Looking Back to Move Forward: Top 10 ExhibiTricks Posts from 2016.

The Sankofa image above, a stylized bird looking back over its shoulder, comes from Ghana and represents the need to reflect on the past to build a successful future.  In that spirit, and with 2017 upon us, I offer ten ExhibiTricks posts worth reflecting on as we start the new year:

A Practical Guide to Museum Ethics: An Interview with Sally Yerkovich  Ethics seems like an important topic to consider, in museums and broader society, so Sally's book and interview are both worth a read.

Humor Me A Moment: The Power Of Humor In Museums  On a completely different note, Cara Dodge shared her thoughts on humor in museums, based on her research.

What Do You Mean By "The World's Best Museum" ?  Did you ever wonder why some projects never seem to get off the ground? Read this post to find out about one common reason for lack of project traction.

Edifice Complex and Museums Another common cause of "projectus interruptus" is the dreaded "Edifice Complex."

These three related posts all cluster around notions of customer service and healthy, robust institutions:

Can Social Psychology Predict Successful Museum Project Teams?

Have you tried making your museum a more interesting place?

Customer Service 101 from the Disney Institute

Among the super smart people that were featured on ExhibiTricks in 2016, I especially liked these posts featuring Nina Simon and Margaret Middleton:

The Art of Relevance: An Interview with Nina Simon

Margaret Middleton on Family Inclusion in Museums

Last, but not least, I'd feel remiss if I didn't highlight this 2016 post about one of my favorite museum/exhibit/design tools:

Stick to it! A resource list of tapes for designers.

And with that, I'd like to wish every ExhibiTricks reader a happy, healthy, and prosperous 2017. 

Are there any articles or resources from 2016 that you've been reflecting back on?  Please share in the "Comments" section below!

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Edifice Complex and Museums

Here's a quick museum business quiz --- answer true or false.

1) A museum can be too big.

2) A museum can be totally"self-supporting" financially.

Depending on your answers to those questions, you may or may not believe that museums (especially in the U.S.) have a serious "edifice complex."

That is, the blind belief that somehow merely constructing a GIGANTIC building, funded through a combination of hopelessly over-optimistic attendance projections and/or slightly dubious loan arrangements, will create a successful, sustainable museum.

Part of what brings this all to mind is the sad and distressing news out of Miami, concerning the Frost Museum of Science — a signature project at the heart of the new Museum Park downtown that has run out of cash before construction can be finished.  The Frost is not merely a project "too big to fail" but "too big to finish."

In an eleventh hour move, the Frost project will be finished, but at a wrenching emotional price to the museum --- the museum's namesake funders — Phillip and Patricia Frost — announced that they're going to bail out the museum with a bridge loan to keep construction going. But they also exacted very tough terms: they’ve effectively “fired" the entire current 41-person board of the science museum.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, I suppose.  Full disclosure: I consulted on the Frost project up until late 2015 and I really admire the creative team there.  I sincerely hope they can move forward and open the museum in a positive and sustainable way.

Unfortunately, Miami's Frost Museum is hardly the exception to the museum edifice complex.  Here's a short list of news story links to ponder in a similar vein:


Newseum

Museum of Jewish Heritage

Exploratorium (here and here)

MOSI (Tampa)

Science City and Prariefire  (A geographically-related pairing in my view)

Please Touch Museum (here and here)

The National Children's Museum

Chattanooga History Museum

All museums with problems that could be reasonably tied to their (overly?) large new facilities or expansion plans.


I offer these links and examples not merely as a litany of pain, or a map to the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, but as a plea to museum and civic leaders:  If you think it is difficult to build a new museum, it is much, much, much, more difficult to create a thriving and sustainable cultural institution that is responsive to the communities surrounding it.

Maybe there is something ingrained in the American psyche and in the mindset of wealthy philanthropists that prevents modest, truly sustainable projects from moving forward when more grandiose alternatives always seem to be waiting in the wings.

Before completely despairing for the museum business, I'll offer the example of COSI in Columbus, Ohio as an example of an institution saddled (for a variety of political reasons) with a new building that was too large and unsustainable from the day it opened in 1999, that has managed to claw its way back (over the past 16+ years!) through, for example, a variety of community partnerships that involved sharing and leasing unused space inside COSI.  (You can read more about COSI's institutional evolution here and here.)


Like most addictions, edifice complex is probably best kicked if it's never started in the first place, but, lacking that, I hope museums will continue to be smarter (and smaller!) with their facilities and financial projections in the future --- especially given the changing demographics and expectations of cultural consumers.




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.

P.S. If you receive ExhibiTricks via email (or Facebook or LinkedIn) you will need to click HERE to go to the main ExhibiTricks page to make comments or view multimedia features (like videos!)

Another Cautionary Tale For Museums: What Happened To The Millennium Dome?

