Revisiting A Bulgarian Museum Revolution

I am now in Bulgaria as part of the team kicking off the process to create the first Children's Museum in Bulgaria --- in Sofia the Capital.  When I last visited Bulgaria in late 2010, pilot interactive exhibition galleries were just starting to open around the country.  These "Children's Corners" have since been enormously successful and popular with children, parents, and teachers.

Now the dream of creating a full-fledged Children's Museum in Sofia is marching down the road to reality.  While much has been accomplished by our Bulgarian Museum colleagues, it is interesting how the lessons learned from the pilot Children's Corners are still informing the burgeoning Children's Museum project.  While I'll be reflecting on my current Bulgarian trip in future posts, I thought it would be worthwhile to revisit my (slightly modified) posting from my 2010 trip below:

A Bulgarian (Museum) Revolution

What would you do if you lived in a country that had no Children's Museums?

That's currently the state of affairs in Bulgaria.  Fortunately for the Bulgarian Museum community, and Bulgarian museum visitors in particular, a determined and resourceful young woman named Vessela Gertcheva ably assisted by Nadia Zaharieva of the America for Bulgaria Foundation are working to change all that.  In fact, Vessela, Nadia, and their colleagues in the museum and cultural sectors are on the brink of a true Bulgarian Museum Revolution.


I just returned from a trip to Bulgaria to observe and provide advice on the pilot project designed to develop five "Children's Corners" (really better thought of as small interactive exhibition areas designed to introduce children and family groups to hands-on exhibits) into five different museums around Bulgaria.  (Note: remember that this post refers to my first trip to Bulgaria in 2010.)

Vessela is spearheading the "Children's Corners" project as a way to build public awareness for the possibilities of interactive learning spaces in Bulgaria, and to ultimately pave the way for a free-standing Bulgarian Children's Museum there.  In this blog posting, I'll share some of the experiences of my trip to Bulgaria, as well as some of the museum and exhibit ideas I came away with.

But first, a little background.  Everyone I told about my trip before I actually left for Bulgaria was surprised and/or fascinated by my destination.  But most people (including myself, originally) weren't really sure where Bulgaria was located.  So, here's a map:

Bulgaria is bordered to the south by Greece and Turkey, to the west by Macedonia, to the north by Romania, and to the east by the Black Sea.  My sense of central Sofia, the capital, was that there were a few beautiful buildings surrounded by much blocky, oppressive architecture reflective of the Soviet-dominated, totalitarian past of Bulgaria.  This is changing since Bulgaria's entry into the European Union, but slowly.

Similarly, the Bulgarian museums we visited were decidedly "old school."  Large buildings whose interiors were dominated by rows and floors of artifacts and objects in glass cases (or as our Bulgarian hosts charmingly described them, "cages.")  While many of these traditional Bulgarian museums provided interesting staffed programs (such as weekend bazaars or the popular annual "European Bat Night" at the National Museum of Natural History) museum staff have become increasingly interested in exploring ways for integrating interactive exhibit areas geared toward children and families into their museums.

The first of the five Children's Corners opened in September 2010 at the Regional Museum of History in Blagoevgrad, in the southwestern part of Bulgaria.  Having seen the finished gallery, I am very impressed and think that the Blagoevgrad exhibition raises the bar high for the succeeding four galleries in this project to match.  (You can read my entire review and see a batch of pictures from the Blagoevgrad installation by clicking over to the ExhibiFiles website.)

I also learned a new exhibit trick from our Bulgarian museum colleagues: their animal track stamping component makes use of "Moon Sand" in the central stamping area, which makes for sharper track impressions as well as limiting some degree of the messiness associated with traditional loose sand.

In visiting the other museum sites that will be creating their own Children's Corners, and by meeting with their directors and curatorial staff, I was struck by several things:

• It is exceedingly difficult to imagine the possibilities or develop interactive exhibit ideas if neither you, nor your visitors, have directly experienced a hands-on gallery or museum.  This is a key part of both the challenge, and the revolution, inherent in the Children's Corner project.  Fortunately, the completed gallery in Blagoevgrad is already serving as a model and benchmark to Bulgarian museum professionals and visitors alike.

