Town Squares, not Telephone Booths
The theme for this year's InterActivity conference in San Diego is "The Fabric of Belonging: Crafting Spaces for Connection and Resilience." As Children's Museum folks from around the world head to the conference later this month, many sessions will focus on programming, staffing, community partnerships, and institutional strategy.
All important stuff. But I want to talk about the exhibits themselves.
Because the moments of real connection, the ones that cut across age, language, income, and background, almost never happen at a single-user experience. Instead, they happen around a water table. At a drum circle. Around a giant set of building blocks.
Open-ended. Low-tech. And usually less interesting to do alone.
The Exhibit as Social Infrastructure
We talk a lot in the museum field about "belonging" as an institutional value. But belonging isn't a marketing problem or an outreach problem. It's a design problem.
Every time you put a single-user touchscreen into your exhibit hall, you've made a choice about social infrastructure. You've built a telephone booth when you could have built a town square.
I'm not anti-technology, but I am consistently struck by how much money museums spend on interactive technology that isolates visitors.
What Makes an Exhibit a "People Connector"?
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I'd boil it down to a few qualities:
• It requires (or at least rewards) more than one person. The best exhibits are "connectors." Not because they force interaction, but because doing the same thing alone isn't quite as satisfying as doing it together. A giant floor piano is fun to stomp around on by yourself. But it's magical when you and a stranger make a chord or a song together.
• It has no obvious "right answer." Open-ended play invites negotiation, and negotiation builds connection. A canned simulation with a predetermined correct outcome closes that door. A well-framed, multiple-outcome construction challenge opens it.
• It works across a wide age range. Some of the most visitor-friendly exhibits are the ones where a four-year-old and a forty-year-old are equally puzzled, equally capable, equally delighted. Mixed-age play is underrated as a community-building force.
• It doesn't require reading. The best low-tech interactives are intuitive. A clear cause-and-effect relationship helps overcome many of the access issues that make connecting with an exhibit hard in the first place.
A Challenge for InterActivity Attendees
The fabric metaphor in this year's InterActivity conference theme is great. Fabric is made of many small interlocking pieces. Each thread matters. So does each exhibit choice in your museum.
If you're heading to San Diego, what specific takeaways about exhibit design for belonging and connection can you take away from your conference experiences?
Not just aspirational language, but the actual material decisions. What new "connector" exhibits could you put into your museum?
How can we build more town squares and fewer telephone booths?
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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