Big Museum Energy (on a Small Museum Budget)

If museums had a red carpet season, we'd be in the middle of it.

The Lucas Museum of Narrative Art just opened its doors in Los Angeles. It has more than 100,000 square feet of galleries, continuous film screenings, a free research library, a destination restaurant, and a new 13-acre park. 

And if that isn't enough architectural spectacle for one year, the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is scheduled to open in December. That's a 320,000-square-foot Frank Gehry building first announced in 2006.

It's fun to watch these mega-openings unfold, the way it's fun to watch a Hollywood blockbuster premiere. But most of us don't work at museums with a Jedi-sized endowment. We work at children's museums, science centers, and local history sites

So what can the rest of us actually learn from the big guys? And what should we cheerfully ignore?

Borrow this: a big idea you can say in one sentence

Say what you want about the Lucas Museum, but its concept is crystal clear. It's about the tradition of telling stories through images, from cave paintings to comics to cinema to murals. You can explain it at a cocktail party in ten seconds.

Can you do that with your museum? With your current exhibition? If your "big idea" needs three paragraphs and a flowchart, visitors will feel that fuzziness long before they read a label. Clarity is free.

Borrow this: treat the outside like the front porch

Notice that the Lucas opening isn't just about the building. That 13-acre park, with public green space for South Los Angeles, outdoor sculpture, and gathering areas, is a big part of the story.

You don't need 13 acres. But you probably have a sidewalk, a lawn, a parking lot, or a fence line that currently says absolutely nothing to passersby. A bench with a question on it, a sculptural sign, or a chalk-art wall can make a museum visit start before people walk through the door. 

Borrow this: make the opening an ongoing event, not just a ribbon cutting

Big museums understand that an opening is a story in itself, with a before, a during, and an after. Small museums often pour everything into the exhibit and then announce it with a press release and a sheet cake.

Try a sneak-peek night for members, a "help us finish the exhibit" community day, or a behind-the-scenes post series on social media while you build. The anticipation is part of the experience, and it costs you a bit of time and enthusiasm.

Skip this: the starchitect

A signature building is a wonderful thing if someone else is paying for it. For the rest of us, remember that visitors don't remember floor tiles and finishes. They remember the moment their kid figured something out, or the object that stopped them in their tracks. Spend your money where people's hands and eyes actually go.

Skip this: tech for the sake of tech

When budgets are big, you might be tempted to fill every wall with screens. When budgets are small, there's a temptation to feel inferior because you can't. Don't. Plenty of trend reports this year will tell you about immersive installations running from half a million to five million dollars, plus ongoing maintenance. A well-designed hands-on interactive made of simple materials and good thinking will outlast most of them. 

Small museums have superpowers too

Here's what mega-openings can't buy: nimbleness. 

A small museum can try a new idea next Tuesday. It can change a label because a visitor pointed out a better way to say something. It can know its regulars by name.

That matters, because attendance is getting harder for many of us. One recent AAM-cited analysis projects that children's museums will be 8.4% below 2019 attendance levels this year, and science centers 6.2% below. That's exactly the incentive to be scrappier and more visible right now.

So enjoy the red carpet photos from Los Angeles and Abu Dhabi. Then go look at your own front door, your own big idea, and your own next opening, and ask what "big institution energy" would look like at your museum.

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"

5 Unexpected Ways to Network at Your Next Conference

It's a BIG Museum Conference Week, folks!

By some quirk of the scheduling gods, the ASTC Annual Conference (September 16–19 in Phoenix, hosted by Arizona Science Center) and the AASLH/NCPH Joint Conference (also September 16–19, in Providence, Rhode Island) are happening at exactly the same time this year. So unless you've figured out how to be in the Sonoran Desert and Narragansett Bay simultaneously (and if you have, please email me), you've already picked your team.

Either way, you're about to spend three or four days surrounded by hundreds of smart, friendly museum people. Which brings up the eternal question: how do you actually meet any of them?

Because let's be honest, "networking" is a word that makes most of us want to hide behind the coffee urns. It conjures up images of stiff handshakes, elevator pitches, and that guy who hands you a business card before he's told you his name.

So forget all that. Here are five slightly sideways ways to make real connections at your next conference. None require a LinkedIn premium account, and most are free.

1. Bring a Gizmo

Put something small and interesting in your bag. A prototype of a hands-on component. A weird mechanism you found at the hardware store. A 3D-printed gear that doesn't quite work yet. A tiny wooden puzzle.

Then, when you're sitting next to someone at lunch or waiting for a session to start, just... take it out and fiddle with it.

Museum people can't ignore a gizmo. They will ask what it is. They will ask to try it. And suddenly you're not "networking," you're two exhibit nerds geeking out over a thing, which is the best kind of conversation there is. 

2. Take the Empty Chair

Here's a simple rule for every meal, coffee break, and reception: never sit with anyone you already know.

I know, I know. Your colleagues are right there, and it's so much easier. But you can talk to your colleagues at home for free. Instead, look for the table with one empty chair and a bunch of unfamiliar faces, walk over, and say the magic words: "Is this seat taken?"

It has never once been taken. And the people at that table are usually just as relieved as you are that someone broke the ice. Some of the longest-running friendships I have in this field started with a rubber-chicken banquet and a "mind if I join you?"

3. Skip a Session (On Purpose)

This one sounds like heresy, but hear me out.