• Prototyping and testing your ideas is the most effective way to achieve good results.  There was a little bit of the tendency in Bulgaria (as there is in the U.S. and elsewhere in the museum world) to want to design and develop the interactive children's exhibitions inside meeting rooms with a quorum of experts.  Fortunately, by the end of our trip to Bulgaria, our hosts seemed to be warming up to the notion of using prototyping as a way to answer exhibit design and development questions.

• Failure IS an option.  As I often say to my kids, "It's o.k. to make mistakes, as long as you learn from them, and don't keep repeating the same mistakes over and over."   There is an enormous degree of professional pride and pressure at stake for the Bulgarian Children's Corner project sites --- which might make some people decide to stick with very safe exhibit design and development choices.   Fortunately, the vast majority of project partners we came in contact with seem to realize that this is a time and opportunity that favors choices that may be difficult and risky.

We really are witnessing the start of a truly exciting museum revolution in Bulgaria, and I can't wait to see what happens next!  (Feel free to contact me with questions or to request addition details about my work in Bulgaria.)

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The Questions We Ask

The questions we ask determine the answers we get.

The importance of questions seems pretty straightforward, but this week I've been working with teachers at the New York Hall of Science to help them come up with the best questions to ask their students to start design projects.  (We call the "prompts" or "frames.")

It's hard to come up with good design activity questions, but here are some tips I've gathered from working on the "Design Lab" project at the NY Hall for the past two years that are helpful when I'm thinking about framing exhibit experiences as well:


• Keep it short.  It's harder for visitors or students to respond when they're trying to hack their way through a tangled forest of words.


• Real world is really good.   If your framing questions have a real-life context, your visitors or students will become more easily engaged in the design problem or challenge.

• Start at the finish.  How will both you and users know whether they've been successful?  Having clear criteria helps students or visitors determine how they want to go after a design challenge.

•  Frame problems for divergent solutions.  Really juicy design or exhibit prompts offer end-users the opportunity to come up with many different types of good solutions instead of one right answer.


• Layer content, don't dump it.  There is a tendency for some teachers and exhibit developers (especially when dealing with science or technology related prompts) to "dump" all the content on the user right at the beginning of a design activity. 

A well-crafted design problem "layers" in opportunities for students or exhibit users to discover or seek out content information to help complete their problem solving.



I'm moving on to a new set of exhibit projects, but working with the entire Design Lab crew at the Hall of Science these past few years has really helped me think more deeply about how to work with visitors to create even more engaging and open-ended exhibit experiences.  I look forward to seeing what comes out of the Design Lab project in the future!


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ReWind: Grocery Store Exhibits?

I've spent this week in beautiful Knoxville conducting community input groups for The MUSE, an emerging museum here.  Even though we weren't soliciting specific exhibit ideas at this stage, people couldn't help share their excitement for exhibit areas they had seen at other museums around the country.

Inevitably (perhaps) when the discussion turned to young children, and children's museums, the old exhibit warhorse of the kid-sized grocery store reared its head.  So I thought now would be a good time to re-post the reasons why I dislike grocery store exhibits so, in a screed entitled:
 

"NOT Another Grocery Store Exhibit!"

At the end of a recent conference presentation, 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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Exhibit Design Inspiration: Mining The Dollar Store

I find a special pleasure in putting things (especially inexpensive or unexpected things!) to creative use for projects.  (There's a good reason I edited the three ASTC Exhibit Cheapbooks ...)  I love going through "mom and pop" hardware stores, or Home Depot, or the Dollar Store, or even Staples, to find interesting materials for current or future exhibit projects.  Online cruising for materials (like the McMaster-Carr catalog) is great, but it's a different experience than being able to actually pick up stuff and give it a good look in the "real" (non-digital ) world.

This is Exhibit Design 101 as far as I'm concerned.  It's much better to have a good sense of materials and suppliers ahead of time, before trying to find specific parts or widgets for a project in a last-minute panic.

So imagine my delight in finding the videos and blog from the XRobot folks from the UK.  Here are enthusiastic makers who are dedicated to making awesome things (like the "Terminator" endoskull pictured at the top of this post) with material from the Dollar Store (or as James from XRobots says "The Pound Shop" or "The 99p Shop.")

So why not do two things to nurture your inner "thrifty designer" today? 

1) Check out the XRobots site, and

2) Visit your local Dollar Store or hardware store and see what cool stuff you can turn up.

Let us know what you find, or share your own favorite "creative design on the cheap" tips, in the Comments" Section below.


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