What Makes a Museum Experience Stick?

Quick: think of a museum visit you still remember years later. Not the museum, the moment.

It was probably a feeling, a surprise, something you did, or someone you were with.

After decades of building exhibits and wandering through other people's creations, I've come to believe that memorable museum experiences share a handful of ingredients. Here are a few, with some museums that serve them up especially well.

1. A body in motion remembers.

Visitors forget what they read, and even what they see, but they remember what their bodies did. Climbing, crawling, building, getting a little lost.

Nobody does this better than City Museum in St. Louis, with everything from a 10-story slide to an in-house circus to a 3,000-pound praying mantis perched on the roof. And here's the creative "repurposing" lesson hiding in plain sight: its exhibits consist largely of repurposed architectural and industrial objects, from colorful tiles to safety deposit boxes to stainless steel buffet pans. Salvage plus imagination beats a big budget every time.

2. Take one sense away, and the others wake up.

Sometimes the most memorable thing you can do is remove something. The Exploratorium's Tactile Dome has been doing this since 1971. Visitors journey through total darkness, relying on touch to navigate the twists, turns, and textures inside. I love that the original press release described it as a carefully planned and structured succession of shapes, temperatures, and textures. That's exhibit development in a nutshell: it feels spontaneous to the visitor because someone sequenced it very deliberately.

3. Real stories about real people.

Big themes ("Immigration!" "Love!" "Loss!") are hard to hold onto. Specific people are easy.

The Tenement Museum on New York's Lower East Side has built its whole model around this. Two historic tenements on Orchard Street, home to an estimated 15,000 people from more than 20 nations between 1863 and 2000, represent the heart of the museum. You don't walk away thinking about "immigration policy"; you walk away thinking about a particular family in a particular cramped apartment.

Halfway around the world, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb takes this idea somewhere wonderfully strange. The thematic display takes visitors through a series of different emotions associated with break-up, illustrated by objects donated by members of the public. Everyday objects plus a short personal story. That's it! It's proof that you don't need priceless artifacts to create unforgettable exhibits; you need meaning.

4. Watch it, then make it.

Demonstrations are great. Demonstrations followed by "now you try it" are even better.

At the Corning Museum of Glass, you can watch live glassblowing demonstrations daily in the 500-seat Amphitheater Hot Shop, then head to Make Your Own Glass to try it yourself. (They're even offering seasonal Hot Glass demos and the chance to create your own glass pumpkin right now, just in time for Halloween.) And the best part? You go home with a physical souvenir that you made.

5. Permission to feel something.

Do you notice a thread running through all these examples? None of them are trying to be neutral. City Museum wants you giddy. The Tactile Dome wants you a little disoriented. The Tenement Museum and the Museum of Broken Relationships want you to feel empathy, maybe even shed a tear.

Too often, we design exhibits to be informative and "safe" and end up with something pleasant and forgettable. Memorable experiences take an emotional risk.

So what does this mean for exhibit developers?

Before your next project heads into design, try asking a few simple questions:

•  What will visitors do here? With their bodies, not just their eyes?

•  Whose specific story are we telling? 

•  What do we want people to feel?

•  What will they take home, either literally or figuratively?

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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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Masks, Portals, and Non-Museums

Every few years, someone outside the museum world builds something that makes all of us inside the museum world squirm a little.

People line up around the block. They pay real money (often more than museum admission). They come back again and again. And they tell their friends with the kind of breathless enthusiasm we'd love to hear about our galleries.

So instead of grumbling about "those immersive things," let's look at what a few of them do right and steal (er, borrow) their best ideas.

Sleep No More: Let visitors choose their own path

For many of us in New York, Sleep No More was the gold standard. The show adapted Macbeth, stripping away nearly all of its spoken dialogue and setting it mainly in a dimly lit, 1930s-style establishment called the McKittrick Hotel. Instead of sitting in seats, audiences wandered at their own pace through a set filled with actors. The production closed after its matinee on Sunday, January 5, 2025, but drew more than two million attendees over its 14-year run.

What can museums take from it?

• The threshold matters. After checking their coats, visitors "checked in" at a themed reception desk, got a playing card that set their entry time, and waited in a themed hotel jazz bar until called. The experience started long before the "exhibit" did. How much thought do we give to our lobbies, coat checks, and ticket lines?

