ReWind Exhibit Design Inspiration: One Day Poem Pavilion

Many designers talk about the intersection of art and science, but the "One Day Poem Pavilion" actually delivers. I was immediately taken by the idea of Jiyeon Song's piece when I first posted about it, and obviously I still am.  Enjoy!

Artist Jiyeon Song has created a sculptural structure that utilizes perforations carefully arranged throughout the top surfaces.  As light shines through the Pavilion's holes at different angles, legible text is created on the sidewalk underneath.  Different lines from a poem appear at different times of the day, due to the position of the sun.  What is super cool is that (again, due to the sun's position) one poem appears during the summer, and a different poem appears in the winter.

As described on Song's "Experiential Typography" website:

The specific arrangements of the perforations reveal different poems according to the solar calendar:  During the summer solstice, the poem will contain the theme of “new life”. During the winter solstice, the poem will be on “reflection and the passing of time.”

The resulting effect is inviting and magical. Within the pavilion, the poem can be seen between 8 AM and 4PM. The poem consists of 5 lines with each line lasting about an hour. The slowness of the message offers us a meditative moment within our hectic lives.  

You can see a timelapse movie of the piece in action below or on the website as well.  The entire Experiential Typography website is worth a look as Jiyeon Song carefully documents and articulates both the art and the science of the creative development process underlying a piece like One Day Poem Pavilion.

Nice work!





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Turn the Content Around and Around: An Interview with Lyn Wood

Lyn Wood founded Hands On! in 1984 as a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) nonprofit corporation for “the promotion and expansion of science education opportunities through the development of participa­tory science centers and youth museums,” particularly in communities that do not have such resources for children and families. Shortly after its founding, Hands On! teamed with the Junior League of St. Petersburg, Florida, to co-found Great Explorations, the Hands On Museum, and helped operate it for several years.

That accomplished, she spun off Hands On! to apply her knowledge of exhibition design, visitor behavior and operational sustainability to more than 50 projects all over the world. Projects range from helping museums that are in the process of re-imagining their institutions to small start-up museums to expansions of major science centers.  Lyn is pictured above in a Hands On! exhibit at the Don Harrington Discovery Center in Amarillo, Texas. Photo: © Oscar Williams.

Lyn was kind enough to share her thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers:

What’s your educational background? 

My Bachelors degree is in Industrial and Environmental Design from the Rochester Institute of Technology.  I think I was the only native Miamian in school there.  Experiencing cold and snow for the first time caused me to stay indoors and attend classes or spend long hours on projects in their wonderful shops.  I was able to score a great first job doing commercial exhibition design back in Miami, but by then my heart was (perhaps always was) strongly leaning toward the museum field.  I received my Masters in Museum Education from George Washington University and was slightly less cold than when in Rochester.



What got you interested in museums?
My family is a tribe of adventurous travelers, and we marked time abroad pre-travel tour days. Pan Am and Eastern Airlines were doing a booming business from us then.  My parents always took us through museums, and they all seemed fascinating and strange to me.  I don’t think I actually encountered an American museum until I was a young adult and, by then, I was marinated in the eccentric collections and presentations I had seen while growing up and traveling.

You can imagine me in graduate school with all kinds of enthusiastic questions about these new-to-me American museums.  And let’s just say, back then when I was taught, children’s museums and science centers were not yet on the syllabus—not quite accepted into the hallowed halls of museum academia.  So, of course, I developed an immediate thirst to learn more about what, at the time, seemed forbidden.  This ultimately led to the founding of Hands On! Inc.



How does working with museums worldwide to create exhibits inform your design process?
Given that I already had a healthy amount of exposure to different cultures, it has been relatively easy to work on the fantastic variety of projects that have come our way.  I think that having such basic curiosity about the world inevitably makes great questions come up, causing delightful explorations that can then lead toward interesting solutions.



