Revealing Process to Relieve Museum Visitor Boredom?

Museums are great at showing off end-products, but the process(es) that created those products --- not so much.

Every time I'm in an art museum and hear someone nearby mutter "my kid could do a better job than that ..." I think that if only the disgruntled visitor could get a better sense of HOW the artist created the artwork in question, that they might feel differently.

But in many museums (especially art and history museums) visitors are faced with thousands of items plainly presented with the assumption that any "thoughtful" person will simply be amazed/inspired/transported by what's on display.  And what many visitors often find "boring" about museums is this endless parade of encased or hung objects without any context.

So what's to be done?  I'd say it's no accident that two of the current trends in museums relate directly to this context/process challenge in museum exhibition design:

• The rise of co-curated or community-curated exhibitions deliberately busts the normally opaque process open, and gives people a sense of the messiness involved in creating what often is seen as a tidy end result.  Of equal importance, creative/community partners take tremendous pride and ownership in the end results.

• Maker spaces or design education spaces inside museums (including non-science museums like the Denver Art Museum) give visitors an opportunity to directly participate in activities that interest them and that "pull back the curtain" on many, many aspects of the processes involved in creating products.


Of course large, traditional collection-based institutions may find it hard to pivot toward more process-oriented exhibition experiences.  However, even straightforward approaches in exhibition design can address this. 

Take for example the "Hopper Drawing" exhibition currently on view at The Whitney Museum of American Art.  The basic premise is simple: display classic paintings by Edward Hopper alongside preparatory drawings of those same paintings to give visitors a better sense of the artist's evolving and changing process.

Perhaps if more museums could become as involved in revealing process as well as product, fewer visitors would think of museums as "boring."

Have you visited a museum or exhibition recently that adeptly revealed process?  Then give a shout out in the "Comments" Section below!


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User-Centered Design: An Interview with Margaret Middleton

Margaret Middleton designs exhibits and environments at Children's Discovery Museum of San Jose. She is an artist and craftsperson with a passion for designing and creating beautiful, functional spaces, unique props, and imaginative costumes.  Margaret was kind enough to answer some questions for ExhibiTricks readers below:


What’s your educational background?
I have a BFA in Industrial Design from the Rhode Island School of Design. I had trouble deciding whether to be an engineer or an artist so industrial design seemed like a good compromise. Turns out it's also a perfect background for exhibition design.



What got you interested in Museums?   Growing up, going to museums was a favorite family activity and we liked them all --- art, history, science, you name it. I loved museums so much I would make my own at home. I’d start by burying stuff in the backyard so I could be an archaeologist and dig it up. Then I’d display my artifacts in elaborate exhibits in my bedroom with a gift shop in the hallway and a sign on the door. I’d give my family a hand-drawn brochure, take their tickets and invite them into my museum.

Even though I was a museum entrepreneur at age 7, I didn’t know I wanted to make museums my career until I was halfway through with college. I’d been working at Providence Children’s Museum and when they hired on exhibit designer Chris Sancomb he let me follow him around and help him out. I knew right away I wanted to be just like him. 4 years later I was the exhibit designer at Children’s Discovery Museum of San Jose.



Tell us a little bit about how your “non-museum” skills/activities inform your exhibit design work?  I don’t have non-museum skills.

But seriously, one interest of mine that I consider "cross-training" is event and program planning. All the considerations that go into it, from the agenda to the room setup to the snack choices, it's basically user-focused experience design. The big difference is that an event or program is a temporal experience with a host so it's easier to guide a participant through a program and you can control the experience better than you can with an exhibit. Scaffolding, story-telling, and being a good host are all things I learn from event design and apply to exhibit design.



What are the ways you think about making your projects accessible to the widest range of visitors?  I'm working on this theory right now that, anti-intuitive as it may seem, exhibits that use specific, personal stories have more universal appeal than ones that stay broad and general.

