Wanted: Museum "Fans"

How would museum staffers do things differently if they were trying to increase the number of museum "fans" instead of "customers" or "guests" or "visitors"?

I mean "fans" like those who attend college football games or people who stay at the Mandarin Oriental Hotels or who line up at midnight to buy Harry Potter books.

It will be a great day when museums become so popular that people are scalping admissions tickets outside instead of shuffling around half-empty exhibit halls.

But until then, how do we create more museum "fans"? Give us your best ideas in the Comments Section below.

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Subhead Anti-Slip Stickers

Safety design in museums is an often overlooked opportunity to combine form and function, but safety doesn't often equal beauty. To that end, let me commend to your attention the Subhead website.

Subhead Anti-Slip Stickers is the name of a company that sells (wait for it!) anti-slip stickers, those adhesive-backed non-skid materials often seen on stair treads.

And not just any anti-slip stickers, COOL anti-slip stickers!

For the many museums that have water exhibits or other slippery surfaces that they don't want visitors to slip on, Subhead's stuff seems like the perfect blend of safety and style. (Or you might just want to trick out your skateboard or Segway --- especially if you have a pirate/oceanic fetish!)

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Thinking Inside The Box

I like to keep a stash of interesting junk --- stuff I've found from trolling through the aisles of hardware stores, toy stores, office supply stores (o.k. just about any store!) or "leftovers" from previous exhibit projects. It's fun to look at the products on the store shelves and consider the possible exhibit uses for such items.

Having "junk boxes" nearby gives me the opportunity to think about creative reuses for common materials, and also provides a good supply of prototyping fodder for when I'm putting together exhibit ideas.

The design company IDEO employs a similar practice by keeping sets of materials in its offices to serve as inspiration during design projects or creative meetings. The New York Times wrote an article about the practice.

So here are four quick links to serve as inspiration for either starting (or re-stocking) your own "idea box"

Creative reuse of office supplies.

How to repurpose toys to aid in stem cell research.

High Tech/Low Tech Garden Lighting.

A different way to use Sticky Notes.

Have fun tinkering, AND thinking "inside the box"!

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Help ExhibitFiles Crack 100!

ExhibitFiles is one of the most important websites for people who care about museum exhibits, period.

What's that? You're not an ExhibitsFile member? So click here now to join up! (It's free, and will only take a minute or two ...we'll wait.)

Now that everyone reading is a member of ExhibitFiles, I hope you'll take the time to post a "Review" of an interesting exhibition you've seen, or a "Case Study" of an exhibition you were involved in creating.

Despite all the time and effort that goes into creating exhibitions, the museum business has been traditionally very lackadaisical about documenting the processes and products involved in exhibition design and development. In many cases, once exhibitions (even incredibly amazing ones!) were dismantled or retired, the information about them --- POOF! --- simply disappeared.

ExhibitFiles was designed as a repository for valuable information, criticism, and documentation regarding exhibitions --- a resource freely shared that everyone could learn and benefit from. Thanks to Kathy McLean from Independent Exhibitions and Wendy Pollock from ASTC for approaching NSF to get the ExhibitFiles project funded. (Also a shout-out to Jim Spadaccini and the Ideum crew for the excellent site design!)

I notice that the ExhibitFiles counters for both "Case Studies" and "Reviews" are nearing that magically round number of 100. So let's make an effort to move ExhibitFiles past that magic "100" mark and beyond!

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

Not Another Grocery Store Exhibit!

I was very fortunate to be able to give a presentation on exhibition development and exhibits resources during the Emerging Museums Pre-Conference during the recent ACM (Association of Children's Museums) meeting in Philadelphia.

We had lots of fun at the Pre-Conference discussing unusual places to find exhibits resources , making prototypes, and even blowing stuff up in a museum MacGyver moment (really!) but I ran out of time before I could slice up a few "Museum Sacred Cows" related to museum exhibits.

But before I finished my talk, I threw a chunk or rhetorical "red meat" to the crowd by saying that I'd be quite happy if I never saw another kid-sized grocery store exhibit in a children's museum ever again. Given the raised eyebrows and open-mouthed stares from many in the audience I thought I'd share the top five reasons why I dislike grocery store exhibits:

1) Grocery store exhibits are the anthithesis of "green design."
Dumping a truckload (literally!) of fake plastic produce and grocery items onto shelves and into bins sets a tremendously bad example for sustainable exhibit design practice.