Every conference has a "hallway track," the unofficial, unscheduled conversations that happen in the corridors, on the sidewalk outside, and in the host museum's galleries while everyone else is inside a ballroom watching slides. Some of the most useful things I've ever learned at ASTC or AASLH happened between sessions, not during them.

So pick one time slot where nothing on the program is calling your name, and go wander. Poke at the exhibits in the host museum. Hang around the poster session after the crowd thins. Sit in the lobby with your gizmo (see Tip #1). You'll find the other people who are also playing hooky, and they tend to be the interesting ones.

4. Ask the Vendors What Went Wrong

The exhibit hall is full of people who really want to talk to you, and most attendees treat them like they're radioactive. Big mistake.

Fabricators, AV integrators, software folks, and lighting people are the folks who have seen inside hundreds of museums. They know which materials fail, which institutions are a joy to work with, and which "innovative" technology quietly got unplugged six months after opening.

Don't ask for the sales pitch. Ask them: "What's the project you learned the most from?" or "What's the thing clients always underestimate?" Then just listen. You'll get an education, they'll get a break from the pitch, and you'll both remember each other next time.

5. Play the Long Game (With Actual Paper)

Here's the unexpected part: the best networking at a conference happens after the conference.

Everybody swaps cards, follows each other on social media, and then... nothing. So do the thing almost nobody does anymore: when you get home, send a handful of actual postcards or short handwritten notes to the three or four people you had the best conversations with. "Great to meet you in Phoenix — here's that link I mentioned." That's it.

A postcard costs less than a conference coffee, and I promise it will be the only piece of physical mail that person gets from a museum colleague all year. It sticks on the fridge. It sticks in the memory. And six months later, when they need an exhibit person, a collaborator, or just someone to vent to, guess who they think of?

So there you go. Five ways to network that don't feel like networking, which is precisely why they work.

Safe travels to Phoenix and Providence, everybody! Go find that empty chair!

What's your favorite (or most unexpected) way to meet people at a conference? 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"

"Unfacilitated" Doesn't Mean "Unpeopled"

Have you noticed what happens at the self-checkout lane at the supermarket?

The whole premise is that you don't need a person. Scan, bag, pay, leave. And yet every store still posts a human at the end of the row, and every one of us has been quietly grateful for them when the machine barks "unexpected item in the bagging area" for the third time. The self-checkout isn't a facilitated experience. But it is unquestionably a better experience because somebody friendly is standing nearby.

I've been thinking about that lately in relation to museums, because we use the word "unfacilitated" as if it were a design specification. 

An exhibit is either "facilitated" (there's a program, a cart, a scheduled demo) or "unfacilitated" (the exhibit has to do all the work itself, forever, with no help). Exhibit developers, myself included, spend enormous energy making sure our components can stand on their own. That's good practice. 

But somewhere along the way "unfacilitated" started to sound like "unstaffed," and those are not the same things at all.

Here's the proposition I'd like to expand on: "unfacilitated" exhibits and activities still benefit enormously from human interaction between visitors and staff or volunteers. Not scripted programs. Not tours. Just people who are present, approachable, and trained to be useful in the moments that matter.

The research backs this up

This isn't just a hunch. Scott Pattison and Lynn Dierking spent years studying what they call "unstructured" staff-visitor interactions at OMSI (the unscripted conversations at exhibits, as opposed to shows or tours) and found front-line educators to be critical to the visitor experience. Their later work at interactive math exhibits, done through the REVEAL project, deliberately built "facilitation affordances" into components that already worked fine on their own, so an educator could deepen what a family was doing beyond what the exhibit alone could accomplish. In other words: the exhibits weren't broken. The humans made them better.

REFERENCES:

Pattison & Dierking, "Staff-Mediated Learning in Museums" (Visitor Studies): https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10645578.2013.767731

Pattison et al., "The Impact of Facilitation by Museum Educators on Family Learning at Interactive Math Exhibits": https://www.terc.edu/reveal/wp-content/uploads/sites/31/2021/03/PattisonEtAl2018_VS_StaffImpact_PrePub.pdf

And a 2025 Curator article by Karen Knutson and colleagues looked at youth facilitators talking with families in a natural history museum, where the "exhibits" are static specimens rather than push-button interactives. Same finding, different museum genre. Families don't arrive expecting a conversation, but when a prepared young person offers one, the visit gets richer. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cura.12669

Museums that get this right

The Exploratorium's Explainers (San Francisco). The granddaddy of them all. Frank Oppenheimer wanted enthusiastic guides who would encourage visitors to play with the exhibits and discover their own questions, and the High School Explainer program has been doing that since 1969. Explainers get more than 60 hours of training, and a science background is not required. Explainers are required to have curiosity and the ability to talk with strangers. Notice that the Exploratorium's floor is famously "unfacilitated" in the programmatic sense, yet it has always been thick with people in orange vests. That was never an accident. https://www.exploratorium.edu/about/explainers

The Exploratorium's Tinkering Studio takes this a step further and says it out loud. They describe a suite of experiences that "do not need facilitation in order to be effective" but "benefit greatly from a facilitator being present," with the explicit goal of training non-expert Explainers to act as co-learners rather than authority figures. That phrase, "co-learners rather than figures of authority," is the whole ballgame. https://www.exploratorium.edu/tinkering/our-work/the-tinkering-studio-itself