Tell us a little bit about how your industrial design skills inform your exhibit design work?
I am very open to what I don’t know as a designer, but if you can ask good questions, then a new universe of design answers open up.  Getting to good design solutions really is mostly about opening up the possibilities.  That being said, if I were not surrounded by a host of smart, talented people, then I would not get the added benefit of different voices, skills and knowledge to help drive a project to an interesting and rewarding conclusion.



What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?
I am not someone who spends a great deal of time online, and the literature I tend to read is, well, literature.  I think I gain more information about exhibition development from talking to people in the field.  I find that our field is really quite generous about sharing information, and we try and do our part in sharing things we have learned as well.  I like the camaraderie and earnestness that is a big part of our field.  



What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing a broader “worldview” into their exhibitions?
I am thoroughly convinced that just about anything can be turned into something interesting and worthy of inspection.  You just need to turn the content around and around until it has a compelling twist or angle to it. If you can see the content as something beautiful or even strange, then perhaps you are on to something that will intrigue visitors. 



What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?
I am a fan of the basic core of what I see our field can do.  Life can be tough, so if we can inspire, help folks get a fun taste for learning and maybe even facilitate bringing someone into a lovely state of wonder, that’s so important.  I am attaching my NYC sister’s letter to me just after 9/11 that touched on just this thing.  It doesn’t get more basic than that.

What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?
The Hamar Bispegaard Museum designed by the beloved Norwegian architect, Svere Fehn.  The building, delicately suspended over medieval ruins, serves as structure for both preservation and a grand space for exploration.  You can take in the ruins of this 12th century cathedral while perusing early Norwegian artifacts presented in utterly the most handsome way I have ever seen.  Now there was a designer who wasn’t constrained by any precedent of exhibition design whatsoever!  Here are a couple of my photos plus some links.
 

Here’s an artifact lovingly presented (top image on this blog): http://iitcoa3rdyr.wordpress.com/tag/sverre-fehn/


Here'a a Flickr set of the building: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/53521870@N06/4970197411/?q=hamar%20bispegaard%20museum



Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?
Imagine walking into an Enchanted Physics Forest.  Well, that is exactly what we are making right now for Kidspace Children’s Museum in Pasadena!  An arroyo will soon replace the empty plot of land.  The trees will be going in soon.  Mixed in with the forest will be plenty of different-scaled interactives to explore and contemplate.  A family might just sit down under the shade of a tree for a while.  We are absolutely thrilled to be working on our first major outdoor exhibition and environment.

And all this we get to do with the wonderful scientist Dr. Mike Brown, the CalTech professor of Plantetary Astronomy (and author of “How I Killed Pluto and Why it Had it Coming”), who is a board member at Kidspace.  This generous and gifted (funny too!) scientist has been such a pleasure to work with as we have developed the Enchanted Physics Forest.  He can hardly wait to play there together with his 5-year-old daughter.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?

If money were no object then we might as well place it in Paris where we all would be required to meet often for lunch at a café while brainstorming how to reach the incredible vision that our client has laid out to our crack team.  You would be there, of course, Paul.  And, aside from all my pals here at Hands On!, I would also want bring back from the dead my favorite architect Sverre Fehn to include his sensibilities.  The artist Theo Jansen would be with us too. Perhaps it is a museum/laboratory on biophilia.  We all would be required to have an extended stay at our client’s country home in Brittany to do extensive prototyping, and Theo would bring his Strandbeests.

Thanks again to Lyn for her thoughtful responses!  To find out more about Hands On! check out their website.


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Putting Visitors First: An Interview with Beth Redmond-Jones

Beth (at far right) with her family in Teton National Park

Since 1988, Beth Redmond-Jones has developed, designed, and project managed exhibitions for museums, interpretive centers, zoos, and aquariums, including Carnegie Museum of Natural History, the National Aquarium in Baltimore, Bay Area Discovery Museum, the Alaska SeaLife Center, Exploratorium, California Science Center, National Park Service, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Her expertise lies in creating multi-layered visitor experiences that include graphics, text, low and high-tech interactives, live animals, media, theater, and immersive exhibit elements. Her in-house experience includes Director of Exhibits at the Aquarium of the Pacific, Assistant to the Director of Public Programs at the Exploratorium, and Assistant Registrar at the Tucson Museum of Art.   

