Museum Easter Eggs

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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Federal Funding for Museums = "Budget Dust"?

Here's a "Tax Day" Question: Do you know what folks on Capitol Hill call funding programs that may only deal with millions of dollars, instead of billions, or even trillions?  Answer: Budget dust!

So, apparently, federal funding for ALL museum-related projects is merely "budget dust."

With the notion of "budget dust" pinging around my brain, I've tried to set out determining exactly (or at least approximately) how much money was actually awarded to museums via the Federal government in the 2010 budget cycle.  Unfortunately, it hasn't been easy.

I naturally assumed that AAM (American Association of Museums) could provide that number, but no go.  So, moving on, I've been contacting the "big four" Federal agencies that seem to provide most of the museum-related funding: IMLS (Institute for Museum and Library Services); NSF (National Science Foundation); NEA (National Endowment for the Arts); and NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities.)  So far, I've gotten some initial numbers from NEH and IMLS, and I hope to get some comparable information from both NSF and NEA soon.

Once I gather and parse all the numbers, I'll offer the documentation and figures here on ExhibiTricks, so stay tuned!

Why am I interested in the museum funding numbers?  Mainly to spur museum colleagues to action, and to provide a fact-based response to the demagoguery spinning around the current budget process in Washington.

Why are "budget dust" projects that serve a wide range of people (like museums!) being targeted for cut-backs while the real "budget boulders" like Defense, Entitlements, and tax cuts for the very richest Americans, are being spared, or even increased?

If you work with museums and care about their future, please contact your representatives in Washington to let them know how important museum funding is --- not just for museums themselves, but their local communities.

Don't let our "budget dust" turn into "budget nanoparticles"!


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Can Exhibits Really Change Lives?

Given that even the most avid museum-goers spend the vast majority of their lives outside of our exhibit galleries, perhaps a more nuanced question might be: "After visiting an exhibition, can visitors become motivated to make specific choices or take concrete actions that will improve their lives?"

Many exhibitions, especially those involving topics related to Energy, Environment, or Health, in addition to wanting to impart content-rich material, often have an underlying desire to get visitors to take action after leaving the museum.  But, can exhibit messages, delivered in the context of a busy museum visit, ever really "stick" enough so that visitors begin to modify their behavior in the days, weeks, and months following their exposure to such messages?

I've been thinking about this a lot lately since I'm involved in exhibits projects that specifically want people to take concrete actions relating to their own sustainable practices (in one case) and fitness-related choices (in the other case.)

In our project team discussions, we keep returning to several factors:

          • Keep the messages positive.   It's one thing to tell exhibit users that even small steps can lead to increased fitness.  It's another thing to slap them in the face with the message "You're Obese!"  (even though they might be ... ) without providing some way of mitigating that message.

Many "Rain Forest Exhibits" are notoriously bad at this.  There is often an LED counter that shows how many acres of rain forest have been destroyed while you've been inside the exhibition.  Really what can you do with that sort of message? (Except feel depressed ...)

         • Offer options.  There be many legitimate reasons why a person may need to drive to work, instead of biking or using mass transit. But if all of your exhibit messages boil down to CARS = EVIL you probably haven't won many hearts and minds, and you may just have turned the drivers in your audience away from many other positive actionable messages in your exhibition.

        • Make Follow-ups Memorable (and Specific.)  Telling visitors to eat according to the Food Pyramid is not very memorable --- it's a boring message they've heard before.  But letting them try to create a "Rainbow Plate" composed of differently-colored healthy food choices will, hopefully, leave a longer-lasting impression tied to a specific positive action that will follow them home.

It's devilishly hard to determine the correlation (or causation!) of visitors' actions based on a single short visit to an exhibition, but is it unrealistic for museums to try to change behaviors (and ultimately lives) through the exhibition medium?

I'd love to have you leave your opinion in the "Comments Section" below, along with any examples of exhibitions that seemed to be effective at helping to change visitor behavior outside the museum.



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Un(der)sung Projects and The GBER Re-boot

Most of the museums in the world are classified as "small" but you would never know it from the disproportionate notice and publicity their bigger museum "cousins" receive.   I've written before about how funders and professional museum organizations might give more "aid and comfort" to those small(er) institutions that don't usually end up on the AAM or ASTC or ACM letterhead.

ExhibiTricks has also previously featured a few exemplary projects from "smaller" places that haven't always shown up in the NY Times or been splashed around the Twitter-verse:

• The LEGO® Millyard Project at the SEE Science Center that combined community volunteers and over 3 million LEGO bricks to recreate and help tell the story of the historic Amoskeag Millyard.

• The Play Project at the Providence Children's Museum that got their local communities thinking about the "power of play" as well as the museum as a resource for playing and play resources.

• As well as several "small" community-minded art exhibits like the White Plains project or the work of the Acadiana Center for the Arts.

So, I'd like to do my "small" (natch!) part to highlight some more interesting and creative projects coming out from small(er) museums and organizations.  If you know of such Un(der)sung Projects, please leave a message I can follow up on in the "Comments Section" below, or send me an email message directly briefly describing the project or exhibition. 

I'll follow-up with postings here on ExhibiTricks (and my Twitter and Facebook streams) about these "Smaller Is Better" efforts in order to provide a little recognition, but also to, hopefully, provide awareness and encouragement for other small places doing great stuff during these tough times.


On a tangential note, I'd like to mention that I've completed another round of additions and HTML "nips and tucks" to The Great Big Exhibit Resource List  (or GBER for short.)

The GBER is a compendium of trusted resources for museum exhibit developers, designers, and educators looking for the "stuff" to make their programs of exhibitions successful.   Everything from "Fake Foods" to "Extrusions" and "Scent Machines" is there for the browsing along with quick links to websites and company contact info.

Check out the new, improved GBER re-boot and let me know what you think --- and whether there are some of your favorite resources we should add to the List!






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