"Unfacilitated" Doesn't Mean "Unpeopled"

Have you noticed what happens at the self-checkout lane at the supermarket?

The whole premise is that you don't need a person. Scan, bag, pay, leave. And yet every store still posts a human at the end of the row, and every one of us has been quietly grateful for them when the machine barks "unexpected item in the bagging area" for the third time. The self-checkout isn't a facilitated experience. But it is unquestionably a better experience because somebody friendly is standing nearby.

I've been thinking about that lately in relation to museums, because we use the word "unfacilitated" as if it were a design specification. 

An exhibit is either "facilitated" (there's a program, a cart, a scheduled demo) or "unfacilitated" (the exhibit has to do all the work itself, forever, with no help). Exhibit developers, myself included, spend enormous energy making sure our components can stand on their own. That's good practice. 

But somewhere along the way "unfacilitated" started to sound like "unstaffed," and those are not the same things at all.

Here's the proposition I'd like to expand on: "unfacilitated" exhibits and activities still benefit enormously from human interaction between visitors and staff or volunteers. Not scripted programs. Not tours. Just people who are present, approachable, and trained to be useful in the moments that matter.

The research backs this up

This isn't just a hunch. Scott Pattison and Lynn Dierking spent years studying what they call "unstructured" staff-visitor interactions at OMSI (the unscripted conversations at exhibits, as opposed to shows or tours) and found front-line educators to be critical to the visitor experience. Their later work at interactive math exhibits, done through the REVEAL project, deliberately built "facilitation affordances" into components that already worked fine on their own, so an educator could deepen what a family was doing beyond what the exhibit alone could accomplish. In other words: the exhibits weren't broken. The humans made them better.

REFERENCES:

Pattison & Dierking, "Staff-Mediated Learning in Museums" (Visitor Studies): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10645578.2013.767731

Pattison et al., "The Impact of Facilitation by Museum Educators on Family Learning at Interactive Math Exhibits": https://www.terc.edu/reveal/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2021/03/PattisonEtAl2018_VS_StaffImpact_PrePub.pdf

And a 2025 Curator article by Karen Knutson and colleagues looked at youth facilitators talking with families in a natural history museum, where the "exhibits" are static specimens rather than push-button interactives. Same finding, different museum genre. Families don't arrive expecting a conversation, but when a prepared young person offers one, the visit gets richer. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cura.12669

Museums that get this right

The Exploratorium's Explainers (San Francisco). The granddaddy of them all. Frank Oppenheimer wanted enthusiastic guides who would encourage visitors to play with the exhibits and discover their own questions, and the High School Explainer program has been doing that since 1969. Explainers get more than 60 hours of training, and a science background is not required. Explainers are required to have curiosity and the ability to talk with strangers. Notice that the Exploratorium's floor is famously "unfacilitated" in the programmatic sense, yet it has always been thick with people in orange vests. That was never an accident. https://www.exploratorium.edu/about/explainers

The Exploratorium's Tinkering Studio takes this a step further and says it out loud. They describe a suite of experiences that "do not need facilitation in order to be effective" but "benefit greatly from a facilitator being present," with the explicit goal of training non-expert Explainers to act as co-learners rather than authority figures. That phrase, "co-learners rather than figures of authority," is the whole ballgame. https://www.exploratorium.edu/tinkering/our-work/the-tinkering-studio-itself

NYSCI's Science Career Ladder (Queens).  Closer to home for me. The red-aproned Explainers at the New York Hall of Science are high school and college students who advance through a scaffolded set of jobs, training, and mentorship. The museum reports that roughly 5,000 young people have come through the program. The brilliant part is the two-way benefit: visitors get a friendly face at an exhibit, and the Explainer gets a career pathway. A class of NYSCI Explainers can collectively speak something like 20 languages, which matters a great deal in Queens. https://nysci.org/science-career-ladder

Living Laboratory at the Museum of Science (Boston).  This one turns the model inside out. Instead of museum staff talking to visitors, actual child-development researchers from Harvard, Tufts, BU, and elsewhere set up their studies on the exhibit floor in the Discovery Center and Hall of Human Life, in plain view, and are trained by museum educators to talk with any visitor who wanders over. The exhibits around them are as unfacilitated as ever. The scientists are just... there, and approachable.  https://www.mos.org/living-laboratory and  https://livinglab.org/

