ExhibiTricks: A Museum/Exhibit/Design Blog

Wednesday, May 27, 2026

FREE Museum Exhibit Design Resources

Who doesn't like free stuff? Here are links to some great FREE exhibit design resources from the POW! website:

The Great Big Exhibit Resource List

A constantly updated compendium of resources for museum design and exhibit fabrication (including websites and contact information.) Need to find fake food, giant sequins, or adaptive devices? Check out the GBER List! And contact me if you have a resource you think should be added to the list.

The Exhibit Cheapbooks

The idea for the Exhibit Cheapbooks started during sessions at the annual Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) Conference. The purpose was to share "cheap" exhibit ideas and create a written record of how to replicate these simple and successful exhibit components.

The four Exhibit Cheapbooks have always celebrated museums' "sharing" nature. Inside each volume, you will find varied exhibit ideas from museum colleagues around the world. Sincere thanks to everyone who has shared their ideas and expertise! Special thanks to ASTC for allowing all the Exhibit Cheapbooks material to be shared freely online.

Museum FAQ Videos

Check out these interesting and informative video conversations with museum professionals from around the world. Topics run the gamut from museum management, community engagement, digital exhibits, and more! Click the link above for the video gallery, or go directly to the POW! YouTube site.

You can also find downloadable exhibit articles and other museum exhibit design resources by clicking over to the main resource page on the POW! website.

Do you have some other great resources to share? Tell us about them in the COMMENTS Section below!

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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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Sunday, May 17, 2026

Caps, Gowns, and Grand Openings

It's graduation season. Everywhere you look: folding chairs in gymnasium-sized rooms, proud families squinting at tiny figures crossing a stage, and someone in charge at a podium declaring that this is only the beginning.

Sound familiar?

Think about the last exhibition opening you attended. The speeches. The ribbon cutting. The board members beaming in the front row. The champagne (or, let's be honest, the warm Chardonnay in plastic cups).

Both events share the same fundamental illusion: that the hard work is "done."

It isn't, of course. The grad still has to get a job, pay rent, and figure out what they actually "do" with that degree. And your shiny new exhibition? Visitors are going to touch things they shouldn't, break things they definitely shouldn't, and completely ignore the interpretive panel you agonized over for three months.

Here's the real parallel: graduation and an exhibition opening are both "beginnings," not endings. The diploma is just a ticket to the next set of challenges. The opening night ribbon is just the starting gun.

The best museums know this. They treat "Day Two" -- when the real visitors (not the donors) show up as more important than opening night. They watch, they listen, they fix things. They iterate.

So by all means, enjoy your opening. Pop that (warm) Chardonnay. Take the group photo.

And then get back to work.

Tuesday, May 5, 2026

Every Train, A Note

Let me bring to your attention the website called Train Jazz.

Here's the premise: designer Joshua Wolk assigned a jazz instrument to every active NYC subway line, then mapped them against the MTA's open real-time transit data. Every note you hear is triggered by where an actual train is along its route. Bass, piano, sax, vibes, brushes all playing together as a kind of jazz combo.

Eight hundred trains, give or take, forming a small jazz combo that has been "playing" without pause for over a hundred years.

This is a perfect example of taking something people walk right past every day (a subway map, a stream of transit data) and making it audible in a way that suddenly reveals all the hidden rhythm underneath.

Museum folks, take note. What's the "Train Jazz" version of your collection? What data stream, what pattern of visitor movement, what overlooked system in your building is just waiting to be turned into something a visitor could hear or feel or interact with in a completely new way?

Thursday, April 23, 2026

Museum/Exhibit/Design Inspiration: "Cook This Page"

What if instructions and end product become one and the same?

Leo Burnett Toronto created fill-in-the-blank recipes printed with food-safe ink directly on cooking parchment paper for IKEA Canada's "Cook This Page" campaign.

You lay your ingredients over the illustrated outlines (sized to actual proportions, naturally), roll the whole thing up, and cook it. The recipe IS the cooking vessel. < Mind blown. >

What makes this idea inspiring for me is the way it completely collapses the distance between instruction and action. No separate recipe card to consult. No screen to smear with salmon hands. The medium and the message are literally the same object, and then you eat it.

Museum/exhibit/design folks, take note: this is exactly the kind of thinking we should be applying to interactive experiences. What if the instructions were the activity? What if the label was the exhibit? What if visitors didn't need to read about something before touching it, because the touching was already built into the reading? (I'm wondering about a hands-on science exhibit on edible paper ...)

All 12,500 parchment paper recipes for the "Cook This Page" campaign distributed across 18 Canadian IKEA locations were snatched up within hours. People grabbed those things because the format itself communicated "this will be fun and I can do this." Simply place ingredients here, roll, cook, and eat.

The other lesson worth emphasizing is that the "Cook This Page" idea went through multiple iterations: starting as dessert recipes on peel-away posters, then recipes on different cooking materials, before landing on the fill-in-the-blank parchment paper approach.

Prototyping your way to the right answer isn't just good exhibit development practice. It's apparently good marketing practice, too.

Wednesday, April 15, 2026

Building LEGO Bridges (Over Ponds of Water Lilies)

I've been keeping an eye on the LEGO Art series for a while now. As someone who thinks a lot about how people engage with objects, ideas, and making things with their hands, there's a lot to appreciate in LEGO's latest collaboration with The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The new LEGO Art "Claude Monet – Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies" (set #31220) was announced in February 2026, inviting builders to connect with one of Monet's most iconic works, originally painted in 1899. At $249.99 and 3,179 pieces, it's not an impulse buy, but the thinking behind this collaboration is interesting from a museum engagement standpoint.