Beth was kind enough to answer a few questions for ExhibiTricks readers:

What’s your educational background?

I have an MA in Museum Studies from John F. Kennedy University and a BA in Art History with a double minor in studio art and biology from University of New Hampshire. I grew up in a family of architects and spent a good part of my childhood watching (and helping) my family flip houses. The design and construction aspects I feel have helped me to become a better conceptual designer, and to consider all aspects of how an exhibit could work and create an effective environment.

What got you interested in Museums?

My mom and dad were really good about taking me to museums and zoos when I was a kid. My favorites were the Cincinnati Zoo and seeing the white Bengal tigers. The other was the Natural History Museum in Cincinnati. They had this amazing immersive experience where you walked through a cave, and there was a waterfall, and it was wet and cold. I was transformed into a spelunker. I would go through it multiple times during each visit. I was also fascinated by the museum's taxidermied specimens. They were amazing.

Then, when I was seven, my mom told me we were going to have lunch with a friend of hers at the Cincinnati Art Museum. At that point in time, art museums were boring to me, and the thought of having lunch with her and one of her friends at a boring museum was "a total drag" (one of my favorite expressions when I was seven.) What she didn't tell me was that her friend, Millard F. Rogers Jr., was the Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum, who ended up serving as Director for 20 years.

Well, that lunch began my love of museums. Millard took me behind the scenes to show me collection storage and when we walked in, staff were opening a crate to reveal a Greek sculpture (I hated Greek sculpture then, but it was still a cool thing to watch) and they began discussing how to remove it from the crate and how it was going to be displayed. Seeing that sculpture in its crate, and listening to their conversation, was all it took. I was hooked.

Given your varied background, is your approach to exhibition development different in the context of different museum types?   No, not at all. Visitors always come first. Working for Kathy McLean for so long taught me the importance of putting visitors first: determining their base line knowledge of a subject, their assumptions, and their misconceptions, then evaluating concepts throughout the process.

The challenge I sometime find with the exhibition development process, however, is getting the rest of the team on board of talking with and listening to what visitors have to say all through the process. Some of my past clients did not have experience working with and including visitors in the exhibition development process, so this has been where I've had to refine my approach—getting the team on board to take visitor input seriously and create an experience that achieves the goals of the team while responding to the needs and interests of their visitors.

I really like the ambiguity of the process. Letting things sit, simmer, percolate, whatever you want to call it. Yet, I know it can frustrate others. Many of the team members I have worked with over the years want to make a decision and call it a day. I think it's important to put ideas on the board, move them around, refine them, keep some, toss others. It's an iterative approach, one that I think creates a better experience.

On occasion, I have used the IDEO method cards which are a fun way to spark new kinds of design conversations with non-designer team members. It has led to some very insightful and fun discussions which led them to come up with some innovative design concepts for exhibits.

Does being a parent inform your exhibit design work?

Definitely. I have two girls and they couldn't be more different from one another, and they are also eight years apart. So their interests, attention level, and desired experiences are really different from one another. They are constantly giving me their input on an exhibition I'm working on, whether I want it or not. But I really love that—they want my exhibitions to be engaging as well.

At various times over the years, both of them have looked at fonts for readability and read labels out loud for understandability. They are often my first level of evaluation. Most recently, my youngest was looking at typefaces and logo treatments for a children's exhibition I’m working on. She picked out problem areas that no one else on the team noticed. It was really helpful.

As a parent, I've also been exposed to experiences that I may not have been exposed to if I hadn't had kids, such as Adventure Playground in Berkeley, CA, or even children's museums. Seeing how kids learn, engage, and behave in a variety of environments has allowed me to think about exhibit experiences that engage that younger audience in a different way.

What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?

The online museum resources I follow on a regular basis are the National Association for Museum Exhibition (NAME) list-serve and web site, ExhibitFiles, Nina Simon's blog,  Museum 2.0 and of course ExhibiTricks! I also check out IDEO's web site on a regular basis.

