior Class Advisor, coordinated and facilitated projects with teens. One year we found two downtown business owners willing to let us transform the clerestory between their buildings into a theatrical streetscape. Everyone brought their skills to the table, including bricklaying knee-walls, designing and lighting shop windows, painting murals, woodworking and scrounging for benches and street lamps. The kids, parents and business folks all came out. It was a blast.

What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing more community input into their exhibitions?
Try anything that brings more voices to the table at every stage of your exhibit or project. Here are three strategies:

-       Stage a community workshop. Early in a project, convene key community stakeholders (school teachers and principals, librarians, board members, local supporters, critics and naysayers) to help clarify your problem and brainstorm strategies. Don’t be afraid. Pay them a stipend and, before they leave, ask if they’d be willing to come back as volunteers. Bring them and others back to test ideas, serve as advisors, interpret exhibits or, as groups, actually manage exhibit activity areas.

-       Identify community-based science organizations in your community. Get to know them and you’ll find all sorts of ways to work together. Visit them where they congregate, go to their meetings to meet their audiences and host meet-ups at the museum. Invite them to advise on projects, lead workshops or participate in museum events. Write them into grant proposals; ask them to write you into theirs.

-       Showcase local work in your exhibits. Get to know creative people in your community. Search out area artists, crafters, trades people, entrepreneurs and youth leaders. Find them on the Internet, through person-to-person contacts or through their associations and organizations. Commission work or purchase pieces that help convey your exhibit themes; credit them and invite them to the party. Art pieces—practical (like lighting or seating), contemplative or interactive—lend a personal, creative twist that appeals. I’ve found that the State Fair is a good place to shop.

What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development? I’ll suggest six books that I use for ideas and inspiration:

• Alexander, Christopher and Ishikawa, Sara and Silverstein, Murray (1977) A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings and Construction, London: Oxford University Press

[Instructs reader in a humanist approach to design, using a sequence of 600 design problems and solutions, from planning a city to planning a bedroom]

• Whyte, William “Holly” (1980), The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces, New York: Project for Public Spaces

[Book and accompanying film document iconic human behaviors exhibited by people using New York public spaces—sidewalks, street corners, markets, parks and plazas]

• Zumthor, Peter (1998) Thinking Architecture, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers

[Walks you through a diary-like personal reflection and instruction on observation and design]

• Tufte, Edward (1997) Visual Explanations: Images and Quantities, Evidence and Narrative, Cheshire: Graphics Press

[Shows ways graphics and illustration can convey dynamic processes without words]

• Underhill, Paco (1999) Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, New York: Simon & Schuster

[Reveals the psychology in attracting and holding potential customers)

• Gurian, Elaine (2006) Civilizing the Museum: The collected writings of Elaine Heumann Gurian, London; New York: Routledge Taylor and Francis Group

[Explores ways to make museums more central and relevant to society]

What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?
Etiquette of the Undercaste, by Antenna Theater, is an interactive performance installation; a maze of thirteen rooms that use simple theater props and techniques to put you in the shoes of a homeless person. You die and are reborn into hopeless poverty. The show triggers gut-felt empathy for the disenfranchised. I felt changed in a more positive way by videos of people with disabilities that we developed for Bionics and Transplants: the World of Replacement Medicine—a mind-bending exhibit staged here at the Science Museum of Minnesota.

The City Museum, St. Louis, makes you a player in their adventure reality show. I entered the place as chaperone for a group of teenagers, but found myself facing my fears alone most of the time. Curiosity coaxes you into unthinkable situations—like dropping down into mysterious holes in the floor—that test your courage and survival skills. Strangers encourage each other through often dark, artfully created mazes, slides and tunnels. Experiencing all of the funky outdoor climbing structures at night is particularly cool.

In these times, watching immigrants under siege, I recall being moved by two Smithsonian exhibitions: A More Perfect Union revealed the discrimination against Japanese interned during WW II.   From Field to Factory told a memorable story of the continued persecution of freed slaves as they moved north. They displayed an actual contract that would have been signed by Klu Klux Klan members --- it was a shocker.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?

That would take some thinking. Here are a few ideas.

- Develop dynamic interpretive help centers and connecting wayside attractions that immerse travelers in a sense of place and help facilitate their journey. Nova Scotia does a nice job.

- Work with regional coordinators across the country—maybe the world— to increase the capacity of community-based science organizations to mobilize their audiences. Call it a revolution.

- Build an energy-efficient, accessible home in my neighborhood. I’ve started this process; we’ll see how it goes. Along the way I’d like to move Minneapolis to establish a housing development policy that requires new homes to be visitable or accessible to folks using chairs. Baby boomers are their money in the bank.

- Help develop community art and science centers around the world that reflect local culture and help address real human needs, like health, food, clothing and shelter and the creation of meaningful work. It’s uncanny to see copies of the same exhibits populating museums and science centers everywhere without adaptation to specific places and situations.

- Develop an engaging urban space. I’m an enduring fan of Project for Public Spaces, a New York organization committed to placemaking to build stronger communities, and am drawn into this kind of effort in varied contexts, such as museums, my neighborhood park and my church. Most recently, I’m jazzed to help pull together a focus group convened by Forecast Public Arts, a St. Paul organization that connects the talents and energies of artists with the needs and opportunities of communities.