The Art Gallery of Ontario's "Ask Me" program (Toronto).  Proof that this isn't just a science center trick. The AGO stationed docents in its contemporary galleries several afternoons a week specifically to have one-on-one conversations, validate visitors' reactions to difficult contemporary work, and point people toward further resources. No tour, no script, just a human wearing a button that gives you permission to talk to them. https://www.museum-ed.org/the-ask-me-program/

ASK Brooklyn Museum (a program that's gone, with a lesson that isn't).  A decade ago, the Brooklyn Museum launched an app that let visitors text questions to a live team of art historians who responded in under a minute. It won awards, but it has since been phased out. ASK is no longer active.

Regular ExhibiTricks readers know I'm skeptical of technology for its own sake, and there's a lesson in the fact that the ASK app didn't last. But what I find most instructive is what the museum learned in a year of pilot testing before building anything: visitors wanted a personal connection with staff and wanted to talk about the art. The app was the delivery mechanism. The humans were the essential component. Apps come and go. That finding is still true, and it doesn't require a single line of code. https://artmuseumteaching.com/2015/07/23/the-big-ask-experiencing-the-brooklyn-museums-ask-app/

Some Takeaways

You do not need a Bloomberg grant or a 55-year-old youth employment program to do this. Some low-cost, high-impact starting points:

• Rebrand your floor staff.  If the people on your floor are called "attendants," the job title is telling them (and visitors) what to expect. "Gallery host," "Explainer," "Play Guide" cost nothing and change the posture.

• Give people permission to talk.  The AGO's "Ask Me" button is a visitor engagement component that costs about a dollar. So is a sign at the entrance to an unfacilitated gallery that says "Our staff love questions."

• Build one "facilitation affordance" into each new exhibit.  Pattison's team did it with extension challenges. It can be as simple as a second, harder version of the activity that a staff member can offer to a family that's already engaged. Design for the human, even when the human is optional.

• Train for questions, not answers. The Exploratorium and the Tinkering Studio both emphasize that their best floor staff are co-learners. A ten-minute weekly huddle on "what's a good question to ask at the wind tube?" beats a binder of facts.

• Borrow other people's experts.  Living Laboratory works because researchers want an audience. So do master gardeners, ham radio operators, retired machinists, and the woodturners' guild. They'll come for free if you give them a table and a cup of coffee.

The self-checkout lane doesn't need a person. But nobody complains that there is one.

So what does your museum call the people standing in your "unfacilitated" galleries? And are you training them to answer questions, or to ask them? Let me know in the "Comments" section below!

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 Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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The milk bottle is a Trojan horse.

Somewhere along the way, milk got controversial again.

The oat-milk aisle has opinions. Some influencers treat raw milk like a personality. Almond, soy, macadamia, and "barista blend." The dairy case now reads like a debate stage. For a plain white liquid that mostly just wants to go on cereal, milk is doing a remarkable amount of cultural heavy lifting.

Which is funny, because I've spent the last year or so with Christina Ferwerda researching and building out the Long Island Dairy Museum project on the former Caumsett estate. And I can report that milk has been quietly fascinating the entire time. 

But first, a little scene-setting, because Caumsett is a story before it's a dairy.

In 1921, Marshall Field III, grandson of the Chicago department-store magnate and, at the time, one of the richest men in America, bought some 1,750 acres of Long Island's North Shore and set out to build a world of his own. He named it Caumsett, after the Matinecock word for "place by a sharp rock," and hired the era's heavy hitters to raise it all at breakneck speed.  

John Russell Pope for the manor, Alfred Hopkins for the farm buildings, the Olmsted Brothers for the grounds. The result was a self-sufficient kingdom with its own power plant, water system, fire brigade, greenhouses, polo ponies, and a full working dairy.

And that dairy was no gentleman's hobby. Caumsett was a genuine model farm, home to a world-renowned herd of Guernsey cattle and engineered to supply the estate with its own milk. Even through the Depression, the families who lived and worked there had housing, garden vegetables, and dairy rations. When one of the richest men in America decides to make his own milk, he does not do it halfway.