2) Grocery store exhibits are unfair to museum floor staff and volunteers.
These galleries might more accurately be called "entropy exhibits" since the main activity for young visitors seems to be to madly rush about pulling every facsimile grocery store item off the shelves, shoving them into the miniature shopping carts or onto the phony checkout conveyor and then leaving. The poor floor staff and volunteers assigned to this area then, Sisyphus-like,
engage in resorting the mess left behind again and again as new visitors enter the mini store.

3) Grocery store exhibits are just creatively lazy.
When I visit a museum with one of these areas, I instinctively think, "well, they must have run out of good exhibit ideas." Despite all the high-minded rationalizations --- "the kids are learning about food groups" or "our grocery store shows visitors where milk and tomatoes actually come from..." I say if that was really what you wanted to get visitors thinking about, there are only about a dozen more entertaining and interesting ways to address those particular topics in an exhibition format than riding the tired mini grocery store warhorse once again. (Although if food groups or farm to store topics were high on your exhibit"wish list" to begin with, I'm not sure I'd want to visit with my kids in the first place.)

4) Grocery store exhibits send at least as many unintended messages as intended messages.
I'd really rather not send the message that it's alright to tear up an exhibit area and make a mess and then leave it to other people to clean up, or that shopping for food is some sort of wacky leisure activity instead of a necessity. If we really thought carefully about the ideas that kids are leaving grocery store exhibits with instead of blithely, and automatically, assuming that frenetic activity in an exhibition area equals "fun" or "learning" we might try out some different ideas.

5) Grocery store exhibits are the worst sort of craven fundraising ploys.
One of the most common reasons I hear directors defend their choice of a kid-sized grocery store exhibit is "We can easily get a sponsor for this." Believe me, after 27 years in the museum business, I understand the need to fundraise, but are you trying to create unique, amazing exhibit spaces, or just sell chunks of museum real estate?

Unfortunately most museum "sacred cows" come from just the sort of "well this is the way we've always done things" or "I've heard it works amazingly well at Museum X" sort of thinking.

What do you think? Do you have some of your own favorite museum "sacred cows" you'd like to throw on the fire? Let us know in the "Comments" section below.


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Sign Up For The Exhibit Doctor

The Exhibit Doctor has an antidote to the economic "doom and gloom" in the museum world.

We'll send you exhibit resources you can put to use right away (including directions to make an interactive exhibit every month!) 12 times a year to help you stretch your exhibit development resources.

It's a great deal, so head on over to The Exhibit Doctor info page to find out how to sign up!

"The goal is to create an exceptional moment in people's lives."

Muscle Up! is a short film by Aaron Stapley and Sarah Castelblanco that serves as a real inspiration for museum folks singing the recession blues. The title quote of this posting comes from one of the businesspeople interviewed in Muscle Up!

As reflected by the film's title, the film covers the many ways that creative folks can build the "institutional strength" to push past all the bad economic news and put into action ways to work smarter and to really create a unique niche for themselves.

While the people interviewed for the film are all small business/entrepreneurial types, every bit of what they have to say is relevant for anyone who works with, or for, museums. So give Muscle Up! a look and load up on great ideas to help your museum create those exceptional moments.



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Museums Matter

Given the constant drumbeat of dire news, it seems important to take a deep breath and think about how important museums continue to be in the lives of so many people.

I really enjoyed this short film, "Spark" that was created by the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, and produced in association with the American Association of Museums, and I hope you do too.

Post-Conference Musings

As the AAM and ACM conferences pack up their tents and roll out of Philadelphia, I'm thinking about the types of conversations that happen (or don't happen) at professional museum conferences.

It would be interesting to think of ways to: 1) Capture the types of meaty conversations that happen in hallways, restaurants, and bars outside of the confines of formal sessions. Or perhaps make sessions a little more conversational. 2) Give people a (anonymous?) forum to comment on conference topics and happenings in a truthful and professional way without feeling like they were committing professional suicide.

Suggestions and ideas welcome in the Comments Section below.

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