ExhibiTricks: A Museum/Exhibit/Design Blog: 10/01/2026

Wednesday, October 28, 2026

Trick or Treat? What Halloween Can Teach Us About Exhibit Development

It's October, which means plastic skeletons are already hanging from porches here on Long Island, grocery stores have been selling candy corn since roughly Labor Day, and somewhere a museum educator is trying to fit "pumpkin" into a STEM program for the third year running.

But Halloween has been rattling around in my head for a different reason. Every Halloween night, millions of kids walk up to strangers' front doors and run the world's oldest visitor experience test: Is this house worth it? Turns out, that question says a lot about how we develop exhibits.

So, in the spirit of the season, here are a few Tricks and Treats for exhibit developers!

TREAT: The front porch is your exhibit entrance.

Kids decide which houses to visit in about three seconds flat. Porch light on? Pumpkins out? Somebody in a goofy costume handing out candy? That's a yes. Dark windows and a "No Soliciting" sign? Keep walking.

Visitors make the same snap judgments at your gallery entrance. If the threshold doesn't signal "something fun is happening in here," a big chunk of your audience will drift right past. You need clear, inviting cues that say "come on in." Light, color, sound, and something to do right at the start go a long way.

TRICK: Don't hand out the raisins.

We all remember the house that gave out tiny boxes of raisins. Or toothbrushes. Technically, those houses participated in Halloween. Nobody went back.

How many exhibits are the raisin box of the museum world? The "interactive" that's really a flip label. The touchscreen kiosk that turns out to be a slideshow of the text panel next to it. The well-meaning "learning station" that feels suspiciously like homework. Visitors can smell a box of raisins from across the gallery. If you're promising a treat, deliver one.

TREAT: Full-size candy bars stick with you forever.

Every neighborhood has The House. The one with the full-size candy bars. Kids talk about it for years, and plan their routes around it.

Exhibits can be The House, too, and it rarely takes a giant budget. It takes generosity. A genuinely open-ended activity. Real objects people can actually handle. A staff member or volunteer who's delighted to be there. Visitors remember generosity of experience, and it's often cheaper than whatever expensive "wow" element sits in your budget line.

TRICK: Beware the haunted (technology) house.

You know the elaborate yard display with the animatronic witch that's supposed to cackle when you walk by? By about 7:30 PM on Halloween night, half of them are frozen mid-cackle. I'm not anti-technology (really!), but I've seen far too many exhibits where the flashy digital element was the first thing to break and the last thing to get fixed.

Before you build the haunted house, ask: What happens to the visitor experience when this thing goes dark? If the answer is "nothing works anymore," you might want to rethink the plan. A good old-fashioned jack-o'-lantern still glows when the power goes out.

TREAT: Costumes are an invitation to play.

Halloween's magic is that everyone gets permission to pretend—even the grown-ups. Especially the grown-ups.

Dress-up and role-play areas are sometimes dismissed as "just for little kids," but watch what happens at a history museum when visitors try on a period hat, or at a science center when someone slips into a lab coat. People of all ages lean in. Permission to play is one of the most powerful (and least expensive!) tools in the exhibit developer's toolbox.

TRICK: Scary is good. Confusing is not.

A good haunted house is scary in a designed way: you know where to walk, the scares are paced, and you come out laughing. A bad one is just dark and disorienting, and you leave annoyed.

Exhibits that take on difficult or challenging subjects can (and should!) be powerful and even unsettling. But there's a big difference between intentional emotional impact and plain old visitor confusion caused by poor wayfinding, muddled sequencing, or labels nobody can read. Make sure your visitors are feeling what you intended them to feel.

TREAT: Go back for seconds.

The best trick-or-treaters circle back to their favorite houses. (Don't pretend you never did it.)

That's really the ultimate test for any exhibit: Do people want to come back? Do they bring friends? Do they tell the story of their visit afterward?

Prototyping, observing visitors, and tweaking based on what we see is how we learn which of our "houses" are worth a second trip — and which ones are handing out raisins.

Happy Halloween, everyone! 🎃

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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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Wednesday, October 21, 2026

1,000 Posts! (How Small Steps Add Up to Something Big)

Back in 2007, the iPhone was brand new, “Web 2.0” was the hot buzzword at every museum conference, and I sat down to write the first ExhibiTricks post.

I didn’t have a grand plan. I just wanted a place to share ideas, tricks, and the occasional rant with fellow museum folks — the kind of things we usually only talk about in the hallway between conference sessions.

Fast forward to today, and this post you’re reading is number 1,000. (Cue the confetti cannon!)

No Giant Leaps Required

Here’s the thing: nobody sits down and writes 1,000 blog posts. You write one. Then, a few days later, you write another one. Over time, those small, regular steps stack up into something much bigger than you ever imagined at the start.

It’s the same idea that runs through the Exhibits Cheapbook philosophy: you don’t need a huge budget or a perfect master plan to make something worthwhile. You need to start, and then keep going.

And I think that lesson applies to a lot of what we do in museums:

Prototyping. One quick cardboard mockup on the floor teaches you more than a month of meetings. Do it again next week, and the week after that.

Visitor observation. Fifteen minutes of watching people at an exhibit, done regularly, adds up to a deep understanding of how your galleries actually work.

Professional growth. Read one article, attend one conference session, have one conversation with a colleague at another institution. Repeat for a career.

Building collections and community. One donated object, one new volunteer, one returning family at a time.

Small steps aren’t the “lesser” path. Very often, they’re the only path to big payoffs.

A Few “Greatest Hits” Along the Way

One of the fun parts of hitting a milestone like this is looking back at the trail of small steps. Here are a few ExhibiTricks favorites from over the years, and each one, in its own way, is about doing something small that pays off big:

ELVIS The Exhibit Prototyper? The King had a few things to teach us about prototyping: less talk, more trying things out with visitors.

Many Ways To Say Thanks. Gratitude is one of the smallest (and cheapest!) steps you can take, and it pays dividends with staff, volunteers, donors, and visitors.

What’s The Big Idea? Before you build anything, can you say what your exhibit is about in a single sentence? That one small step shapes everything that follows.

Hayao Miyazaki’s Museum Manifesto. The great animator’s vision for the Ghibli Museum is still one of the best museum “mission statements” I’ve ever read.

Are Exhibit Timelines So Boring Because of the Lines? Sometimes one small shift in how you look at a familiar exhibit element opens up a whole world of better possibilities.

2 Little Words Jugaad and Можело: two small words about focusing on what can be done. (Which is basically how a blog gets to 1,000 posts!)

Thank YOU!

A blog is really a conversation, and the best part of these nearly two decades has been hearing from all of you. Through comments, emails, and those “Hey, I read your post about…” moments at conferences around the world.

Thanks for reading, sharing, arguing, and (most importantly) trying things out in your own museums. ExhibiTricks wouldn’t have reached 1,000 posts without YOU.

So, onward to post #1,001!

Tuesday, October 13, 2026

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?

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

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.

ExhibiTricks: A Museum/Exhibit/Design Blog