ExhibiTricks: A Museum/Exhibit/Design Blog

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?

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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 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.

Wednesday, September 30, 2026

"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.

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

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.

Tuesday, September 15, 2026

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!

Tuesday, September 8, 2026

"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!