• Anonymity is freedom. Audiences wore anonymizing Venetian-style masks that encouraged a sense of freedom and lowered inhibition. Many adult museum visitors are self-conscious about "playing" in public. What small cues could give them permission?

• Nobody sees everything, and that's okay. Every visitor left with a different story. Museums often design experiences as if everyone must see every panel in order. What if we designed for discovery instead of completion?

Meow Wolf: Story as connective tissue

Meow Wolf began as an artist collective in Santa Fe, and its original location, House of Eternal Return, is in a former bowling alley where visitors meet a full-size Victorian-style house at night. It was a hit, drawing more than 400,000 visitors and grossing $6.8 million in its first year. Today, Meow Wolf locations include Santa Fe, Las Vegas, Denver, Grapevine, and Houston, with a seventh permanent space announced for Pier 17 in New York.

What makes it work isn't just the neon. Each location is part art exhibit, part escape room, part scavenger hunt, and for visitors who look hard enough, the Meow Wolf crew has woven an amorphous narrative across its locations.

That's the lesson I keep coming back to: layered depth. Casual visitors can just enjoy the spectacle. Curious visitors can dig into the story. Obsessive visitors can piece together clues across multiple cities. Museum exhibits can work the same way: a "wow" layer, an "ah-ha" layer, and a "rabbit hole" layer for the folks who want to go deeper.

And a note of caution from my "skeptical of tech for its own sake" corner: the magic at Meow Wolf mostly comes from hand-built, physical, artist-made environments. Secret doors in refrigerators are pretty low-tech!

Fantasy Non-Museum of Plovdiv: Local character as the collection

Here's one many of you may not know yet. In Bulgaria, a creative group opened the Fantasy Non-Museum of Plovdiv in August 2025, right in the heart of the city. It's a three-story house with no showcases, only experiences.

The Non-Museum describes itself as a place where visitors, guided by comic characters through a blend of analog and digital experiences, explore interactive installations, VR, graffiti art, and surreal stories that blur the line between the real and the fantastical. What I love most is how it celebrates a place's personality. 

The Non-Museum pays tribute to local legends like Mitko the Sock Man, Autograph Stephan, and Maestro Bhagavan. These are the kinds of neighborhood characters that most "official" history museums would never think to include, yet they're exactly what locals love, and visitors remember.

It's also refreshingly modest in scale compared to the big immersive players: the total investment was BGN 680,000. One visitor review sums up the sweet spot nicely: the information was massive, but presented in such creative and diverse ways that it never overwhelmed. (Isn't that what we're all trying to do?)

So, what are the takeaways for museums?

Pulling these threads together, here's what I think all these "non-museum" experiences are teaching us:

1. Design the whole journey, not just the galleries. The experience starts at the curb, not at the first exhibit.

2. Give visitors agency. Let them choose paths, follow curiosity, and miss things.

3. Build in layers. Spectacle for some, story for others, deep clues for the devoted.

4. Celebrate the quirky and local. Your town's "Sock Man" may be more memorable than your most valuable artifact.

5. Grant permission to play, especially to adults.

6. Remember that spectacle is not the same as meaning. The best immersive experiences use atmosphere to serve a story, not replace one.

My biggest takeaway: Museums have something these attractions often don't: real objects, real stories, and real expertise. We don't need to become Meow Wolf. We just need to remember that being trustworthy and being delightful aren't mutually exclusive.

 

 

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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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"Storm Proofing" Your Exhibits?

Batten Down the Hatches!

If you live anywhere near the East Coast, you spent last weekend watching the sky. A nor'easter rolled in with heavy rain, gusty winds, and coastal flooding. 

Here in New York, everybody's first question before a big storm is some version of: "Is the subway going to flood again?" We've all seen those viral videos of water pouring down station stairs like an indoor Niagara Falls.

What do storms and subways have to do with museum exhibits?

What caught my eye during this most recent storm wasn't the drama. It was the prep work. 

Before the first raindrop fell, the Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA) crews were closing storm doors at the low-lying Coney Island and Howard Beach train yards, clearing drains, and putting flood equipment in place. 

