ExhibiTricks: A Museum/Exhibit/Design Blog: 12/01/2023

Sunday, December 31, 2023

New Year, New Games!

Our family just received some new games over the Holidays that I'd like to recommend.**

Good games, like good museum exhibit experiences, share a few common traits:

1) Easy to learn and play.

2) Fun for a variety of age levels.

3) Challenging, but not too challenging.

4) Interesting enough to play again and again.

So here, in no particular order, are some games that you might like to check out. (The link attached to each game name brings you to Amazon.)

Charty Party

Charty Party is a card game for adults that reminds me of another card-based game called Apples to Apples. During each round of Charty Party, one player is chosen to be the judge and flips over a chart card. The other players then anonymously play their funniest orange card to name the Y-axis of the chart. It's an easy but often hilarious game.

Wingspan

As the name of the game and the picture below implies, this is a game about birds! You play against other players to collect bird cards, get different types of food, and gather eggs in various ways. Wingspan is a gorgeous-looking game, with each one of the beautiful playing cards showing an accurate picture of a real bird. Wingspan feels educational but not boring -- with interesting, solid gameplay.

We like the game so much that we bought one of the "expansion" packs -- in this case, the Asia Expansion set, which adds a whole new flock of birds to learn and play with!

Mantis

Brought to you by the same people who developed the "Exploding Kittens" game, Mantis (named after the super-cool oceanic creature the Mantis Shrimp) comes with a bonus physical copy of the comic book, "Why the Mantis Shrimp is My New Favorite Animal."

The aim of the game is to be the first player to get 10 or more cards into your score pile. You do this by collecting matching sets of colorful Mantis cards and/or stealing those same cards from your opponents! Mantis works as a card game for kids but is also one of the adult party games you’ll want to play again and again.

King of Tokyo

If you've ever imagined yourself tearing up Tokyo like Godzilla or blasting New York City from an alien spaceship, this is the game for you!

A dice-driven game with a good combination of both luck and strategy needed to win, you compete against fellow "monsters" to collect energy points and avoid losing health points. Each round plays relatively quickly, so it's a great game for people at a party to jump in and out of.

Here's hoping your 2024 gets off to a fun and playful start!

As I mentioned above, each game name leads to a link on Amazon where you can purchase your own set! (** Note: Commissions may be earned from the Amazon links above.)

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Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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Thursday, December 21, 2023

Museums and Restaurants

As the end of the year festivities approach, I'll be spending time with my extended family. We will no doubt be enjoying many wonderful new museum and food-related experiences, so I thought I'd share this "encore" of one of my most popular posts that ties together the similarities between great dining AND great museum experiences.

ENJOY!

Let me tell you about Bigelow's. It's a little "hole in the wall" sort of place near my home on Long Island known for its fried clams. Bigelow's has been in business in the same spot since 1939. I went there for lunch today with my son, Philip, and in between our sighs of pleasure and chatting it up with our fellow diners, I was reminded of how much a great dining experience is like a great museum experience.

1) Everyone Knows Where It Is

I know you can use Google Maps or Yelp, but if you ask somebody at a hotel front desk or a taxi driver where a local restaurant or museum is, they should be able to tell you right away. If the place is really good, they should also be able to enthuse about a memorable experience that they or a friend had there recently. I remember visiting a city whose (unnamed) museum was practically across the street from the well-known professional football stadium, and not one taxi driver knew where that museum was located or had even heard of it. That's sad.

2) You Feel Welcomed Right Away

Even if it's the first time you've been there, a great museum or dining spot makes you instantly feel welcomed and at ease. It's a combination of the physical entry sequence (starting in the parking lot) and the staff people at the entrance that do the trick. You feel like you are in the right place and are starting out your visit in a positive way. Think about the qualities of the places that always make you feel welcomed (and the ones that don't!)

In the case of Bigelow's, you see the stools around the horseshoe-shaped counter (so you know where to sit right away) and the straightforward menu board lets you see your options (so you can start thinking about what you'd like to eat or drink as soon as you sit down.)

Contrast that with some museums where you have no idea where to pay your admission, or how to figure out which things you want to do or pay for.

Welcome to Bigelow's!

3) Friendly Staff Anticipate Your Needs

You never wait for your water glass to be refilled, or twiddle your thumbs waiting for the check at a great restaurant. That's because the people who work there are alert and genuinely attentive to their customers' needs. Great museums have actual floor staff interacting with visitors, not just chatting in a corner by themselves. Wonderful dining and museum experiences share an important social component. A positive interaction with a staff person often adds to the overall experience.

4) You Tell Friends About The Place And Want To Take Them There

A fantastic experience at a great place is one you want to share with other people. There's a reason "word of mouth" advertising is so sought after --- you can't fake it or spend your way there. If you had a remarkable museum experience you tell other people about it. And you want to go back there to share that positive experience with people you care about. I've visited "museums worth a special trip" -- those places you would travel out of your way to go see based on a friend's recommendation. I would definitely put places like The City Museum in St. Louis, or Chanticleer Garden outside Philadelphia in that rarefied category.

Bigelow's is worth a special trip!

5) Memory Makers!