NYSCI's Science Career Ladder (Queens).  Closer to home for me. The red-aproned Explainers at the New York Hall of Science are high school and college students who advance through a scaffolded set of jobs, training, and mentorship. The museum reports that roughly 5,000 young people have come through the program. The brilliant part is the two-way benefit: visitors get a friendly face at an exhibit, and the Explainer gets a career pathway. A class of NYSCI Explainers can collectively speak something like 20 languages, which matters a great deal in Queens. https://nysci.org/science-career-ladder

Living Laboratory at the Museum of Science (Boston).  This one turns the model inside out. Instead of museum staff talking to visitors, actual child-development researchers from Harvard, Tufts, BU, and elsewhere set up their studies on the exhibit floor in the Discovery Center and Hall of Human Life, in plain view, and are trained by museum educators to talk with any visitor who wanders over. The exhibits around them are as unfacilitated as ever. The scientists are just... there, and approachable.  https://www.mos.org/living-laboratory and  https://livinglab.org/

The Art Gallery of Ontario's "Ask Me" program (Toronto).  Proof that this isn't just a science center trick. The AGO stationed docents in its contemporary galleries several afternoons a week specifically to have one-on-one conversations, validate visitors' reactions to difficult contemporary work, and point people toward further resources. No tour, no script, just a human wearing a button that gives you permission to talk to them. https://www.museum-ed.org/the-ask-me-program/

ASK Brooklyn Museum (a program that's gone, with a lesson that isn't).  A decade ago, the Brooklyn Museum launched an app that let visitors text questions to a live team of art historians who responded in under a minute. It won awards, but it has since been phased out. ASK is no longer active.

Regular ExhibiTricks readers know I'm skeptical of technology for its own sake, and there's a lesson in the fact that the ASK app didn't last. But what I find most instructive is what the museum learned in a year of pilot testing before building anything: visitors wanted a personal connection with staff and wanted to talk about the art. The app was the delivery mechanism. The humans were the essential component. Apps come and go. That finding is still true, and it doesn't require a single line of code. https://artmuseumteaching.com/2015/07/23/the-big-ask-experiencing-the-brooklyn-museums-ask-app/

Some Takeaways

You do not need a Bloomberg grant or a 55-year-old youth employment program to do this. Some low-cost, high-impact starting points:

• Rebrand your floor staff.  If the people on your floor are called "attendants," the job title is telling them (and visitors) what to expect. "Gallery host," "Explainer," "Play Guide" cost nothing and change the posture.

• Give people permission to talk.  The AGO's "Ask Me" button is a visitor engagement component that costs about a dollar. So is a sign at the entrance to an unfacilitated gallery that says "Our staff love questions."

• Build one "facilitation affordance" into each new exhibit.  Pattison's team did it with extension challenges. It can be as simple as a second, harder version of the activity that a staff member can offer to a family that's already engaged. Design for the human, even when the human is optional.

• Train for questions, not answers. The Exploratorium and the Tinkering Studio both emphasize that their best floor staff are co-learners. A ten-minute weekly huddle on "what's a good question to ask at the wind tube?" beats a binder of facts.

• Borrow other people's experts.  Living Laboratory works because researchers want an audience. So do master gardeners, ham radio operators, retired machinists, and the woodturners' guild. They'll come for free if you give them a table and a cup of coffee.

The self-checkout lane doesn't need a person. But nobody complains that there is one.

So what does your museum call the people standing in your "unfacilitated" galleries? And are you training them to answer questions, or to ask them? Let me 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"

The milk bottle is a Trojan horse.

Somewhere along the way, milk got controversial again.

The oat-milk aisle has opinions. Some influencers treat raw milk like a personality. Almond, soy, macadamia, and "barista blend." The dairy case now reads like a debate stage. For a plain white liquid that mostly just wants to go on cereal, milk is doing a remarkable amount of cultural heavy lifting.

Which is funny, because I've spent the last year or so with Christina Ferwerda researching and building out the Long Island Dairy Museum project on the former Caumsett estate. And I can report that milk has been quietly fascinating the entire time. 

But first, a little scene-setting, because Caumsett is a story before it's a dairy.

In 1921, Marshall Field III, grandson of the Chicago department-store magnate and, at the time, one of the richest men in America, bought some 1,750 acres of Long Island's North Shore and set out to build a world of his own. He named it Caumsett, after the Matinecock word for "place by a sharp rock," and hired the era's heavy hitters to raise it all at breakneck speed.  

John Russell Pope for the manor, Alfred Hopkins for the farm buildings, the Olmsted Brothers for the grounds. The result was a self-sufficient kingdom with its own power plant, water system, fire brigade, greenhouses, polo ponies, and a full working dairy.

And that dairy was no gentleman's hobby. Caumsett was a genuine model farm, home to a world-renowned herd of Guernsey cattle and engineered to supply the estate with its own milk. Even through the Depression, the families who lived and worked there had housing, garden vegetables, and dairy rations. When one of the richest men in America decides to make his own milk, he does not do it halfway.

Here are a few notes from the milk pail that we will be bringing into the Long Island Dairy Museum:

A Caumsett bull was more famous than many CEOs. Meet Caumsett Dynamo, the estate's prize Guernsey sire, who threw off offspring like a franchise. His sons carried the Caumsett name (like Caumsett Magnet and Caumsett Flashlight), and his daughters all sailed under the "Caumsett Ocean" prefix (such as Caumsett Ocean Leda and Caumsett Ocean Minerva). Dynamo was even invited to the 1939 World's Fair in New York. 

