What Fixing Broken Exhibits Has Taught Me About Smart Design

Let me paint you a picture. It's Tuesday morning, and the school groups are due to arrive in an hour. Your star interactive exhibit—the one that took six months to design and three months to build—is making that clicking sound again. You know, the one that means "expensive repair visit" in exhibit language.

Meanwhile, that simple wooden flip-book station you built as a "temporary" solution five years ago? Still going strong, still engaging visitors, and the only maintenance it needs is occasionally tightening a screw.

After four decades of watching exhibits live, die, and get resurrected more times than a soap opera character, I've learned that maintenance-friendly design isn't about dumbing things down—it's about respecting the brutal realities of public use.

The Immortals: Exhibits That Refuse to Die

Simple Mechanical Interactives: Hand cranks, pulleys, lever systems, rotating drums. These workhorses continue to operate effectively because they utilize principles that have proven successful since the Industrial Revolution. When they break, any competent handy person can fix them.

Magnetic Systems: Those "build your own molecule" exhibits with magnetic atoms? Nearly indestructible. Drop-proof and child-proof, with the only moving parts being the magnetic pieces themselves.

 

Gravity-Fed Demonstrations: Ball runs, catapults, pendulums. Physics does the work, not motors. When something goes wrong, it's usually obvious and can be easily fixed.

The Universal Laws of Exhibit Entropy

Law #1: If It Can Be Touched, It Will Be Touched Incorrectly

Design for the visitor who will push when they should pull, lean when they should stand, and somehow find the one way to use your exhibit that you never imagined.

Smart design response: Make the "wrong" way to interact either impossible or harmless. You can't push in the wrong direction if the mechanism only moves one way.

Law #2: Children Are Tiny Engineers of Destruction

Not maliciously—they're just incredibly effective at finding failure points. They apply force in unexpected directions, use exhibits as climbing equipment, and have an uncanny ability to separate components you thought were permanently attached.

Smart design response: If a six-year-old can break it, assume they will. Design accordingly.

Law #3: The Most Popular Exhibits Wear Out Fastest

Success breeds its own problems. That hands-on station that everyone loves? It's getting 10x the use you planned for.

Smart design response: Build for 5x your projected traffic, then add safety margins.

Law #4: Complex Repairs Happen at the Worst Possible Times

Murphy's Law applies doubly to museum exhibits. The touchscreen will fail right before the VIP donor tour.

Smart design response: Design for graceful degradation. When part of the exhibit fails, the rest should still function.

The Modular Mindset

Think Lego, not sculpture. Design exhibits as systems of replaceable components rather than integrated artworks.

 

Component Accessibility: Can you reach every part that might need maintenance without dismantling half the exhibit? If not, redesign.

Standard Fasteners: Use screws and bolts that are readily available at any hardware store. Avoid proprietary connectors that require special orders from manufacturers who might not exist in five years.

 

Diagnostic Simplicity: When something stops working, can a non-expert quickly identify the problem? Visual indicators, clear troubleshooting steps, and logical component organization save countless hours.

The Long Game

Maintenance-friendly design isn't about creating boring exhibits—it's about creating exhibits that can continue to engage visitors year after year. The most innovative interactive in the world is useless if it's broken half the time.

The goal isn't to eliminate maintenance, but to make it predictable, manageable, and affordable. Design exhibits that age like fine wine, not like forgotten leftovers.

Visitors don't care how clever your engineering is—they care that the exhibit works when they want to engage with it. Design for reliability, and the innovation will take care of itself.

What's your most maintenance-friendly exhibit success story? Or your biggest maintenance nightmare that taught you valuable lessons? Share your war stories in the "Comments" Section below—we can all learn from each other's triumphs and disasters.

 

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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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Can AI Be Your Museum Brainstorming Buddy?

Let's be honest: we've all been there. It's 3 PM on a Tuesday, and you're staring at a blank concept document, with your brain feeling like it's been replaced with cotton candy. The client wants "something interactive about local history that appeals to all ages and doesn't cost more than a decent used car."

Your internal monologue goes something like: Interactive... history... families... budget... HELP.

Enter your new creative partner: AI. 

No, it won't replace your brilliant human insights (thank goodness), but it might just save you from that deer-in-headlights moment when inspiration decides to take an extended lunch break.

The Brainstorm Before the Brainstorm

Here's the thing about AI tools like ChatGPT or Claude: they're like that friend who's read everything, remembers everything, and never gets tired of your "what if we tried..." questions. The secret sauce isn't asking AI to design your exhibit for you—it's using it to unstick your creative gears.

Instead of: "Design an exhibit about butterflies." Try: "I need 15 unexpected angles for approaching butterfly conservation that would surprise visitors who think they know everything about butterflies."