Here are a few notes from the milk pail that we will be bringing into the Long Island Dairy Museum:

A Caumsett bull was more famous than many CEOs. Meet Caumsett Dynamo, the estate's prize Guernsey sire, who threw off offspring like a franchise. His sons carried the Caumsett name (like Caumsett Magnet and Caumsett Flashlight), and his daughters all sailed under the "Caumsett Ocean" prefix (such as Caumsett Ocean Leda and Caumsett Ocean Minerva). Dynamo was even invited to the 1939 World's Fair in New York. 

A 1930s dairy ran like a hospital.  Autoclaves. Sterilization protocols. A bottling room clean enough to perform surgery in. We think of "farm-fresh" as rustic and a little grubby, but top estate dairies like Caumsett were essentially clinical operations obsessed with keeping one product spotless. 

The barns were prettier than your house. Architect Alfred Hopkins designed Gold Coast estate dairies with the kind of care most people reserve for a chapel. Cows lived in buildings that would clear co-op boards today. When a Gilded Age fortune decided to keep cattle, it kept them in style.

And now the cows wear tech. Modern dairy means RFID collars, ear tags, and automated brushes that give cows a back-scratch on demand. I keep meaning to be skeptical of all the gadgetry, and then I watch a video of a cow lining up for her turn at the brush, and I lose the argument.

Same bottle, opposite pitch. For a hundred years we've sold the exact same white liquid on completely reversed promises. In the 1920s, milk was medicine — a health tonic, doctor-approved, practically a supplement. Today, milk is nostalgia in a bottle, the taste of grandma's kitchen. Nothing about the milk changed. Everything about the story did.

Here's the exhibit-design lesson buried in all of this milky goodness:  

The milk bottle is a Trojan horse.

A milk container is the most ordinary object in the room. Everyone thinks they already know what it is. Which is exactly why it works!  You don't need a blockbuster artifact behind glass to hook a visitor. You need to take the thing they might walk right past and make them look twice. Mundane object, wild story. That's the whole game.

It turns out you can fit a century of science, money, marketing, and back-scratching robots inside one simple glass milk bottle. 

So tell me: what's the most ordinary-looking object in your museum that turned out to have the best story hiding inside it? Let us know in the "Comments" section below!

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 Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

Fake Food, Giant Sequins, and Artificial Dirt? There's a List for That!

If you've been reading ExhibiTricks for a while, you already know I'm a sucker for a good "trusted source." That one supplier who has exactly the weird thing you need at 4:45 on a Friday afternoon. Well, one of my favorite FREE resources is The Great Big Museum Exhibit Resource List, and if you've never dug into it before, today's your lucky day!

The List started as an idea from Kathy Krafft during a conference presentation years ago. I offered to host it on the POW! website, and over time it grew into a continuously updated compendium of resources for exhibit designers, developers, fabricators, and makers of all kinds. 

Best of all, it's completely free and organized by category, so whether you're hunting for adaptive devices, fiberglass supplies, glow-in-the-dark pigment, or scrolling lightboxes, there's a section for you.

Need a little convincing? Here are a few of my favorite "wait, that's a category?!" entries from The List:

PolyPavement makes natural-looking "artificial earth" that stays put, so you can create convincing "ground" for a dinosaur dig, an archaeology exhibit, or a habitat scene without hauling in the real, muddy stuff.

Radiant Manufacturing produces giant sequins and "flutter discs" for air cannon exhibits. If you've ever wanted to create a shimmering "blast" across a gallery to demonstrate air pressure, this is your source.

Skulls Unlimited is the place for "All things bone related." A go-to for natural history and science center folks who need real (or replica) skulls and skeletons that hold up to curious hands and even more curious kids.

Aroma Prime / Aromas by Design: Because sometimes an exhibit needs to smell like something. This UK-based supplier makes scent machines, aroma blocks, and custom smells that add an extra sensory layer to an immersive space.

That's just four picks out of dozens of categories and hundreds of entries — everything from fake foods and extrusions to surplus motors and theatrical fabrics is in The Great Big Museum Exhibit Resource List!

And here's the fun part: The List keeps growing thanks to museum makers around the world. So if you've got a favorite trusted source that isn't on there yet, don't keep it to yourself!  

Send your additions and corrections straight to me, and help this resource keep growing.