A 1930s dairy ran like a hospital.  Autoclaves. Sterilization protocols. A bottling room clean enough to perform surgery in. We think of "farm-fresh" as rustic and a little grubby, but top estate dairies like Caumsett were essentially clinical operations obsessed with keeping one product spotless. 

The barns were prettier than your house. Architect Alfred Hopkins designed Gold Coast estate dairies with the kind of care most people reserve for a chapel. Cows lived in buildings that would clear co-op boards today. When a Gilded Age fortune decided to keep cattle, it kept them in style.

And now the cows wear tech. Modern dairy means RFID collars, ear tags, and automated brushes that give cows a back-scratch on demand. I keep meaning to be skeptical of all the gadgetry, and then I watch a video of a cow lining up for her turn at the brush, and I lose the argument.

Same bottle, opposite pitch. For a hundred years we've sold the exact same white liquid on completely reversed promises. In the 1920s, milk was medicine — a health tonic, doctor-approved, practically a supplement. Today, milk is nostalgia in a bottle, the taste of grandma's kitchen. Nothing about the milk changed. Everything about the story did.

Here's the exhibit-design lesson buried in all of this milky goodness:  

The milk bottle is a Trojan horse.

A milk container is the most ordinary object in the room. Everyone thinks they already know what it is. Which is exactly why it works!  You don't need a blockbuster artifact behind glass to hook a visitor. You need to take the thing they might walk right past and make them look twice. Mundane object, wild story. That's the whole game.

It turns out you can fit a century of science, money, marketing, and back-scratching robots inside one simple glass milk bottle. 

So tell me: what's the most ordinary-looking object in your museum that turned out to have the best story hiding inside it? 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"

Fake Food, Giant Sequins, and Artificial Dirt? There's a List for That!

If you've been reading ExhibiTricks for a while, you already know I'm a sucker for a good "trusted source." That one supplier who has exactly the weird thing you need at 4:45 on a Friday afternoon. Well, one of my favorite FREE resources is The Great Big Museum Exhibit Resource List, and if you've never dug into it before, today's your lucky day!

The List started as an idea from Kathy Krafft during a conference presentation years ago. I offered to host it on the POW! website, and over time it grew into a continuously updated compendium of resources for exhibit designers, developers, fabricators, and makers of all kinds. 

Best of all, it's completely free and organized by category, so whether you're hunting for adaptive devices, fiberglass supplies, glow-in-the-dark pigment, or scrolling lightboxes, there's a section for you.

Need a little convincing? Here are a few of my favorite "wait, that's a category?!" entries from The List:

PolyPavement makes natural-looking "artificial earth" that stays put, so you can create convincing "ground" for a dinosaur dig, an archaeology exhibit, or a habitat scene without hauling in the real, muddy stuff.

Radiant Manufacturing produces giant sequins and "flutter discs" for air cannon exhibits. If you've ever wanted to create a shimmering "blast" across a gallery to demonstrate air pressure, this is your source.

Skulls Unlimited is the place for "All things bone related." A go-to for natural history and science center folks who need real (or replica) skulls and skeletons that hold up to curious hands and even more curious kids.

Aroma Prime / Aromas by Design: Because sometimes an exhibit needs to smell like something. This UK-based supplier makes scent machines, aroma blocks, and custom smells that add an extra sensory layer to an immersive space.

That's just four picks out of dozens of categories and hundreds of entries — everything from fake foods and extrusions to surplus motors and theatrical fabrics is in The Great Big Museum Exhibit Resource List!

And here's the fun part: The List keeps growing thanks to museum makers around the world. So if you've got a favorite trusted source that isn't on there yet, don't keep it to yourself!  

Send your additions and corrections straight to me, and help this resource keep growing.

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"

Everything Museums, Everywhere, All At Once

A few years back, a movie called "Everything Everywhere All at Once" swept the Oscars by flatly refusing to be one kind of movie. Science fiction, kung-fu picture, family drama, tax-audit procedural. Critics kept reaching for a genre label, and the movie kept swatting it away. The whole point was that a life refuses to sit neatly in a single bin.

Museums, I think, are having their own "Everything Everywhere" moment. And I want to make the case that it's a good thing.

The tyranny of the label on the door

We spend an awful lot of energy sorting ourselves. Art museum. History museum. Science center. Children's museum. The word on the letterhead becomes a fence, and pretty soon we believe the fence is real. That a science center can't do a wrenching history story, that a children's museum has no business tackling anything heavy.

But visitors have never experienced the world in those tidy silos. Nobody wakes up craving a purely "scientific" morning. People are curious about everything. How a bridge stays up and who built it and what it felt like to weld it forty stories in the air. The genre categories are for us, and for the grant applications. They were never really for the audience.

The museum that was always sneaking across genres

Which brings me to Chicago's grand old Museum of Science and Industry (now officially the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry, or Griffin MSI.)

Here's the thing: MSI has always been an everything museum, even when it pretended otherwise. Walk the floor, and you'll find a captured German U-boat from World War II parked near a walk-through coal mine, a whimsical Fairy Castle built for a silent-film star, and a hatchery full of actual baby chicks. Is that a science museum? An industrial-history museum? A decorative-arts collection? A living zoo? Yes.

All of it, at once. So it shouldn't surprise anyone that right now this "Science and Industry" museum is running two of the most genre-bending shows in the country, side by side.