I happened upon the Danny's Land blog today, and aside from the fact that Dan Howland points out both Laurie Anderson's and Thomas Dolby's favorite oddball amusement parks (That would be "Dollywood" for Laurie and "Diggerland" for Thomas) he also offers a free PDF download of a treatise called "Dome and Domer: The Increasingly Stupid Story of the Millennium Dome."

The premise of the Millennium Dome: "Let's spend lots of money to build a ginormous new attraction with lots of flashy technology --- so many visitors will come, that it will be self-supporting!" certainly sounds familiar to museum people.

Unfortunately, initial bursts of civic enthusiasm and bucketfuls of municipal money do not make for long-term, sustainable business plans for museums. (See our previous posts on COSI Toledo and The Mark Twain House.)

Some of the important lessons learned from The Millennium Dome fiasco outlined in "Dome and Domer" are obvious in retrospect: the people who designed it weren't the people who had to run it, there was no cohesive "vision" to the entire enterprise, simple things like throughput and lines weren't taken into consideration, and tons of money was frittered away on bozo ideas like robotic pubic lice (!)

Obvious though such points about the 'Dome may be, there are still many museum projects hoping to survive on good intentions rather than sound business fundamentals.

Rather than detail here the many hilarious (and scary!) goofups that ultimately doomed the 'Dome, I'll let you download and read "Dome and Domer" for yourself.

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Museum Design: Where's Your Workshop?

It used to be that every museum had an "exhibits workshop." An unsettling trend (to me at least) is the continuing wave of museums that have deliberately left exhibit workshops (staff access, not visitor access spaces) out of the mix.

Can any museum that features interactive exhibits, or really any type of exhibits, ever become great (as opposed to just good) without some sort of workshop?

Let me be clear, I don't think every museum needs a full cabinet-making workshop with full welding capabilities and paint booth. But if you don't have at least one place with a bench and basic tools to tinker, to prototype, or to just pull busted exhibits off the floor while you repair them, can your museum's exhibit program ever be living up to its full potential? Workshop spaces build and increase your museum's internal exhibit development capacity and create a tremendous staff feeling of "ownership." Especially as it relates to "we built that here" exhibits and the entire exhibit development process.

I'm afraid that if you don't have a funky space to create, and explore exhibit ideas, your museum will inevitably cede some (or all!) of this important exhibit development process and skill-set to outsiders. And outsiders, including many architects with exhibit developer aspirations, are often the ones most responsible for eliminating workshop spaces from new building plans. If your designers and architects don't give you a workshop space with convenient loading/unloading access to the outdoors they are starting you and your museum off at a disadvantage.

I'll never forget a visit a few years ago to a beautiful new children's museum. After walking around the space with the Director of Exhibits, I innocently asked to see the "exhibits workshop." He ushered me into a small rectangular office with a desk and chair wedged into the far end. One entire remaining length of wall was lined with deep shelves holding the cans for the 26(or more!) different colors of paint that the architect had used throughout the building. I was dumbfounded. I asked, "Where do you build new exhibits?" The answer: "We don't build new exhibits. We just hire other people to build them for us." Then I asked, "What happens if an exhibit breaks?" The answer: "Most of the time, we just put an "OUT OF ORDER" sign on the exhibit and call somebody to come and fix it." I worried then, and I worry now, about what the long-term effects of "workshopless" museums will be --- both for visitors and the museum field itself.

How do you handle exhibit workshop space(s) in your museum or in museum projects you've helped create? Are workshop spaces a neccessity, or am I just hopelessly "old school"? Let us know in the "Comments Section" below.

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The Myth That Museums Support Themselves

Martin Filler wrote an excellent article in Architectural Record,
entitled " Debunking a myth about museums that pay for themselves."

Mr. Filler raises several excellent points, but one main takeaway for me was that museum boards, in their quest for the next "Bilbao" oftentimes sacrifice important, if not essential, aspects of buildings like on-site storage.

Creating a new museum building clearly shows the values that the institution's stakeholders hold dear. Does form truly follow function, or do the design stylings of a "starchitect" reign supreme? Does your new museum serve as a gateway to your community or a playground for the elites?

Unfortunately, monumental architecture does not have a great track record for engendering ongoing community support. Mr. Filler highlights recent projects in Toronto, Milwaukee, and Denver that failed to live up to the promise of creating "economic engines" for their respective regions.

An unfortunate corollary to this "edifice complex" in the museum community is the notion of architects serving as both building designers and exhibit designers for new projects. This is generally a bad idea, especially when it comes to museums with high numbers of interactive exhibits. You wouldn't hire an exhibit developer to design a new building (would you?) So why do some museums hire architects to design interactive experiences? Instead of a blending of architecture and experience design, most museums with architect-designed exhibits seem like the interactive equivalent of "LegoLand" with mini-buildings or "design statements" inside a larger shell.

Of course, the economic realities of starting up and maintaining a museum have always been with us. But in the end, true passion, not ego, not finances, is what drives excellent institutions. To paraphrase Mr. Filler, "Do what you love...if you make a profit, good for you. If not, good for you, too, because you’ll have been enriched by living with a thing of beauty."