Exhibit Design Inspiration: Tom Eckert

Tom Eckert is a sculptor who works with only carved and painted wood to create his art.  Sounds simple doesn't it?  But if you take a look at Tom Eckert's website you'll soon come to appreciate the possibilities that can come from these basic materials and methods.

I love how the sculptures "fool the eye" and create their own fantastical scenes that play with your notions of "reality."  The pieces also reward viewers for being careful observers.

From the artist:

"Forms carved to suggest cloth recur in many of my pieces.  By tradition, cloth has been widely used to conceal and shroud objects in practices ranging from advertising to church rituals.  Covered forms are often more evocative - with a sense of mystery absent from the uncovered object by itself.  I remember in church one Lent, as a child, being mystified while gazing at the statues shrouded with purple cloth.

Since childhood, I have been curious about and amused by mistaken impressions of reality presented as part of my visual experiences.  One of my earliest recollections, on a car trip, was my perception of the wet, slick highway ahead that turned out to be an illusion, a mirage.  The revelation that I was fooled, visually and intellectually tricked, stuck with me.  This visual deception is now the basis for my creative direction.  “Cloth” carved of wood has much different structural qualities than real cloth. When this idea is applied to my compositions (floating book, floating cards, floating rock) a sense of the impossible happens - for me, magic."

Check out Tom Eckert's website for more images of his work!


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As you may have heard, Google is killing off Google Reader on July 1, 2013.

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Technology's Kaleidoscope --- Reflecting on the HCI+ISE Conference

"You should always think about what you really want to accomplish first, before you start thinking about the technology you want to use."  This became a common refrain at the HCI+ISE (Human Computer Interaction in Informal Science Education) Conference that happened just last week in Albuquerque.

The why before the how, if you will.

However, "technology" is a slippery term, as is the implementation of technology in informal learning environments.  And everyone who uses (or creates) technology, especially digital technology, tends to view its uses through a very personal lens --- like a kaleidoscope that shifts and changes depending on who is using it.  I still see so much cringe-worthy digital technology deployed in exhibitions that I wonder if the WHY really does happen before the HOW in the most museums.

But rather than concentrate on the bad examples of tech implementation, I wanted to share some things that resonated with me in a positive way from the HCI+ISE Conference.  I'm honestly still mentally unpacking lots of meaty conversations and ideas to try to make better sense of it all.  But here, in no particular order, are projects, people, and ideas that stuck out for me:

Accessibility, and accessible technology, was a big part of the HCI+ISE conference.  Folks who are doing really interesting work in this regard include the Boston Museum of Science's "Creating Museum Media for Everyone" team.  Some interesting things that came out of these discussions included ideas about "sonification" --- the idea of supplementing, or augmenting, traditional visual approaches with additional sonic cues and layers.  (Check out the work of the Georgia Tech Sonification Lab.)

One of the Conference's participants and presenters was Sina Bahram.  He spoke about looking for ways to create standards for accessibility interfaces and the notion of creating graphic overlays where each layer could relate to different learning abilities and modalities.  (Imagine a sonic layer over a traditional iPad interface for people with visual impairments, for example.)  You should definitely check out Sina's website for more ideas in this regard.

We spent a bit of time at the Conference articulating differences between "digital" and "physical" exhibits and environments, including the social aspects of those differences.  I liked the discussions about:

• The differences between wall-based and table-based multitouch units and how visitors use them

• How do the types of devices used shape visitor expectations.  (Does every touchscreen now have to act like an iPad --- to be able to pinch or expand screens, or to sweep through images?)

•  Does NUI (Natural User Interface) only "work" if the objects don't "misbehave"?

Geeky, but good, stuff!  Which naturally led the Conference conversations and presentations into interlocking conversations about AR (Augmented Reality.)  There's a lot to say about this topic, but one of the HCI+ISE projects using AR that I really like is the NSF-funded ARIEL (Augmented Reality for Interpretive and Experiential Learning) Project out of the Franklin Institute in Philadephia.  One of the goals of ARIEL is to make "invisible" forces more visible (like the magnetic field exhibit pictured below.)

Also, I liked one of the ARIEL team member's quotes that exemplified their team's willingness to take risks:  "Everytime something worked, it was a happy accident."

Check out the ARIEL website --- there are lots of good resources there.