Other resources are books and magazines. First and foremost is Kathy McLean's book Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions, Beverly Serrell's book Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, and Sam Taylor's book Try It! Improving Exhibits Through Formative Evaluation. In my opinion, these are necessary items on any exhibit developers bookshelf.

Other favorites are Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions edited by Kathy McLean and Wendy Pollock, Nina Simon's book The Participatory Museum, and of course, Exhibitionist, the journal published by the NAME, and Curator magazine. I also read non-museum magazines like ID and Wired to see what's going on in design and technology outside museums.

There is one other resource that I have pinned on my wall. I'm not sure where it came from, but I know many exhibit developers who have it above their desks:


What Do I Do?

Visionary: Inspire the process.

Curator: Without the Ph.D. or the years of preparation, but with the pressure for accuracy.


Researcher: Compile background, interview experts.

Secretary: Listen to the Board, listen to the administration.

Thinker: Synthesize all of it to get the main message.

Warrior: Defend the main message.

Whiner: Complain when the main message is being ignored.


Translator: Turn words into a three-dimensional, interactive, exciting exhibit.

Teacher: Educate the designers who are too busy to learn about the content they’re exhibiting.


Evaluator: Speak with visitors.

Advocate: Speak up for visitors.

Project Manager: Make charts, write purchase orders, manage, make it happen.

Therapist: Make sure everyone feels a part of the process, that everyone’s ego is stroked.

Parent: Prevent squabbling from bringing down the house.

Laborer: Actually build the thing.

What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in developing their exhibitions?

1. Use real stuff. Use your collections. Put them in context. Tell your story. Be true to your institution.

2. Talk with your visitors, even informally.

3. Don't be afraid to experiment with new exhibit techniques. Try new ways to engage your visitors. I've seen very simple exhibits that activated the visitor conversations—some exhibit cases, a few good objects, a couple of engaging questions, and post-it notes for visitors to write a response and a wall to post them on.

What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?

Who knows….museums are challenged by changing demographics and the economy. I think museums need to be true to themselves and create passionate experiences that resonate with audiences. We need to be places where people want to go and hang out, create things, and visit with their friends—not be a place to check off a list. Museums need to become an integral part of the community.

What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?

Some of my favorite museums are the American Visionary Art Museum (Baltimore, MD), Monterey Bay Aquarium (Monterey, CA), Pittsburgh Children's Museum (Pittsburgh, PA), The City Museum (St. Louis, MO), The Museum of Jurassic Technology (Los Angeles, CA), Minnesota History Center (St. Paul, MN), and the Bob Marley Museum (Kingston, Jamaica).

Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?

I'm currently the project manager and exhibit developer for a new exhibition M is for Museum at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh, PA. This 8,000 square foot exhibition opens October 15, 2011 and is targeted for 5-13 year olds. It is based on the ABCs with each letter representing something the museum does or collects. For example, A is for Artifact, C is for Collect, F is for Fossil, L is for Look, and T is for Taxidermy. It is the first hands-on, kid-centric exhibition the museum has developed. It includes hands-on interactives, multimedia, and hundreds of artifacts and specimens from the museum's collection. We really wanted to focus on breaking down the wall between front-of-house and back-of-house.

One of my other clients is the Utah Museum of Natural History, the Rio Tinto Center. I'm working with them to develop interpretation that calls out the LEED aspects of their new LEED gold building that opens in fall 2011.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?

My dream exhibit project would be an exhibition on mental illness or autism. Both of these conditions have had a huge impact on my life. There are so many stigmas and misinformation associated with these conditions, that I would like to create an experience that would allow visitors to have a better understanding of what it's like for an individual to live with these conditions. It would be an opportunity to bust the stigmas and open people's eyes to some of the amazing people and qualities that these conditions create.


Thanks again to Beth for taking the time to share her thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers!