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 Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

Everything Museums, Everywhere, All At Once

A few years back, a movie called "Everything Everywhere All at Once" swept the Oscars by flatly refusing to be one kind of movie. Science fiction, kung-fu picture, family drama, tax-audit procedural. Critics kept reaching for a genre label, and the movie kept swatting it away. The whole point was that a life refuses to sit neatly in a single bin.

Museums, I think, are having their own "Everything Everywhere" moment. And I want to make the case that it's a good thing.

The tyranny of the label on the door

We spend an awful lot of energy sorting ourselves. Art museum. History museum. Science center. Children's museum. The word on the letterhead becomes a fence, and pretty soon we believe the fence is real. That a science center can't do a wrenching history story, that a children's museum has no business tackling anything heavy.

But visitors have never experienced the world in those tidy silos. Nobody wakes up craving a purely "scientific" morning. People are curious about everything. How a bridge stays up and who built it and what it felt like to weld it forty stories in the air. The genre categories are for us, and for the grant applications. They were never really for the audience.

The museum that was always sneaking across genres

Which brings me to Chicago's grand old Museum of Science and Industry (now officially the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, or Griffin MSI.)

Here's the thing: MSI has always been an everything museum, even when it pretended otherwise. Walk the floor, and you'll find a captured German U-boat from World War II parked near a walk-through coal mine, a whimsical Fairy Castle built for a silent-film star, and a hatchery full of actual baby chicks. Is that a science museum? An industrial-history museum? A decorative-arts collection? A living zoo? Yes.

All of it, at once. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that right now this "Science and Industry" museum is running two of the most genre-bending shows in the country, side by side.

Anne Frank, inside a science museum

Anne Frank The Exhibition , a presentation of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, runs through the end of January 2027. Chicago is only the second U.S. city to host it, and the first in the Midwest. At its heart is a full-scale recreation of the Secret Annex where Anne, her family, and four others hid during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, anchored by more than 130 original pieces from the Anne Frank House collection.

Sit with that a second. There's nothing here you'd file under STEM. It's a story about a girl, a diary, courage, and unbearable loss -- installed in a building most people associate with locomotives and Tesla coils. And it works, precisely because the institution was brave enough to ignore the label on its own door.

A closet full of Oz, Broadway, and history

Just down the way from the Anne Frank exhibition is Crafting Character: The Costumes of Paul Tazewell (through September 7, 2026). 

Tazewell is the designer who, in 2025, became the first Black man to win the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Wicked.  On top of a Tony for Hamilton and an Emmy for The Wiz Live!

The show puts his actual creations in front of you: Glinda's pink bubble dress and Elphaba's Emerald City gown, the Schuyler Sisters' ball gowns and King George III's getup, Anita's yellow dress from Spielberg's West Side Story. The finished costumes are paired with the sketches and messy middle steps where imagination becomes a garment. Our science museum is suddenly also a fashion museum, a theater museum, and a film-history museum. Nobody at the door made you choose.

Why this matters beyond Chicago

A recent Chicago Tribune commentary put it better than I can: museums like the Anne Frank House and Griffin MSI must keep being the kind of place that helps people "understand the world." 

The whole confusing, beautiful, heartbreaking thing, not just one tidy slice of it. 

That's the real argument for the everything museum. When a single visit can hold Anne Frank's diary, Elphaba's gown, a fairy castle, and a World War II submarine, you're not diluting your mission. You're admitting that curiosity doesn't respect our departmental org charts.

The takeaway isn't "go host Anne Frank." It's that the noun on your sign is a starting point, not a cage. A children's museum can hold real grief. A history museum can run a hands-on making space. The genre was never the promise. The STORY is the promise.

So here's my question for you: What's the most genre-bending thing your museum has ever done, or the boldest thing you wish it would try? 

And what's really stopping you: the audience, or just the word on the letterhead? 

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 Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

What's the ONE Exhibit Tool You Can't Work Without?

There's that old party game where somebody asks, "If you were stranded on a desert island and could bring only one book (or album, or snack), what would it be?" I've always thought exhibit developers deserve our own version.

So here's mine: if you could reach for just ONE tool or resource to develop an exhibit — physical, digital, or somewhere in between — what would it be?

