The Green Exhibit Checklist

I'm an advisor on a wonderful project designed to create tools for the museum/design industry that help to foster more sustainable project development and exhibit production.  Or in simpler terms, helping exhibit folks to be more thoughtful about the broader ecological impacts of our work .

The project is headed up by the fine folks from OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) with funding from the National Science Foundation.

One of the "in-process" products that I'm most excited about is "The Green Exhibit Checklist"

The Green Exhibit Checklist is a tool to evaluate the environmental sustainability of exhibits. The goal of the Checklist is to inspire exhibit/design teams to plan exhibits with environmental considerations in mind. It awards points (along the lines of the LEED process) for five key strategies for reducing the environmental impact of exhibit production:

• Reducing new material consumption
• Using local resources
• Reducing waste
• Reducing energy consumption
• Reducing products with toxic emissions

Rather than focusing on a dogmatic list of “dos and donts” or a list of “must use” green materials, the Green Exhibit Checklist considers sustainable design as an institution-wide, evolving process.

If you'd like to find out more about OMSI's Promoting Sustainable Decision Making project, you can click on over to the website called "Exhibit SEED" or better yet, click here to download a PDF of the most recent version of The Green Exhibit Checklist, so you can start using it yourself!

As a side note, I'll be speaking at the upcoming NEMA (New England Museum Association) Conference in Hartford during the Exhibits Luncheon on Thursday, November 17th on just this topic.


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