Seb Chan highlighted the cool things happening at the Science Gallery in Dublin, an edgy, program-heavy place programmed with temporary exhibits on current science that only allows visitors over the age of 16 to visit their space.  (They had me at Blood Wars, a program where blood is drawn from different visitors to have their white blood cells fight in a "death match" !)


Erika Kiessner was feeling a bit conflicted about "usability" but articulated three key aspects of good usability for visitors in exhibits, either with or without digital technology.

Good Usability:

• Is comfortable (physically appropriate)

• Does not make people feel dumb

• Puts people in control (with no obvious limits)


Dave Patten from the Science Museum of London, spoke about the many possible uses of digital technology in a large, object-based museum (and showed some cool experiments involving projection-based media) but I couldn't help but fall in love with a deliberately low-tech artist intervention called the Cockroach Tour!


Some other things that are still bubbling up in my mind from the HCI+ISE Conference include:

• The role of digital technology in "Citizen Science" projects.
( iNaturalist.org is a good website to check out in this regard.)

• Funky Forest --- an interactive/tech ecosystem where children create trees with their bodies and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the types of creatures that inhabit it.  Check out the video!

• The book Consumer.ology about the "myth" of Market Research sounds fab!

I guess the mark of a great conference (and interesting conference participants!) is that I'm still thinking and sorting ideas that I encountered in Albuquerque.  I may revisit some of them here on ExhibiTricks in the future, but for now I'll leave you with a quote from one of those interesting participants, Beck Tench:

"At home I want to use tech to make time, not waste it."



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Thanks (again) Dad!

Father's Day is a meaningful day for me, not only because I have four great kids, but because it gives me time to think about my father, Orlando Orselli, who died in 2001.  My dad certainly helped set many of my ideas about work and parenthood, and I'm thankful for that.

My dad worked most of his adult life for The Ford Motor Company, first at the Rouge Plant, and then at the World Headquarters building (The "Glass House") in Dearborn, Michigan.  He was a Stationary Steam Engineer, which basically means he worked with BIG boiler systems.

Even though he didn't go to college, my dad instilled a love for books and learning, and the importance of education, upon myself and my two younger brothers while we were growing up in Detroit.

Because he worked the midnight shift, he made time to go on school (or scout or Boys Club) field trips during the day and then take a nap before he would drive to work later that night. He thought it was important that my brothers and I helped him fix things around the house and knew the names and uses of the tools in his basement "workshop".

When people ask me how I got into the museum business, I am sure memories of the day when my father took me when I was little (by myself, without my mom and brothers, for some reason) to Detroit's "Cultural Center" to visit the Historical Museum (the streets of "Old Detroit"!) and the Children's Museum (things I could touch!) and the Institute of Arts (Mummies!) all in one long afternoon have something to do with it.  Many, many family trips involved museums, or zoos, or nature centers.

Even though my career choice in museums might have puzzled my father a little bit, he always told me, and other people, how proud he was of the work I was doing.

Please never underestimate how important museums can be to people, especially kids and the adults they will become.

Thanks Dad!



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Is This Tech Necessary?

I often have a fraught relationship with how technology, especially digital technology, gets used in museum exhibits. The devices we choose so often seem to overpower the messages they are presenting.

I've been thinking about technology and museum visitor experiences a lot lately, since I'm an advisor on a project funded by the National Science Foundation called HCI+ISE.  The acronym stands for Human Computer Interaction in Informal Science Education.

Next week,  HCI+ISE will hold a conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico that will bring together 60 museum exhibit designers and developers, learning researchers, and technology industry professionals to explore the potential impact of new HCI technologies in ISE settings. The conference will explore the balance between exhibit technology and the visitor experience.  I'm really looking forward to some meaty conversations! (Which I certainly will report back on in a future ExhibiTricks post.)

As I've been preparing for the HCI+ISE Conference, two previous ExhibiTricks posts kept bubbling up in my mind.  The first, Are Screens Killing Museums? continues to generate lots of passionate responses from people (in fact, it's still my only post that generated hate mail!) but I think the issues inside are still worth thinking about.

The second, Screened Out: Preferences for Technology in Museums reports on research that wrestles with whether museum visitors are as entranced by technology as we think they are.

I'm sure these (and many other!) tech-related topics will come up in Albuquerque, so stay tuned for updates here on the blog or on my Twitter feed (@museum_exhibits)


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