I'm asking because one of my favorite ExhibiTricks side projects was a batch of short videos where museum folks from all over the world shared "Just One Thing" about exhibits. The answers were always more surprising (and more useful) than any tidy "best practices" list. So let's do a written version. Leave a comment below, or drop me a line, and tell me the single most indispensable exhibit development tool or resource in your kit.

To prime the pump, here are two tools that have earned permanent spots in my own list, that are pulled straight from the ExhibiTricks back catalog:

• Foam core and a decent cutting setup.  Foam core is the bread and butter of exhibit development,  but it's only as good as the blade you cut it with. A 48-inch metal straight edge and a sharp rotary cutter will save your sanity (and your fingertips). More in "The Hands-On Toolbox" post.

• 507movements.com.  A "back to the future" gem: an animated, web-based version of Henry T. Brown's classic 1868 reference "507 Mechanical Movements."  If you're building anything that moves (like gears, cranks, and linkages), it's an endlessly inspiring (and free) way to see how mechanisms actually work. 

Those are three of mine. Now I want to hear yours. What's the one exhibit tool or resource you'd grab before anything else? Share it in the Comments Section below!  I'll round up the best responses in a future post.

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 Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

What Can a Guy Who Finds Strangers on the Internet Teach Us About Finding Stuff for Exhibits?

Have you found josemonkey yet?

If not, here's the elevator pitch: somebody sends him a short video (usually a few seconds of a parking lot, a backyard, a stretch of nondescript highway) and he tells them, often within striking distance, exactly where on Earth it was filmed. No metadata, no GPS tag, no cheating. Just the stuff that's "in the frame."

The magic (and it really does feel like magic the first time you watch it) is that there's no magic at all. He talks you through the whole thing. A particular species of tree narrows the hemisphere. The style of a guardrail, the color of a license plate, the font on a road sign, a half-glimpsed logo on a passing truck -- each little clue lops off another chunk of the globe until there's basically one place left standing. He gave a TEDx talk about the privacy implications of all this, which are real and worth taking seriously. But what keeps me watching is watching josemonkey think.

Because here's the thing, fellow museum folks: finding things is our job too.

Think about the last time you were handed a mystery photo from a collection. No caption, no date, a handful of people squinting into the sun in front of a building nobody can identify. What did you do? You read the shadows. You read the clothes. You zoomed into the storefront reflected in the window behind them. You noticed the streetcar wire, or the model of the car at the curb, or the way the trees were leafed out, and you started lopping off chunks of the possibility space until you had a decade, then a neighborhood, then a name. Same instinct. Same joy. We're all just geolocating in our own way.

And it doesn't stop at photo research. This is the exact muscle we flex every time we go hunting for objects to put on display. You need a period-correct milking stool for the dairy exhibit, or a plausible surveyor's chain, or a lunchbox that reads as "1962" to a fourth grader from across a gallery. You don't magic it into existence; you go clue by clue. What did the real thing look like? What material, what patina, what maker's mark? Where would one have survived, and who's selling it, and how do I tell the honest reproduction from the pretender? That's josemonkey-brain, pointed at eBay and estate sales instead of a highway shoulder.

Sourcing materials for a build is the same game one more time. Somebody points at a picture and says "make it feel like that," and now you're hunting for the specific laminate, the right weathered barnwood, the fabric that reads right under gallery lights and survives ten thousand small hands. Clue, clue, clue, answer.

I'll admit there's a Cheapbook-shaped reason I love this. None of what josemonkey does requires a fancy budget. His whole toolkit is paying attention, free maps, and stubbornness. 

That's an enormously encouraging thing to remember when you're a small institution with a big idea and a tiny purchase order. The most valuable piece of research equipment in the building is still the trained eye of somebody who refuses to stop looking. No line item required.

So maybe the real lesson from a guy who finds strangers on the internet is this: the finding is the craft. Whether you're chasing a location, a caption, an object, or a scrap of the right material, the skill is the same: look harder than seems reasonable, follow the little clues, and don't quit until the answer has nowhere left to hide.

What's the best bit of exhibit detective work you've ever pulled off? 

What was the clue that cracked it open? Tell me in the Comments Section below! 

I collect these stories the way josemonkey collects rooftops.

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 Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"