Anne Frank, inside a science museum

Anne Frank The Exhibition , a presentation of the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, runs through the end of January 2027. Chicago is only the second U.S. city to host it, and the first in the Midwest. At its heart is a full-scale recreation of the Secret Annex where Anne, her family, and four others hid during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, anchored by more than 130 original pieces from the Anne Frank House collection.

Sit with that a second. There's nothing here you'd file under STEM. It's a story about a girl, a diary, courage, and unbearable loss -- installed in a building most people associate with locomotives and Tesla coils. And it works, precisely because the institution was brave enough to ignore the label on its own door.

A closet full of Oz, Broadway, and history

Just down the way from the Anne Frank exhibition is Crafting Character: The Costumes of Paul Tazewell (through September 7, 2026). 

Tazewell is the designer who, in 2025, became the first Black man to win the Academy Award for Best Costume Design for Wicked.  On top of a Tony for Hamilton and an Emmy for The Wiz Live!

The show puts his actual creations in front of you: Glinda's pink bubble dress and Elphaba's Emerald City gown, the Schuyler Sisters' ball gowns and King George III's getup, Anita's yellow dress from Spielberg's West Side Story. The finished costumes are paired with the sketches and messy middle steps where imagination becomes a garment. Our science museum is suddenly also a fashion museum, a theater museum, and a film-history museum. Nobody at the door made you choose.

Why this matters beyond Chicago

A recent Chicago Tribune commentary put it better than I can: museums like the Anne Frank House and Griffin MSI must keep being the kind of place that helps people "understand the world." 

The whole confusing, beautiful, heartbreaking thing, not just one tidy slice of it. 

That's the real argument for the everything museum. When a single visit can hold Anne Frank's diary, Elphaba's gown, a fairy castle, and a World War II submarine, you're not diluting your mission. You're admitting that curiosity doesn't respect our departmental org charts.

The takeaway isn't "go host Anne Frank." It's that the noun on your sign is a starting point, not a cage. A children's museum can hold real grief. A history museum can run a hands-on making space. The genre was never the promise. The STORY is the promise.

So here's my question for you: What's the most genre-bending thing your museum has ever done, or the boldest thing you wish it would try? 

And what's really stopping you: the audience, or just the word on the letterhead? 

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"

What's the ONE Exhibit Tool You Can't Work Without?

There's that old party game where somebody asks, "If you were stranded on a desert island and could bring only one book (or album, or snack), what would it be?" I've always thought exhibit developers deserve our own version.

So here's mine: if you could reach for just ONE tool or resource to develop an exhibit — physical, digital, or somewhere in between — what would it be?

I'm asking because one of my favorite ExhibiTricks side projects was a batch of short videos where museum folks from all over the world shared "Just One Thing" about exhibits. The answers were always more surprising (and more useful) than any tidy "best practices" list. So let's do a written version. Leave a comment below, or drop me a line, and tell me the single most indispensable exhibit development tool or resource in your kit.

To prime the pump, here are two tools that have earned permanent spots in my own list, that are pulled straight from the ExhibiTricks back catalog:

• Foam core and a decent cutting setup.  Foam core is the bread and butter of exhibit development,  but it's only as good as the blade you cut it with. A 48-inch metal straight edge and a sharp rotary cutter will save your sanity (and your fingertips). More in "The Hands-On Toolbox" post.

• 507movements.com.  A "back to the future" gem: an animated, web-based version of Henry T. Brown's classic 1868 reference "507 Mechanical Movements."  If you're building anything that moves (like gears, cranks, and linkages), it's an endlessly inspiring (and free) way to see how mechanisms actually work. 

Those are three of mine. Now I want to hear yours. What's the one exhibit tool or resource you'd grab before anything else? Share it in the Comments Section below!  I'll round up the best responses in a future post.

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!

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What Can a Guy Who Finds Strangers on the Internet Teach Us About Finding Stuff for Exhibits?

Have you found josemonkey yet?

If not, here's the elevator pitch: somebody sends him a short video (usually a few seconds of a parking lot, a backyard, a stretch of nondescript highway) and he tells them, often within striking distance, exactly where on Earth it was filmed. No metadata, no GPS tag, no cheating. Just the stuff that's "in the frame."

The magic (and it really does feel like magic the first time you watch it) is that there's no magic at all. He talks you through the whole thing. A particular species of tree narrows the hemisphere. The style of a guardrail, the color of a license plate, the font on a road sign, a half-glimpsed logo on a passing truck -- each little clue lops off another chunk of the globe until there's basically one place left standing. He gave a TEDx talk about the privacy implications of all this, which are real and worth taking seriously. But what keeps me watching is watching josemonkey think.

Because here's the thing, fellow museum folks: finding things is our job too.

Think about the last time you were handed a mystery photo from a collection. No caption, no date, a handful of people squinting into the sun in front of a building nobody can identify. What did you do? You read the shadows. You read the clothes. You zoomed into the storefront reflected in the window behind them. You noticed the streetcar wire, or the model of the car at the curb, or the way the trees were leafed out, and you started lopping off chunks of the possibility space until you had a decade, then a neighborhood, then a name. Same instinct. Same joy. We're all just geolocating in our own way.

And it doesn't stop at photo research. This is the exact muscle we flex every time we go hunting for objects to put on display. You need a period-correct milking stool for the dairy exhibit, or a plausible surveyor's chain, or a lunchbox that reads as "1962" to a fourth grader from across a gallery. You don't magic it into existence; you go clue by clue. What did the real thing look like? What material, what patina, what maker's mark? Where would one have survived, and who's selling it, and how do I tell the honest reproduction from the pretender? That's josemonkey-brain, pointed at eBay and estate sales instead of a highway shoulder.