Thanks to Chris for taking the time to share her thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

P.S. If you receive ExhibiTricks via email (or Facebook or LinkedIn) you will need to click HERE to go to the main ExhibiTricks page to make comments or view multimedia features (like videos!)

ReWind: Good Prototypers are Office Supply Ninjas!

noreply@blogger.com (Paul Orselli) — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 00:46:00 +0000

How best to enable folks to become better exhibit prototypers? One way is by thinking like an "Office Supply Ninja" so I thought I'd ReWind this post on the subject. Enjoy!

Thomas Edison said, "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk." His reference was to inventing, but he could have also been speaking about prototyping.

To me, prototyping is an iterative process that uses simple materials to help you answer questions about the physical aspects of your exhibit components (even labels!) early on in the development process.

As I mentioned in a previous post, it's always a bit discouraging to hear museum folks say "we just don't have the time/the money/the space/the materials to do prototyping ..." (By then I'm usually thinking "So how is setting an ill-conceived or malfunctioning exhibit component into your museum, because you didn't prototype, saving time or money?" But I digress...)

Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine anyone fabricating an exhibit component without trying out a quick-and-dirty version first. So in today's post I thought I'd lay out the simple steps I use to show how quickly and inexpensively prototyping can be integrated into the beginning of any exhibit development process, and how you too can become an Office Supply Ninja!

STEP ONE: Figure out what you want to find out.

In this case, a client wanted me to come up with an interactive version of a "Food Web" (the complex interrelationship of organisms in a particular environment, showing, basically, what eats what.) We brainstormed a number of approaches (magnet board, touch screen computer) but finally settled on the notion of allowing visitors to construct a "Food Web Mobile" with the elements being the various organisms found (in this particular case) in a mangrove swamp. The client was also able to provide me with a flow chart showing the relationships between organisms and a floor plan of the area where the final exhibit will be installed.

The two initial things I wanted to test or find out about from my prototype were:

1) Did people "get" the idea conceptually? That is, did they understand the relationships and analogies between the Food Web Mobile and the actual organisms in the swamp?

2) Could they easily create different sorts of physical arrangements with the mobile that were interesting and accurate?

STEP TWO: Get out your junk!

As in the Edison quote above, it helps to have a good supply of "bits and bobs" around to prototype with. You might not have the same sorts of junk that I've gathered up over years in the museum exhibit racket, but everyone should have access to basic office supplies (stuff like paper, tape, markers, index cards, scissors, etc.) And really that's all you need to start assembling prototypes. (The imagination part is important, too.)

STEP THREE: Start playing around with the pieces ...

Before I even start assembling a complete rough mechanism or system I like to gather all the parts together and see if I like how they work with each other. In the case of the Food Web Mobile prototype, I used colored file folders to represent different levels of organisms. I initially made each color/level out of the same size pieces, but then I changed to having each color be a different size. Finally, I used a hole punch to make the holes, and bent paper clips to serves as the hooks that would allow users to connect the pieces/organisms in different ways.

STEP FOUR: Assemble, then iterate, iterate, iterate!

This is the part of the prototyping process that requires other people beside yourself. Let your kids, your co-workers, your significant other, whoever (as long as it's somebody beside yourself) try out your idea. Obviously the closer your "testers" are to the expected demographic inside the museum, the better --- ideally I like to prototype somewhere inside the museum itself.

Resist the urge to explain or over-explain your prototype. Just watch what people do (or don't do!) with the exhibit component(s). Take lots of notes/pictures/video. Then take a break to change your prototype based on what you've observed and heard, and try it out again. That's called iteration.

In this case, I saw right away that the mobile spun and balanced in interesting ways, but that meant that the labels would need to be printed on both sides of the pieces. Fortunately, my three "in-house testers" (ages 6, 11, and 13) seemed to "get" the concept of "Food Webs" embedded into the Mobile interactive, and started coming up with interesting physical variations on their own.

For example, I initially imagined people would just try to create "balanced" arrangements of pieces on the Mobile. But, as you can see below, the prototype testers enjoyed making "unbalanced" arrangements as well (which is fine, and makes sense conceptually as well.) Also, we discovered that people realized that they could hang more than one "organism piece" on the lower hooks (which was also fine, and also made sense conceptually.)

STEP FIVE: Figure out what's next ... even if it's the trash can!

Do you need to change the label, or some physical arrangement of your prototype? Using simple, inexpensive materials makes that easy.

Do you just need to junk this prototype idea? Using simple, inexpensive materials makes it easier to move on to a new idea, too. (Much more easily than if you had spent weeks crafting and assembling something out of expensive materials from your workshop...) It's not too surprising to see people really struggle to let a bad exhibit idea go, especially if they've spent several weeks putting it together. Quick and cheap should be your watchwords early on in the prototyping process.

In this case, I sent photos of the paper clip prototype and a short video showing people using the Food Web Mobile to the client as a "proof of concept." They were quite pleased, and so now I will make a second-level prototype using materials more like those I expect to use in the "final" exhibit (which I'll update in a future post.) Even so, I will still repeat the steps above of gathering materials, assembling pieces, and iterating through different versions with visitors.

I hope you'll give this "office supply ninja" version of exhibit prototyping a try for your next project!

If you do, send me an email and I'd be happy to show off the results of ExhibiTricks readers prototyping efforts.

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