 
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 Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Why We Do What We Do: An Interview with Sean Duran

Sean B. Duran was the Vice President for Exhibition and Design at the Miami Science Museum before his untimely death in April 2016. Before that, Sean held a progressive series of positions at the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia where he was the leader of content and design development teams for exhibitions and public programs that interpreted the research of the Academy’s Center for Systematic Biology and Evolution.

I've kept this interview in place as both a memorial to, and a record of, Sean's thoughtful contributions to the museum field.

Sean's exhibition projects include Moving Things, a light hearted look at how things move; serving as co-PI on Charlie and Kiwi’s Evolutionary Adventure, an NSF-funded research and touring exhibition project; Heart Smart, a science research project and personalized, trilingual exhibition experience where the exhibition components record data about the health of individual museum visitors; the NSF funded Amazon Voyage, a touring exhibition that has been seen nationally by more than one million visitors; and The Dinosaurs of China, a massive twelve thousand square-foot collaborative exhibition partnership with the Beijing Museum of Natural History.

A particular focus of Sean's work is bilingual communication in exhibitions and he has been core to the development, testing and implementation of bilingual design protocols for all visitor-oriented projects.  Sean’s attention is now turning to the growing momentum behind the development and construction of the new downtown Patricia and Phillip Frost Museum of Science, a 250,000 square-foot science museum and aquarium scheduled to replace the small, aged, though well-loved, current museum.  Sean lives in Coconut Grove, Florida with his wife, a trained chef and informal educator, and daughter, who is in second grade and loves the ocean.

What’s your educational background?
I went to Saint Vincent College and Seton Hill University where I did a BFA, and University of Pittsburgh where I studied history, science and museum studies.  Dr. Paul Chew was the president of a small regional art museum and my advisor. He hired me part-time at the Westmoreland so I was thrown sink-or-swim into how museums do what we do.  I’m so sorry he’s now passed on because I often think I’d like his current view on things.



What got you interested in Museums?
I think museums are in my DNA. My dad was a staff taxidermist at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh and I have a certain fondness for the smell of naphthalene wafting through a workspace.  Some earliest memories are of sawdust-covered museum-basement floors, stacked sauropod bones and the decayed Viking ship at the thoroughly old-school 1970’s era Carnegie.



How does working with teams to create exhibits inform your design process?  (Or does it?)
People bring much of themselves to the design process, and Miami is an incredibly diverse place so I work with community members and colleagues from quite literally all over the world ­ as many of us in exhibition work do. So there is great strength in that diversity.  Most museums are not on track to become welcoming to all.  Non-whites veer away from museums and this trend isn't new and not likely to change until Latinos and African-Americans cease to be so rare on museum staff - or better yet, are commonly running museums.

On the bright side, Museum magazine quoted John Zogby who called the millennial generation the first "globals" and they have embraced diversity so thoroughly that distinctions of race, gender and sexual orientation are fading into the background. If museums engender the kind of participatory experiencers they seek, maybe the barriers won't be so severe.



Tell us a little bit about how your “non-museum” skills/activities inform your exhibit design work?  Non-museum activity? Can watching baseball at 9:30 at night inform exhibit design work? I guess not, that’s just recharging batteries.  My 7 year-old daughter is probably been the best non-museum-activity-museum-activity I’ve ever had. Its not a very diverse focus group but it puts a face on why we do what we do. It’s simply humbling to create museum experiences that may inspire a young person's interest in science and critical thinking. We get the government we deserve and if she grows up to vote from the position of an informed critical thinker, that’s success on both axes.



What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?   I think volunteering is a great way to find out about exhibition development.  Everyone has something they can contribute and museums are hungry for the help.  And through online networks, exhibition teams can include anyone interested in participating in the development and design of an exhibition. I like what Liberty Science Center did in this way with their Cooking exhibition.



What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in developing their exhibitions?  Don’t lock yourself in to any one approach or process as every project has its opportunities. If you only define success as perfectly following a specific flow of steps you’ll likely miss some opportunity to make something really special.


