Inspiration May be Hazardous to Exhibit Design

“You can't wait for inspiration. You have to go after it with a club.”  ~ Jack London

As I was touring through a new exhibition at a very large museum recently, a person from the Exhibits Department complained to me that they didn't have enough time or money to prototype their interactive exhibits. 

 

"So how do you work out which ideas to put into your exhibitions?" I asked.  The Exhibits person admitted that they spent a large amount of time gathering exhibit notions together that the designers felt "inspired by" and produced those things to create the final exhibition --- generally leaving no time or money for remediation, if technical or content aspects fell flat.

I immediately thought of the Jack London quote at the top of this post, and considered how slippery the notion of inspiration is. And how the best exhibit components often come about from spending time with visitors and ideas and materials figuring out what works (and what doesn't) and stumbling onto serendipitous avenues that would never have been found in mind-numbing development meetings or the reveries of creating slick computer renderings to show potential donors.

I wonder if the oft-repeated plaint of "no time or no money" for prototyping and testing components/concepts/whatever (or for fixing things after an exhibition opens) is just a convenient excuse to cover the fear of the unknown.  Is waiting for the clouds to open and inspiration to strike  just a similar sort of excuse?

 

New ideas are fragile things, especially ideas centered around approaches that have never been tried before.  Doubts start to creep in: What if your ideas fall flat before your peers during a presentation meeting?  What if visitors don't like the ideas?  Many museums speed through, or try to short-change, the often messy and plain hard work of really trying ideas out even though the final exhibition is often better for these early uncertainties.  These museums want the inspiration, but they aren't willing to go after it with a club.

So here's an idea for your current (or next) exhibits project:  take one exhibit idea, even if it's not fully formed and truly "inspiring" and just try it out for at least 20 minutes with visitors inside your museum.  You can test or show your idea with paper, tape, and a pen (stuff you already have near your workspace) Ask your visitors questions. Let them make suggestions.  You do have time (20 minutes) and money (near zero) to do this!  

 

Who knows?  You might even get inspired. 

 

"The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who'll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you're sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that's almost never the case."   ~ Chuck Close

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Quick Exhibit Resource Roundup

These are hard times in the museum biz.  It upsets me to read about museums being assailed by governments and politicians, and even more so to hear about museum layoffs or closings.


But as I say to my kids, you can either lie down in the road, or do something about it.  So, here's a simple thing I'm doing through this blog posting: listing some great free resources that can help you stretch your limited exhibit/museum schedules and budgets.


1) ExhibitFiles
This is a webspace maintained by ASTC and partially funded by the National Science Foundation that serves as a community site for exhibit designers and developers.  ExhibitFiles is an excellent place to find inspiration and information from colleagues around the world.  It is also a great way to share background about your own exhibits projects and to offer reviews of exhibitions you have seen.  If you're not already a member, sign up today!

2) Free digital "back issues" of the Exhibitionist
NAME (The National Association for Museum Exhibition) in addition to its other services to the museum field, has started to provide an online archive of its journal, The Exhibitionist.  Even if you are not a member of NAME, you can download previously published articles and entire back issues at the NAME website.

3) The Great Big Exhibit Resource List
This is an ever-growing resource list of suppliers (maintained by yours truly) for all things exhibits and museums.  The compendium is divided up into categories like "Fake Foods" "Electronics" and "Science Supplies."  If you have a suggestion for something to add to the GBER just email me.

4) Exhibits Exchange Group
This free Google group is a place for individuals and museums to list "used but usable" exhibits and exhibit items.  Everyone likes a bargain, and I'm sure museum folks hate to see a perfectly good exhibit get tossed, simply due to lack of space.  So head on over to the Exhibits Exchange and see what's available, or post something yourself.

5) Instructables
This is a wonderful website that shares step-by-step instructions and parts lists for making all sorts of high and low tech gizmos, and "crafty" items as well.  Well worth a look for both instruction and inspiration.

I hope you'll be able to put these resources to good use.  Have we missed one of your favorite exhibit or design resources?  Share the details in the "Comments Section" below!



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Fast Museums or Slow Museums?

Do museums really want people to slow down enough to carefully observe and consider the wonders within?  Or are museums really designed (physically and financially) to keep people moving --- to increase "throughput" --- contemplation be damned?

I was thinking about this the other day inside an art museum that seemed to have an especially conspicuous lack of seating (like benches) available in the galleries. It made me wonder if the gallery designers and curators really care about the people viewing the art inside, trudging along on the hard floors, eyes glazing over as they move from one uniformly white-walled gallery to another.  Standing and concentrating for long periods of time is hard work!

But leaving aside obvious amenities like seating, what other messages do museums send that either invite folks to linger and contemplate as a valued guest, or to hurry them along as just another paying customer?  Timed tickets? Security guards? Audio tours? No stroller policies? No picture taking?

There may be lots of "practical" reasons for "moving people along" through the galleries, but museum visitors may perceive such practicalities differently than museum administrators.  And, if you rush them through your museum, they might not be in a big hurry to come back.