Sourcing materials for a build is the same game one more time. Somebody points at a picture and says "make it feel like that," and now you're hunting for the specific laminate, the right weathered barnwood, the fabric that reads right under gallery lights and survives ten thousand small hands. Clue, clue, clue, answer.

I'll admit there's a Cheapbook-shaped reason I love this. None of what josemonkey does requires a fancy budget. His whole toolkit is paying attention, free maps, and stubbornness. 

That's an enormously encouraging thing to remember when you're a small institution with a big idea and a tiny purchase order. The most valuable piece of research equipment in the building is still the trained eye of somebody who refuses to stop looking. No line item required.

So maybe the real lesson from a guy who finds strangers on the internet is this: the finding is the craft. Whether you're chasing a location, a caption, an object, or a scrap of the right material, the skill is the same: look harder than seems reasonable, follow the little clues, and don't quit until the answer has nowhere left to hide.

What's the best bit of exhibit detective work you've ever pulled off? 

What was the clue that cracked it open? Tell me in the Comments Section below! 

I collect these stories the way josemonkey collects rooftops.

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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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Getting People INSIDE Museums When It's Gorgeous OUTSIDE

It's the height of summer, and you know the drill: the sun is out, the humidity is (mostly) tolerable, and every single person in your community has decided that today is the day to hit the beach, the lake, the pool, the trail, or basically anywhere that isn't your museum.

If I had a nickel for every summer weekend I thought, "Why would anyone go inside right now?"  I'd have a lot of nickels, and probably a sunburn to match.

But here's the thing: "nice weather" isn't actually the enemy of museum attendance. Boring programming is the enemy of museum attendance. Nice weather just makes boring programming failures more visible, because suddenly people have somewhere else (somewhere free, somewhere with a breeze) to be instead.

So the question isn't "how do we compete with the beach?" You can't. Don't try. The real question is:

What can only happen inside your walls (or just outside them) that people can't get anywhere else?

Let's dig into a few approaches, with some real-world examples.

1. Stop fighting the outdoors — Annex it!

One of the smartest moves I keep seeing is museums refusing to treat "inside" and "outside" as a hard boundary. The Eric Carle Museum in Massachusetts hosts "Sunset Thursdays" all summer, featuring late hours, live jazz, picnicking on the museum grounds, and food trucks. All with the galleries just steps away for whenever people are ready to wander in. Nobody has to choose between "outside fun" and "museum visit." The museum grounds become the outside fun, and the collection is right there as a bonus.

You don't need a blockbuster traveling exhibition to pull this off. You need a lawn, some chairs, a local musician, and permission to stay open later than usual. The "innovation" here isn't technological, it's logistical and hospitality-focused. Low cost, high payoff.

2. Give the grown-ups a reason to show up without the kids

A huge chunk of "why would I go to a museum in summer" resistance comes from adults who mentally filed museums under "field trip" or "thing I do with my kids." 

The After Dark/After Hours model exists specifically to break that association, and it's everywhere right now:

• The Exploratorium's After Dark series in San Francisco mixes cocktails and playful science and art programming for adults only.

• MIT Museum's After Dark leans into its research culture -- actual MIT scientists showing off current research, plus a DJ and a cash bar.

• Fernbank After Dark in Atlanta bills itself as "date night, friend night, and 'why haven't we done this before?' night" — which might be my favorite tagline in this whole roundup.

Notice what all of these have in common: they're not really about the exhibits changing. They're about permission and framing changing. Same building, same collection, completely different invitation. That's a cheap lever to pull if you've got the staffing bandwidth for evening hours.

3. Make "hands-on" mean something outdoors, too.

Boston Children's Museum runs outdoor pop-up exhibits built entirely around messy natural materials like mud, pinecones, and stones. No screens, no batteries, nothing that needs an IT ticket when it breaks. Just kids being gloriously, appropriately filthy in a controlled way. It's about as "down and dirty" as an exhibit gets, and it turns "but it's so nice out" into an argument for visiting rather than against it.

4. Lean into what only you can offer

The New York State Museum runs free weekday summer programming built around its own collection strengths, explicitly pitched as a way to beat the heat. That's smart framing: you're not competing with the beach, you're offering cool, calm, air-conditioned learning and fun.

This is where I'd push back gently on the instinct to just throw more tech at the "summer slump" problem. The museums having real success this summer aren't doing it with elaborate digital installations — they're doing it with live music, food trucks, docents, and content only they can provide because it lives in their collection or their expertise. Nobody's beating the beach with a touchscreen.

So what does this mean for your museum?

You probably don't need a $50,000 outdoor exhibit fabrication budget or a full liquor license overnight (though hey, if you've got one, use it). What you likely already have:

- A patch of grass or a plaza you could borrow for an evening

- Staff or community members who play music, tell stories, or lead a craft

- A collection with at least one thing that's genuinely fascinating after dark, after hours, or with a drink in hand

- A "why would anyone come inside today" skeptic on staff. 

(That person is your best editor.)

Start there. Pick one Thursday and see who shows up!

Has your museum tried an after-hours or "beat the heat" program this summer? 

What worked, or what totally flopped?  Drop a comment 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"

What Fireworks Can Teach Museums About Celebrating (America's 250th Edition!)

This summer, millions of people will stand outside, crane their necks, and go "oooooh" in unison at exploding balls of colored fire.