The MTA admitted that the bigger long-term street fixes aren't finished yet, so some old vulnerabilities remain. In other words: you work with what you've got, right now, while the big fixes are still on the way.

Small Steps (Literally) Keep the Water Out

The MTA's biggest enemy isn't just storms.  It's New York City's century-old sewer system.

When the sewers back up, the water looks for the next way down, and that's often a subway entrance. 

The MTA can't rebuild the sewers. That's the City's job, and it will take years. So instead of waiting, the transit folks focused on the openings they do control. Some of their fixes are wonderfully low-tech:

• Raise the stairs. The MTA is adding a step or two at station entrances so rainwater can't simply run down them. 

• Raise the grates. After a 2007 storm poured water through sidewalk vents, the MTA put raised steel "collars" around vent grates in flood-prone spots. The lowest part of each can hold back about six inches of water, and many double as benches or bike racks. 

• Clear the drains first. Before storms, crews clean out drains at known trouble spots and pre-position staff, generators, and a fleet of 23 mobile pumps.

• Put a camera on it. The MTA recently aimed a camera at the tracks next to a pump so staff can see when pumps fall behind and respond. 

• Close the doors. For coastal surges, it's as simple as shutting storm doors at vulnerable train yards before the water arrives. 

None of this is glamorous. A higher step. A metal collar. A clean drain. A camera. But together they keep more trains running, today, with what's already on hand.

Two Little Words, Two Big Ideas

Which brings me to a new word I recently learned the other day: Jugaad. (Pronounced Joo-gahd in English.)

It turns out that "Jugaad" is a Hindi word that describes an improvised or makeshift solution using scarce resources. Jugaad emphasizes creatively solving problems with the resources available.

Jugaad seems like the conceptual Indian cousin of the Bulgarian word Можело (pronounced Mo-zhuh-low in English), which roughly translates to "this can be done" or "I can do this." Можело is definitely the antidote to the (often) automatic Bulgarian response of, "This is not possible!" ("Това не е възможно!")

Jugaad and Можело are two little words that hold big concepts. Namely, they focus on what CAN be done instead of what CAN'T be done.

That's exactly what the MTA did. They couldn't fix the sewers, so they raised a step.

Raise the Step in Your Own Galleries

Most of us in museums have our own version of the city sewer system: the big, expensive fix that's "coming in the next capital campaign." The gallery renovation. The new AV system. The reinstallation. 

Meanwhile, the exhibit problems keep leaking in every single day.

So what's your raised step? A few Jugaad-and-Можело starting points:

• Find the "entrances" to the problem. The MTA didn't fix the whole subway; it fixed the openings where water gets in. Where do your breakdowns start? A loose knob, a sticky flip panel, a label visitors never notice? Fix that spot first.

• Clear your drains before the storm. Walk the floor before the school-group rush or the holiday crowds. A quick checklist, a spare-parts bin, and a screwdriver in the admissions desk drawer can head off a lot of "Out of Order" signs.

• Build a collar, not a new building. A bumper rail, a simple guard, or a sturdier fastener can protect a fragile interactive for pennies, while you wait for the budget to replace it.

• Make the fix do double duty. Those raised subway grates became benches and bike racks. Can your protective barrier also hold a label? Can your repair add a stool for younger visitors?

• Put eyes on it. The MTA's pump camera is just a way to see trouble sooner. Your floor staff and volunteers are your cameras. Give them an easy way (a clipboard, a shared form, a group text) to report what's breaking.

• Raid your own shelves. Before you order anything, look at what's in the storage room, the shop, and the leftovers from your last exhibition. 

None of these replace the big fix. They just keep the "water" out while you get there.

From "I Can" to "We Can!"

Imagine how we can shift our "work mindset" by pairing the concepts of Jugaad and Можело with two more words: "I can" or, better yet, "We can!"

The MTA's fixes work because a whole team shows up before the storm: drain crews, pump operators, planners, even the architects who turned vent grates into benches. Your museum is the same. The educator, the facilities person, the front-desk staffer, and the volunteer who notices the broken button all hold part of the solution.

So the next time an exhibit problem floods your inbox, skip "This is not possible!" Try "What can we do right now, with what we've got?" instead.

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"

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!

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 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.

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"

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"