The best museums (and restaurants!) are memory makers. They are the places that are part of every story that starts with "Remember the time we ..." They are the places that you want to post on Facebook or Instagram because you felt the experience was worth capturing and sharing. The picture at the top of this post shows my friends Bistra and Nadia from Bulgaria after a lunch we shared at Bigelow's. They asked for me to bring them somewhere that was real "Long Island." And even though they both grew up thousands of miles away, they loved it! And what business can ask for more than that?

As you are starting out your New Year and thinking about ways to improve the museum(s) you work with and for, maybe a trip to your favorite local restaurant can give you just the right kind of "food for thought" to inspire making some memorable changes for your visitors. Cheers!

Instagram-ready "food for thought" from Bigelow's!

Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

If you enjoy the blog, you can help keep it free to read and free from ads by supporting ExhibiTricks through our PayPal "Tip Jar"

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

The Other 99%

I've never received a congratulatory message about the 99% of exhibits in a project that are working wonderfully and that visitors are enthusiastically enjoying.

Instead, understandably, people (whether they are visitors or clients) want to tell you about things that aren't working.

Continually focusing on the things that need to be fixed can sometimes cause us to miss the bigger picture -- all the many, many parts of a project that ARE working.

So how can we hold these two aspects of our creative working lives -- the things that need to be tinkered with or improved, as well as all the cool things we've accomplished -- in a helpful balance, or at least a sort of peaceful coexistence?

I'll offer two ways of thinking about this creative tension between improvement and accomplishment:

1) SNAPSHOT VERSUS MOVIE

If you had to graph a creative lull or a tricky part of a project, it might look something like this:

And at that particular moment in time, it might feel awful -- even hopeless. You might even feel like quitting. And that's the "snapshot." A moment in time.

When you are in that snapshot moment, it can be hard to have the proper perspective on the path of a project, which, often, if you take a moment to step back or evaluate afterward, looks more like this:

Let's be honest, there are crappy movies. And maybe your project is one of those "Rotten Tomatoes." Or maybe the scene you're in right now just needs to be rewritten or reworked a little bit. You might need to force yourself to step out of the snapshot to find out.

2) LOOKING BACK TO MOVE FORWARD

A retired school superintendent named George was one of my all-time favorite Board Members, and he would often remind us of something during tense meetings when we would be talking (or arguing!) about things that needed to be improved in, or added to, our museum.

George would say, "Yes, these are things we need to improve or programs we need to add, but let's stop and take a look back at some of the things we have accomplished in the past few months, or the past year. What can we take away from looking at how we made those things happen?"

It was a very wise strategy because it shifted the focus from the often contentious present and the uncertain future. We would be reminded that in the past few months or past year, we had actually accomplished a lot of positive things together. And that we could add and improve more new things together if we used our past experiences to guide us forward.

Years later, I realized that George's approach was very much in the spirit of Sankofa.

As mentioned in this Wikipedia article about Sankofa, the notion of "looking back to move forward," is used by the Akan people of Ghana. They often use an adinkra symbol, of a bird with its head turned backward to symbolically capture an egg depicted above its back, to represent the same concept. It symbolizes taking from the past what is good and bringing it into the present to make positive progress.

So, as we come to the end of another year, I hope you will be able to see not just snapshots but also movies. I also hope you will be able to look back at 2023 to move forward with learnings for the New Year and beyond.

P.S. You know that tricky project you finished this year? It is AWESOME!

Monday, December 4, 2023

How to "Expand" Time at Your Museum

Sometimes, when I'm speaking with a new consulting client, our perceptions of the time needed to complete project tasks on-site at their museum are very different.

Usually, my contact will express that there is "no way" we will complete all the activities I've proposed at their museum in the allotted time. It doesn't matter whether the time involved is two days or two weeks.

However, I know a little museum consultant trick that "expands" time. Well, it's not really a trick, but rather a way of playing with an all too common reality for museum folks -- they don't get regular large blocks of "uninterrupted" time to do their work!

No matter if someone works in Exhibits, Education, Development, or Administration, they seem to be constantly pulled away or distracted by meetings, building concerns, visitor complaints, board issues, malfunctioning exhibits, etc., etc.

However, when everyone knows a consultant is coming (especially from out of town!) staff working at the museum make a commitment to create blocks of "untouchable" time to meet, prototype, brainstorm, or whatever with the consultant (like me!)

And, unsurprisingly, when talented and creative museum folks dig into challenges together for those uninterrupted blocks of time -- LOTS of cool stuff happens.

There are also ways to "hack" your work calendar to create these "time-bending" calendar blocks. Some folks prioritize their "high concentration" tasks at the beginning of their work day (ideally before the museum opens) to maximize their workflow. If possible, some folks shift their starting times an hour earlier to maximize concentrated quiet time or even book standing meetings with themselves to build in those blocks of focused time.

All of this begs the question of whether all those workplace "interruptions" are really necessary. Of course, if a real emergency like a water pipe bursting happens, it requires immediate attention. But could other work events or meetings, be put into a temporal "parking lot" to be dealt with at specific times -- after lunch or two hours before closing, for example -- leaving the rest of the day for concentrated bursts of thinking, creating, and problem-solving?

It's worth spending a little time thinking about how your workdays normally flow -- or don't.

Or you could just contact me to work with your museum so we can bend time together!

ExhibiTricks: A Museum/Exhibit/Design Blog