What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?  Who can say… humans are innately experimental. We recently finished up an exhibition area with a fairly small footprint called "Room for Debate". The interactives in this room include a Snibbe infotiles wall, a nice feedback video kiosk by Brad Larson, a pair of carbon calculators, and other elements aimed at promoting discussion around visitor's lifestyle choices and resulting environmental impact.

The entire space was made from found materials (like magazines that were rolled and stacked to form a wall and repurposed cremation tubes that were lined up to form another) or, green materials (like wheat board, sustainably harvested woods, and recycled plastics). These were tagged with hanging labels so visitors could compare the merits or challenges of the different substances. Graphics were printed with soy inks directly on hunks of old shipping crates that had arrived at the museum for one reason or another. We are doing some remediation stuff now - adding more labels – even more comfortable seats - scheduling demos right inside the space - - no surprises.

I think the greatest challenge museums face as we venture into the “new frontier” is how to strategize the response to demographic shifts that are presently transforming the social landscape of the United States. Ethnicity (and age) will have the largest impact on museums as the definition of mainstream requires revision. Like, what we were shooting for in the “Room for Debate”, museums need to become places where people want to hang-out – not places they feel they ought to visit – so as demographics change, museums need to become places where all people do feel welcome, do hang-out, engage and contribute.



What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?
That’s hard to say, but I’m interested in exhibitions that trust their audience enough to employ humor as a delivery strategy. For example there was an exhibition at the Skirball in Los Angeles called “Jews on Vinyl”. …..it was a simple, not exhaustive exhibition and I think this supports a point that in terms of humor in exhibitions, risk is equable with scale suggesting smaller and less expensive stuff has a better chance of surviving the committee.

Non-museum people Josh Kun and Roger Bennett were the duo behind Jews on Vinyl. The Skirball allotted them about 600 square feet of light filled space where they arranged comfortable furniture, like a hipster’s ‘50s living room. There were ipod listening stations loaded with play lists. One was titled You Don’t Have to be Jewish – another contained 50 versions of Hava Nagila. ……and they hung the requisite  “wall of vinyl” . The space was welcoming; it feel comfortable; a place to laugh with others. I was so taken with this exhibition I called the Skirball and spoke to Erin Clancey. She had managed guest curators Josh and Roger and she confirmed that “welcoming” was in fact a core intent. They wanted visitors to be able to interact with the records as they would in their own homes.



Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?  
Long term, my near-full attention is turning to the growing momentum behind the development and construction of our new downtown Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, a 250,000 square-foot science museum and aquarium scheduled to replace the small, aged, though well-loved, current museum.

More recently we just completed the “Stingray Sea Lab” touch tank space and another new exhibition called "Moving Things", about exploring the most efficient way to move things from one place to another. The stingrays were especially fun because we repurposed an underutilized space - the museum's gift shop (we now do the same level of sales from a kiosk in the lobby). We opened it up to the elements by removing a metal and glass wall along one side creating a sheltered indoor/outdoor space. We used a light tube through to the roof to augment natural light to the algae tank and selected LED lights for all of the fixtures reducing the energy load. The algae in the tank is plumbed to do a portion of the work cleaning the water so we have also reduced some of the load on the filters by incorporating these natural elements.



If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?
Since there is no such thing as an infinite sack of cash, I’d say my dream project is the one we’re doing right here developing and building the new Miami Science Museum.


Thanks again to Sean for taking the time to share his thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers!  You can follow the progress of the new Miami Science Museum on their blog.





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Museum Exhibit Inspiration: The Work Of Arthur Ganson

One of my favorite artists is Arthur Ganson. I've been a big fan of Arthur and his work ever since I met him many years ago while working in the Boston area. (And I can take some small credit for bringing Arthur to Austin for a show that led to the inspiration for his toy called "Toobers and Zots.")

Speaking of Boston, if you find yourself within striking distance of the MIT Museum, you should see Arthur's ongoing exhibition called Gestural Engineering. It's a magical collection of his witty and intricate sculptures.

The video below is from a talk Arthur gave at the TED conference that gives a nice overview of his work and approach. Enjoy!