Boom. Suddenly, you're not just talking about metamorphosis (again). You're exploring butterfly migration as climate data, butterfly wing patterns as inspiration for solar panel efficiency, or the economic impact of pollinator decline on local agriculture.

Journey Mapping: Your Visitor's GPS

 Remember when we used to draw visitor journey maps on napkins and hope for the best? AI can help you think through the emotional rollercoaster your visitors are about to experience—before you build the actual rollercoaster.

Try this prompt: "Map the emotional journey of a skeptical teenager being dragged through an exhibit about [your topic]. What are their pain points, potential engagement moments, and what would make them actually tell their friends about it?"

The AI might suggest that your skeptical teen initially rolls their eyes at the entrance, gets grudgingly intrigued by a hands-on station, feels genuinely surprised by an unexpected connection to their world, and leaves with one concrete thing to think about. That's a roadmap for your design decisions.

The "Yes, And..." Partner

AI excels at the improv comedy rule of "yes, and..."—it builds on your ideas instead of shutting them down. Having a creative block about how to make 18th-century farming techniques relevant to urban kids?

You: "What if we connected historical farming to modern urban gardening?"

AI: "Yes, and what if visitors could compare the efficiency of colonial crop rotation with vertical farming techniques, using the same square footage?"

You: "And they could actually plant something to take home..."

AI: "And track their plant's growth against historical weather data from the same region..."

Suddenly, you've an exhibit that bridges centuries, connects to current sustainability concerns, and provides visitors with a lasting takeaway.

Pro Tips for AI Collaboration

Be specific with context: "I'm designing for a 200-square-foot space in a children's museum with a $15K budget and weekly school groups of 25 kids" gets you better suggestions than "design something for kids."

Ask for alternatives: "Give me 5 completely different ways to teach this concept" will stretch your thinking beyond your first idea.

Play devil's advocate: "What would a museum visitor who hates technology think about this exhibit?" helps you design for all your audiences.

Get granular: "What should visitors be thinking, feeling, and doing in the first 30 seconds of this experience?" forces specificity.

The Human Touch (Still Required)

Here's what AI can't do: understand your specific community, navigate your institution's politics, or know that your facilities manager has strong opinions about anything that plugs into the wall. It can't feel the energy of your space, or know that Mrs. Henderson brings her third-grade class every October, and they always ask about dinosaurs, even in the art gallery.

AI is your museum brainstorming accelerator, not your replacement. 

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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"

"Stealing" Ideas from Everyone. What Apple Stores, Airports, and Playgrounds Can Teach Museums About Visitor Experience.

Here's a confession: some of my best exhibit ideas have come from places that have nothing to do with museums. That breakthrough wayfinding solution? Inspired by IKEA's store layout. The interactive that finally got teenagers engaged? I borrowed the concept from a skateboard shop in Portland.

Museum professionals sometimes act like we're the only industry that cares about visitor experience, but the truth is, we're surrounded by brilliant design solutions just waiting to be adapted. The question isn't whether to "borrow" ideas from other industries—it's how to "steal" smartly.

The Great Idea Heist: Where to Look

Retail: The Masters of "Just One More Thing"

Walk through any well-designed store, and you'll see visitor flow management that puts most museums to shame. Retailers have spent billions figuring out how to guide people through spaces, create desire, and encourage exploration.

What They Do Right:

• Sight lines that draw you deeper: You can always see something interesting ahead.

• Clear navigation without being obvious: You know where you are and where you're going.

• Strategic placement of "impulse" experiences: High-interest items at decision points.

• Varied pacing: Busy areas followed by calm spaces, creating rhythm.

Museum Takeaway: That "featured artifact" placement at the end of your gallery hallway? Pure retail psychology. Visitors see it from the entrance and naturally move toward it, encountering your other content along the way.

Theme Parks: Emotional Journey Architects

Disney didn't invent storytelling, but they perfected the art of emotional pacing in physical spaces. Every step of a Theme Park experience is choreographed to build anticipation, deliver a payoff, and leave you wanting more.

What They Do Right:

• Line design that's part of the experience: The wait becomes preparation for the main event.

• Layered storytelling: Multiple levels of detail for different types of visitors.

• Transition spaces: Clear beginnings, middles, and ends to experiences.

• Multi-sensory immersion: Sound, smell, temperature, and lighting work together.

Museum Takeaway: Your exhibit entrance isn't just a doorway—it's the opening scene of your story. What if you treated it like the loading area of a theme park ride, building anticipation for what's coming?

Playground Design: The Physics of Fun

Playground designers are brilliant experience architects. They create spaces that encourage specific behaviors, accommodate different ages and abilities, and somehow make parents want to linger while kids are completely absorbed.