What do you think?  Are "slow museums" an unrealistic Victorian notion, or a better idea than the "Throughput Uber Alles" of "fast museums"?  Share your views in the "Comments Section" below.



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Teaching Hacking to Teach STEM?

Could giving people a chance to hack* their smartphones, remotes, and Wiis get them excited about science?  I've been working on a few museum projects recently that make me think so.

STEM is an acronym that stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.  STEM is all the rage in the Governmental, Education, and Museum communities as everyone wrings their hands over the (real or perceived) decline of science and math skills in the U.S. compared to other countries.

Everyone acknowledges the importance of STEM, but how do you actually get people excited enough about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics materials so that they can discover for themselves how interesting these areas of human knowledge can be?

In the spirit of Johnny Chung Lee and his Wii system hacks, letting people play around with and experiment with the familiar yet "magical" devices around us all the time (like remote controls or Wii controllers) can be a great way to find out about STEM topics as varied as liquid crystal technology, infrared signaling, and polarization.

I'll share the efficacy of this "demystifying familiar technology" approach through project progress reports and experiences in future posts, but in the meantime grab a remote control yourself and a digital camera (still or video) or the camera in your computer or smartphone to start finding out about the (normally) invisible lightsource that makes remotes tick.  (As in the photo at the top of this post.)  Feel free to use Google if you need some help answering some of your questions --- it's meant to be fun exploration using all the tools at your disposal, not a test!

Why does your digital camera "see" the remote's light that our eyes can't?  Can you figure out a way to "decode" the various light sequences that the remote sends as "commands" to the device it works with? Why doesn't your remote just use a "visible" light source to control its devices?

Thinking about, and experimenting with, familiar objects in unfamiliar ways can be a great way to unlock one part of the STEM learning puzzle. (To "hack" it open if you like...)   Try "hacking" some familiar technologies for yourself or in your museum, and let us know what you find out in the "Comments" section below!

* By the term "hack" I mean the original benevolent definition, not the malicious, harmful sense of the word.

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The Super Bowl vs. Your Museum

Super Bowl Sunday will be a great day to visit your local museum --- because it will be even quieter than usual.  This, despite the oft-repeated statistic that "140 million people will attend major league sporting events in a year, compared to 850 million museum visitations in the United States."

First off, in keeping with the Super Bowl theme of this posting, let me just ask whether you've ever seen someone outside a museum scalping tickets to get inside?  Leaving aside the fact that the comparative statistic above is misleading for a number of reasons, if not downright bogus --- but let's move on.

So why are so many people, even folks who don't normally follow football, more rabidly enthusiastic about watching the "Big Game" or attending a local Super Bowl event, than visiting your museum?

I'd say one possible answer lies in finding the difference between a "fan" and a "casual visitor."   Fans wear logo gear all year long, and have no compunction in excitedly telling total strangers how great their team is.  The National Football league is, as a recent New York Times Magazine article has detailed, even going after a traditionally neglected demographic, women 18 to 49, with great success.

Most museums, however, seem unable to expand beyond their traditional visitor demographic of older, white adults.

So how can museums create more "fans" and expand their demographic reach as well?  

One positive example is the Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans program which is billed as "a socially networked museum membership" that gives special benefits to anyone who becomes a 1stfan. Despite being in the shadow of their over-hyped museum brethren in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Museum has decided to deliberately and aggressively become more responsive to the various communities it serves --- and in the process has been creating Brooklyn Museum fans.

Similarly, places like The City Museum in St. Louis have set out to become a gathering spot for their local communities and have become open to all sorts of fun ideas that are edgy enough to attract a wide, and enthusiastic,  audience of repeat visitors who definitely become City Museum fans.


Of course all this talk of creating "museum fans" is pointless if your museum isn't really fan-worthy.  Is your admissions procedure torture?  Do your create core exhibits and attractions that are worth revisiting, or do you depend on the hucksterism of one-off events that only vaguely relate to your museum's mission and purpose?  What are the obstacles that prevent your visitors from becoming fans?


So, let's take a few lessons from the NFL and see if we can create more museum fans.   And if we can't beat them at the Super Bowl hoopla, maybe we can take a page from Tyler Greens's playbook by stirring up an Art Museum Super Bowl bet, and giving football fans another reason to be interested in what we do.


GO MUSEUMS!



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Exhibit Design Inspiration: Zimoun

The artist Zimoun uses a variety of familiar materials (primarily combinations of boxes, motors, and wire) to create sound sculptures and environments.  As you can see from the video above there is a very compelling, almost hypnotic effect to the sounds and motions the art pieces create.

In the words of the artist: "My audio compositions are less focused on getting from A to B but rather to create static sound architectures and spaces. They should be entered and explored acoustically like a building."

 

Find out more about the artist, and see more examples of Zimoun's work by clicking over to the Zimoun website.


Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Free Updates" link on the 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!)