No labels. No touchscreens. No 400-word interpretive panels explaining the chemistry of strontium salts.

Just wonder, shared in public, with strangers.

As museums in the United States mark America's 250th birthday this weekend, it seems like the perfect moment to ask: what can fireworks teach us about designing celebrations and exhibits that people actually remember?

1. Fireworks are about pacing.

A good fireworks show doesn't fire everything at once. It builds. A few teasers, some quiet moments, a mid-show surprise, and then the finale that makes the car ride home worth it. Compare that to the anniversary exhibition that dumps 250 years of history onto the walls in a single, undifferentiated wash of artifacts and text. Visitors, like fireworks audiences, need rhythm: moments of intensity followed by moments to breathe (and to turn to the person next to them and say, "Did you SEE that?").

2. Fireworks are gloriously low-resolution.

Nobody complains that fireworks aren't in 4K. The "technology" is centuries old, and yet it reliably outperforms every LED wall and projection-mapped spectacle I've ever stood in front of. Production values don't create wonder — surprise, scale, and shared experience do. Before your museum drops six figures on an immersive installation, ask whether a simpler, more human-scaled experience might land harder.

3. Fireworks are a communal experience by design.

You can watch a fireworks video on your phone, but nobody does, because that's not the point. The point is being there, together, on a blanket, with kids running around and someone's uncle narrating every shell. The best anniversary programming works the same way. Don't just mount an exhibit about 1776 — create reasons for neighbors to gather, argue, celebrate, and add their own stories to the mix. A birthday party where the guests just observe isn't much of a party.

4. Anniversaries are prompts, not endpoints.

The most interesting Semiquincentennial projects I've seen ask forward-facing questions: What do we want the next 250 years to look like? What does founding-era language about liberty and self-governance mean on your block, in 2026? Those questions belong in science centers, children's museums, and art museums just as much as in history museums. Every institution has a stake in what comes next.

5. The finale isn't the whole show.

July 4, 2026 will come and go in a burst of light and a haze of smoke. But the neighbors you stood next to are still your neighbors on July 5th. Museums that use this anniversary to build lasting relationships with communities, schools, and local storytellers will still be reaping the benefits when the 251st rolls around and nobody's writing grant guidelines about it anymore.

So this weekend, when you're standing under the fireworks, do a little professional observation (we can't help ourselves, can we?). Watch how a centuries-old, decidedly analog experience holds a crowd of all ages in genuine, phone-lowering wonder.

Then ask yourself: how do we bottle that and set it off inside our museums for the next 250 years?

Happy 250th, everybody! Ooooh. Ahhhh.

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"

A Leaf, a Blade, and a Whole Lot of Patience.

I'm always on the lookout for folks who turn the "ordinary" into something that stops you in your tracks. 

Which is exactly why I want to introduce ExhibiTricks readers to Lito, a Japanese artist who does something deceptively simple: he cuts intricate scenes into single fallen leaves.

Yes, just a leaf. No paper, no canvas, no do-overs. Lito works in the Japanese tradition of kirie, or "cut picture," but instead of paper, he uses leaves. Lito started applying these techniques to leaves back in 2020, partly as a way to channel and focus the energy that comes with his ADHD. He'd never formally studied art or design; instead, his ideas come from childhood memories, family dinners, things he sees on TV, and ordinary daily life turned into "another world."

Each piece is cut from a single leaf, and Lito deliberately leaves the leaf's midrib intact in every cutout (a small, consistent gesture of respect toward his material). That's good design thinking right there; a signature constraint that becomes part of the story, not just a technical limitation.

If "tiny, ephemeral, single-object art" makes you wonder how on earth you build a whole museum around it, check out the LITO LEAF ART MUSEUM in Fukushima, a dedicated home for his work that's become a pilgrimage site for fans. As an exhibit designer, I'm fascinated by the challenge: how do you give scale, pacing, and context to art objects you can practically hold on one fingertip?

Lito also posts new work regularly on Instagram: @lito_leafart. It's a genuinely lovely feed to scroll through.  Lito's IG feed is also where many of his audience first found him, leading to exhibitions across Japan and the publication of books of his work.

Lito's story is a nice reminder that you don't need elaborate materials or formal training to build a devoted audience. You need a distinctive point of view and a willingness to share your process where people already are (hello, social media). Museums and exhibit developers, take note.

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"

The World's Biggest Fans Are In Your City. Are They In Your Museum?

It's mid-June 2026 in New York City. The Knicks are in the NBA Finals for the first time since 1999, and fans are buying tickets to away games in San Antonio just to follow the team. The MTA has swapped out its subway globe lights for basketball-shaped ones. 

And oh, by the way, the FIFA World Cup just kicked off, with MetLife Stadium hosting eight matches, including the Final. Five official fan zones, one in each borough, are packed with visitors from every corner of the planet.

In other words, New York City is currently the global epicenter of sports fandom.

So here's my question for every museum professional in the region: "Where are all those fans?"

I've asked some version of this question before. Most recently, about Super Bowl Sunday, when I pointed out that game day is a great time to visit your local museum because it will be "even quieter than usual." The joke lands because it's true, and it shouldn't be.

The difference between a sports fan and a casual museum visitor isn't curiosity or intelligence. It's investment. Fans wear the gear. They know the stats. They travel to road games. They feel something when their team wins or loses. Passion isn't a personality type; it's something that gets cultivated through repeated, meaningful experiences that reward engagement.