The Translation Problem (and Solution)

The design challenge here mirrors something exhibit designers wrestle with constantly: how do you translate one kind of experience into a fundamentally different medium without losing what makes it special?

LEGO designer Stijn Oom describes how his team "meticulously created a tactile 3D surface by layering tiles and plates in both vertical and horizontal directions, mimicking the brushwork and carefully adapting Monet's subtle palette of hues within LEGO's signature color options." That's not just marketing copy; that's a genuine design constraint that required real creative problem-solving. (Oom was also the designer behind the earlier Van Gogh "Sunflowers" set.)

Even more interesting to me is that the finished LEGO build transforms with viewing distance. Individual pixels and textures are visible up close, shifting into an Impressionist landscape from afar, mirroring the nature of Monet's later works. That's the LEGO version of "pointillism," and it's a clever parallel to how Monet himself worked.

The Unexpected Elements

Here's where it gets fun for anyone who loves the creative use of everyday objects. The set uses well-known LEGO elements (including butterflies, cherries, bananas, swords, and shields) to recreate Monet's masterpiece. I love this kind of creative repurposing, and it's essentially the same spirit as reaching into a hardware store bin for an unexpected exhibit component. The constraint becomes the creativity.

The Museum Piece of the Package

What I find most interesting about this collaboration between LEGO and The Met isn't the set itself, but rather the multiple interpretive experiences built around it.

The Met is releasing a podcast hosted by European paintings curator Alison Hokanson, offering historical context and personal reflections on Monet's life, his garden, and the enduring legacy of his work. Accessible via QR code right in the instruction booklet (or via the LEGO website) it turns the building process into something closer to a guided art museum experience. That's a smart, simple approach to interpretation, meeting the audience exactly where they already are.

And then there's the in-museum activation: visitors to The Met will have the unique opportunity to get "inside" the work by posing with a life-size, 8-foot-wide immersive LEGO installation of Claude Monet’s Bridge over a Pond of Water Lilies, by artist Nathan Sawaya, on view at The Met through June 2026.

Located near Gallery 819, this installation features over 60,000 bricks to promote the 3,179-piece LEGO Art set released in collaboration with the museum. A giant, climbable, photo-worthy LEGO installation inside one of the world's great art museums? That's smart audience development, especially for families and younger visitors who might otherwise find the Met's marble-clad gallery experience a little chilly.

The Met has been clear that it hopes the set will boost its efforts to bring its collection to life for kids and families.

What Museum Folks Can Learn Here

The collaboration took over a year, with LEGO designers visiting The Met to see the original painting in person rather than relying on reproductions, and Met staffers traveling to Denmark to review different iterations. That kind of genuine back-and-forth is what separates a thoughtful partnership from a licensing deal. It shows in the result.

The interpretive layers, including the booklet, the podcast, the in-museum installation, and the LEGO website, demonstrate how a single object can anchor a whole ecosystem of engagement. Most of our exhibit projects could stand to think more expansively about that multiplier effect.

And finally, the LEGO Art series as a whole has been quietly "building" a very interesting niche. The series already includes tributes to Van Gogh's "Sunflowers," "The Starry Night," and Hokusai's "The Great Wave." Creating a line of adult-oriented, hands-on making experiences that are explicitly connected to major museum collections. That's a mainstream consumer product company doing what "stuffy" museums often struggle to do -- making art history feel personal, tactile, and worth your time on a Tuesday evening.

Monday, April 6, 2026

Town Squares, not Telephone Booths

The theme for this year's InterActivity conference in San Diego is "The Fabric of Belonging: Crafting Spaces for Connection and Resilience." As Children's Museum folks from around the world head to the conference later this month, many sessions will focus on programming, staffing, community partnerships, and institutional strategy.

All important stuff. But I want to talk about the exhibits themselves.

Because the moments of real connection, the ones that cut across age, language, income, and background, almost never happen at a single-user experience. Instead, they happen around a water table. At a drum circle. Around a giant set of building blocks.

Open-ended. Low-tech. And usually less interesting to do alone.

The Exhibit as Social Infrastructure

We talk a lot in the museum field about "belonging" as an institutional value. But belonging isn't a marketing problem or an outreach problem. It's a design problem.

Every time you put a single-user touchscreen into your exhibit hall, you've made a choice about social infrastructure. You've built a telephone booth when you could have built a town square.

I'm not anti-technology, but I am consistently struck by how much money museums spend on interactive technology that isolates visitors.

What Makes an Exhibit a "People Connector"?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I'd boil it down to a few qualities:

• It requires (or at least rewards) more than one person. The best exhibits are "connectors." Not because they force interaction, but because doing the same thing alone isn't quite as satisfying as doing it together. A giant floor piano is fun to stomp around on by yourself. But it's magical when you and a stranger make a chord or a song together.

• It has no obvious "right answer." Open-ended play invites negotiation, and negotiation builds connection. A canned simulation with a predetermined correct outcome closes that door. A well-framed, multiple-outcome construction challenge opens it.

• It works across a wide age range. Some of the most visitor-friendly exhibits are the ones where a four-year-old and a forty-year-old are equally puzzled, equally capable, equally delighted. Mixed-age play is underrated as a community-building force.

• It doesn't require reading. The best low-tech interactives are intuitive. A clear cause-and-effect relationship helps overcome many of the access issues that make connecting with an exhibit hard in the first place.

A Challenge for InterActivity Attendees

The fabric metaphor in this year's InterActivity conference theme is great. Fabric is made of many small interlocking pieces. Each thread matters. So does each exhibit choice in your museum.

If you're heading to San Diego, what specific takeaways about exhibit design for belonging and connection can you take away from your conference experiences?

Not just aspirational language, but the actual material decisions. What new "connector" exhibits could you put into your museum?

How can we build more town squares and fewer telephone booths?