What They Do Right:

• Multiple difficulty levels in one space: Challenging for experts, accessible for beginners.

• Natural supervision points: Parents can watch from comfortable positions.

• Flow that prevents bottlenecks: Multiple paths to the same destinations.

• Materials that age gracefully: Built to withstand weather and heavy use.

Museum Takeaway: That hands-on science station where kids naturally help each other figure things out? That's playground psychology at work—creating spaces where collaboration happens organically.

Other Industry-Specific Lessons That Translate to Museums

From Coffee Shops: The Art of Comfortable Lingering

The Lesson: Different seating for different social configurations (solo work, couples, small groups, large gatherings)

Museum Translation: Create varied spaces within your galleries—standing height for quick interactions, comfortable seating for deeper engagement, communal areas for group discussions.

From Bookstores: Discovery by Wandering

The Lesson: Mix of organization and serendipity—you can find what you're looking for, but you'll stumble across things you didn't know you wanted.

Museum Translation: Clear thematic organization with unexpected connections and cross-references that reward exploration.

From Restaurants: Pacing and Appetite

The Lesson: Building anticipation, managing expectations, and knowing when people need a break from intense experiences.

Museum Translation: Heavy content followed by lighter interactions, complex ideas broken up with hands-on activities, and "palate cleansers" between intense emotional experiences.

From Hotels: Creating Immediate Atmosphere

The Lesson: Great hotel lobbies establish mood and expectations within seconds of entry. They tell you what kind of experience you're about to have.

Museum Translation: Your lobby and entrance sequence should immediately communicate your museum's personality and prepare visitors for your content.

Permission to Experiment

Museums sometimes suffer from "museum-ness"—the assumption that we have to look and feel like "traditional" museums. But your visitors don't live in museums. They live in a world of retail spaces, entertainment venues, and public spaces that have evolved sophisticated approaches to human experience design.

Your visitors' expectations are shaped by the best customer experiences they have anywhere, not just in other museums. If Starbucks has figured out how to make waiting in line a pleasant experience, we can learn from that. If IKEA can guide people through a complex warehouse while making it feel like an adventure, maybe we can too.

Great ideas don't care about industry boundaries. The principles that make a bookstore browsable, a playground engaging, or a restaurant memorable can make your museum more effective.

Your next breakthrough exhibit idea might be waiting for you at the grocery store, the airport, or that well-designed playground down the street. Keep your eyes open—inspiration is everywhere!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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"

Where's Your Workshop?

It used to be that every museum had an "exhibits workshop." An unsettling trend (to me at least) is the continuing wave of museums that have deliberately left exhibit workshops (staff access, not visitor access spaces) out of the mix.

Can any museum that features interactive exhibits, or really any type of exhibits, ever really become great (as opposed to just good) without some sort of workshop?

I don't think every museum needs a full cabinet-making workshop with full welding capabilities and a paint booth. But if you don't have at least one place with a bench and basic tools to tinker, prototype, or simply pull broken exhibits off the floor while you repair them, can your museum's exhibit program ever live up to its full potential? 

Workshop spaces build and increase your museum's internal capacity and create a tremendous staff feeling of "ownership." Especially as it relates to "We Built That Here" exhibits and the entire exhibit development process.

If you don't have a funky space to create and explore exhibit ideas, your museum will inevitably cede some (or all!) of this critical exhibit development process and skill set to outsiders. 

And outsiders, including many architects with exhibit developer aspirations, are often the ones most responsible for eliminating workshop spaces from new building plans. If your designers and architects don't provide you with a workshop space that offers convenient loading and unloading access to the outdoors, they are putting you and your museum at a disadvantage from the start.

I'll never forget a visit a few years ago to a beautiful new children's museum. After walking around the space with the Director of Exhibits, I innocently asked to see the "exhibits workshop." He ushered me into a small rectangular office with a desk and chair wedged into the far end. One entire remaining length of wall was lined with deep shelves holding the cans for the 26 (or more!) different colors of paint that the architects had used throughout the building. I was dumbfounded. 

I asked, "Where do you build new exhibits?" The answer: "We don't build new exhibits. We just hire other people to build them for us." Then I asked, "What happens if an exhibit breaks?" The answer: "Most of the time, we just put an 'OUT OF ORDER' sign on the exhibit and call somebody to come and fix it." 

I worried then, and I worry now, about the long-term effects of "workshopless" museums on both visitors and the museum field itself.

How do you handle exhibit workshop space(s) in your museum or in museum projects you've helped create? Are workshop spaces a necessity, or am I just hopelessly "old school"? 

Let us know in the "Comments Section" below!

Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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"