Some museums are actually getting this right. Right now, the American Museum of Natural History has launched "World Cup, World Cultures," featuring match-watch parties in its galleries, an all-ages Goal Zone soccer play space, and a Global Sports Pavilion. The Intrepid Museum is running free watch parties for more than 50 World Cup matches on the pier. 

These aren't gimmicks. They're a playbook.

The AMNH didn't suddenly stop being a natural history museum by putting up a big screen for Brazil vs. Morocco. What they did was remove the activation energy barrier — that invisible wall that keeps people who aren't "museum people" from walking through the door in the first place. They said: the thing you already care about? It lives here too.

The Knicks marketing team understands something that many museum marketers still don't: you can convert a bandwagon fan into a real one, but you have to catch them while they're excited. Right now, there are people in New York wearing Jalen Brunson jerseys who have never been to a game before. Some of them will become Knicks fans for life. The question is whether anyone is offering them an equivalent on-ramp into your institution.

What would that look like? Here are a few things to chew on:

The story IS the exhibit. Millions of World Cup visitors will be in New York through July 19. Most of them love history, culture, and spectacle. They didn't come to Manhattan to stare at a wall panel with 8-point type. Give them something they can feel, touch, cheer about.

Fan-worthy requires a lower barrier to entry, not a higher one. The Knicks don't make you pass a quiz before you can root for them. Your admissions procedure, your signage, your hours — do they say "welcome" or "here are the rules"?

Repeat visits are what turn visitors into fans.  Sports teams don't try to make every game the same experience. Neither should you. What brings someone back to your museum a second time, a third time, until one day they're the person telling strangers on the subway how great your place is?

The World Cup Final is at MetLife on July 19. The city will be electric between now and then. Millions of visitors, billions of eyeballs, and a huge percentage of them are people who have never set foot in your museum.

That's not a threat. That's an opportunity.

GO MUSEUMS! (And, yes — go KNICKS!)

What are you doing at your museum to tap into the World Cup energy? And are there other sports-fan-to-museum-fan conversion stories you've seen work? Share your ideas 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"

Have You Met Chloe?

By now, you may have stumbled across "Chloe VS History" in your social media feed or on YouTube.

If not, go take a look. I'll wait.

Chloe is an AI-generated avatar who "travels" through history, hanging out in pre-revolutionary Paris, dodging the eruption of Pompeii, and sneaking into the first-class section on the Titanic. She's got the vibe of a travel influencer: casual, enthusiastic, and a little amazed by everything. 

The YouTube channel has racked up hundreds of thousands of subscribers and millions of views, and the videos are genuinely watchable.

The person behind Chloe is Jonathan Laramie, who also runs Majestic Studios, a history channel that hit 14 million views in 90 days using AI to bring historical scenes to life. In a recent interview, Laramie, who has no background in filmmaking, talks candidly about what separates his work from the tsunami of AI garbage: trust and accuracy in sources, genuine creative investment, and a consistent storytelling voice. 

Now, before you roll your eyes and mutter something about "AI slop," I think there's something genuinely worth paying attention to here, particularly for those of us who work in history museums.

The secret sauce isn't really the AI visuals (though they're impressive). It's the perspective. Chloe works because she positions herself as a curious visitor to history, not a lecturer about it. She's learning alongside you. She reacts. She wanders. She asks the dumb-but-honest questions non-historians would ask if they felt comfortable doing so.

Sound familiar? It should. That's good interpretive design. (It's also worth noting that Laramie comes from the customer service space.)

So here's the question worth asking: what would it look like if YOUR museum used AI-generated media—not to replace human storytelling, but to model the kind of curious, visitor-centered engagement you want to spark?  A short "first visit to a Colonial kitchen" clip to play at a program intro, or an AI character who "experiences" your exhibit for the first time and invites visitors to do the same?

The AI technology is accessible. The approach is already working at scale since the Chloe Channel was built by just one guy with no film training and a lot of curiosity. 

The only thing missing is history institutions willing to experiment thoughtfully with accurate content, genuine curiosity, and real visitors in mind.

Chloe currently doesn't have all those advantages, but history museums do!

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"

FREE Museum Exhibit Design Resources

Who doesn't like free stuff?  Here are links to some great FREE exhibit design resources from the POW! website:

The Great Big Exhibit Resource List

A constantly updated compendium of resources for museum design and exhibit fabrication (including websites and contact information.) Need to find fake food, giant sequins, or adaptive devices? Check out the GBER List!  And contact me if you have a resource you think should be added to the list.

The Exhibit Cheapbooks

The idea for the Exhibit Cheapbooks started during sessions at the annual Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) Conference. The purpose was to share "cheap" exhibit ideas and create a written record of how to replicate these simple and successful exhibit components.

The four Exhibit Cheapbooks have always celebrated museums' "sharing" nature. Inside each volume, you will find varied exhibit ideas from museum colleagues around the world. Sincere thanks to everyone who has shared their ideas and expertise! Special thanks to ASTC for allowing all the Exhibit Cheapbooks material to be shared freely online.

Museum FAQ Videos

Check out these interesting and informative video conversations with museum professionals from around the world.  Topics run the gamut from museum management, community engagement, digital exhibits, and more!  Click the link above for the video gallery, or go directly to the POW! YouTube site.

You can also find downloadable exhibit articles and other museum exhibit design resources by clicking over to the main resource page on the POW! website.

Do you have some other great resources to share?  Tell us about them 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"