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Sustainable Museums. What happened to COSI Toledo?

In case you hadn't heard, COSI Toledo closed down permanently on December 31, 2007, after 10 years of operation.

I think it's a little sad and scary that one of the early "brand(ed) names" of the science center business, COSI, has taken such a drubbing in both its greatly expanded Columbus location, as well as in its now-defunct Toledo satellite.

Unfortunately, the news of museum closings, like COSI Toledo's, begs several important questions: 1) Are the traditional business models of museum operation truly sustainable? 2) Is the public really willing to support museums directly (through admissions, contributions, etc.) and/or indirectly through taxes, millages, etc.? 3) Should the IRS that grants 501 (c) 3 non-profit status for museums insist on more realistic business plans? All tough questions, which I don't claim to have the definitive answers to, but I am interested in starting a dialogue. So, what do you think?


Here's a link to some comments on the situation from some people who live in Toledo.

UPDATE: Now the folks at COSI Toledo are trying to make a go of it by offering outreach programs to local schools.

William Gibson: EBay as Guest Curator?

William Gibson, the godfather of cyberspace has a cool interview in the Washington Post.

In it, Mr. Gibson contends that there is a great opportunity for people to become connoisseurs due to the inadvertent curatorial power of eBay: "Every hair is being numbered -- eBay has every grain of sand. EBay is serving this very, very powerful function which nobody ever intended for it. EBay in the hands of humanity is sorting every last Dick Tracy wrist radio cereal premium sticker that ever existed. It's like some sort of vast unconscious curatorial movement."

Maybe eBay is another way to deploy the power of "Web 2.0" into museums?

In any event, an interesting interview.

Beach (or Airplane) Business (mostly) Books for Exhibits People.

Here's a set of books for your Summer list that I've read or re-read recently.

The first set of books are primarily from the "business section" but I've found great lessons for idea generation, better collaboration, and ways to leverage tools like the Internet to make better exhibits (and let people know that you make better exhibits!)

The last couple of books are excellent novels by two gifted writers.

Seth Godin's Free Prize Inside! is a quick read that lobs lots of great ideas your way. The main idea being that making great products is the best form of advertising.

The Black Swan The author stresses how our brains are wired for narrative -- to tell stories. We look for order and repeatability, even though the "odds" are on the side of randomness.

Rule The Web Think you know everything there is to know about the Web? Guess Again ... and learn some new tricks from this book!

Made to Stick The two brothers who researched and authored this book set out to discover the common traits of "ideas that stick." Ideas, like "The Great Wall of China is the only human-made object visible from outer space", even when they are shown to be incorrect, maintain a life of their own, and keep getting repeated because their ideas "stick" with people.

While the traits the authors come up with seem fairly obvious (Sticky Ideas usually have aspects of Emotion and Unexpectedness embedded in them...) the examples and questions the brothers Heath raise provide a good checklist to shift merely good ideas or exhibits into "sticky" ones.

The Creative Priority Jerry Hirshberg shares his experiences as founder and president of Nissan Design International and imparts some great lessons in how to motivate everyone in an organization to make creativity their priority.

A Death In Belmont From the author of "the Perfect Storm" comes this account of how Junger's family intersected with Albert DeSalvo, the presumed "Boston Strangler" during the 1960's in Belmont, a suburb of Boston.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay If you've never read anything by Michael Chabon, this book is a good place to start. Weaving threads of reality and fiction as he outlines the lives of those creating "fictional reality" in the golden age of comic books in NYC.

"Food" for thought: Cultural Exhibits

Many museums are interested in creating or hosting exhibitions on "cultural" topics. However, many such exhibitions often run the risk of reinforcing cultural stereotypes, or focusing on the strange habits, customs, clothes, of "other" people. (Adding plastic pineapples and plantains to your grocery store exhibit does not mean you now have a cultural exhibit!)

Two wonderful books that may well provide interesting starting points for creating more thoughtful (and thought-provoking!) cultural exhibitions are:
Hungry Planet: What the World Eats
and
Material World: A Global Family Portrait