It's a common misconception that when you're making a cultural or historical exhibit you need to keep the narrative broad so you don't alienate anyone by getting too specific. We think that if we keep things vague people will be able to see themselves in the exhibit because hey, we're all people. But it turns out that you end up alienating everyone because no one can relate to these generic stories with no juicy details. The details are what make personal stories relatable. The best way to help visitors see themselves in the exhibit is to ask them good questions and invite them to share their own personal stories in the exhibit.

For a specific, personal story about this technique in action, check out this video I made: http://vimeo.com/69290692 



What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about accessible exhibition development?  Anything about user-centered design. I like Planning for People in Museums by Kathy McLean and Dana Mitroff's Interview Tips from her website "Design Thinking for Museums." An accessible exhibit is one that puts the visitor first. 



What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals in thinking about making their work accessible to all visitors?   Learn how to listen to visitors and ask them the right questions. This is design research --- any of those user-centered design books should cover it. Research should have a goal and a plan for how to use the information gathered. The questions need to be questions you actually want answers to.

And for goodness sake, if you're going through the trouble of putting together an advisory panel (which you should) then listen to them. It's not easy to admit you're wrong, but advisers (and evaluators for that matter) are not there to support and reinforce the decisions you already made.

Also, your mere gesture of engaging community members does not mean you will automatically achieve "buy-in" from them. If your advisory panel doesn't like your ideas, you can't spend the rest of your time with them justifying your ideas. There's a big difference between "buy-in" and "coercion." And "we don't have time" is no excuse.  If you don't have time to respond to what you learn, don't engage an advisory panel to begin with. 



Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?   Right now we're revamping an exhibit about healthy eating. Rainbow Market is made up of three linked environments where you can select, "cook", and "eat" healthy food- a farmers' market, a home kitchen, and a food truck. I'm particularly excited about some of the details we're incorporating to feel like an authentic San Jose experience --- like the iron scrollwork window grate of the home kitchen, the local food map in the farmers' market, and our plan to make a Yelp page for our food truck so visitors can review all the delicious plastic food they enjoyed at the Museum. 



What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?  One trend that I'm appreciating in museums is the genuine interest and validation of visitors' personal experiences. It's an important step in the democratizing of the museum experience. 



If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?   I'd love to be part of an exhibition about gender, inspired by the Science Museum of Minnesota's incredible Race exhibition. Race is challenging, poignant, and so necessary. It'd be great to take what we've learned from that exhibition and apply it to similarly fraught topics.

Some day I'd like to open an art museum specifically for families. All too often art exhibits for children seem too self conscious --- they have a way of separating out disciplines like visual art and science in this forced, artificial way that grownups prefer to categorize the world.

I think it's a big assumption to make that children would relate to those categories the same way grownups do. I'd love to create experiences that are seamlessly blended instead of layered, using art as a lens for looking at the world and responding to it. Children think nothing of using their innate creativity and science skills simultaneously, but it might challenge some grownups' assumptions.



Thanks so much Margaret for sharing your thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers, especially the idea of using event and program planning as "cross-training" for exhibits work.



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Be In The Next Cheapbook!

Over the years, I've been happy to have started and edited three volumes of the Cheapbooks (collections of inexpensive exhibit ideas from museum folks from around the world ) for ASTC --- the Association of Science-Technology Centers. 

If you don't already have or know about the Cheapbooks, the ASTC Publications Department is running a special three volume "bundle deal" right now on their website.  Get the Cheapbooks even cheaper!

I'm excited that ASTC has asked me to work on a fourth Cheapbook volume, which will be a little different from the previous editions, and I'd like to start gathering submissions for new exhibit "how-tos" for Cheapbook 4. 

So if you have a great (inexpensive) exhibit that you'd like to share with the rest of the museum world, just send me an email so I can give you more details.

And stay tuned to ExhibiTricks for more details about Cheapbook 4!


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Museum Spaces

I'm in Detroit with my family this week, and while we're here we will be visiting one of favorite museums, the Detroit Institute of Arts.  And we will certainly make a point of visiting the amazing Rivera Court that features the frescoes of Detroit's industrial heritage created by Diego Rivera in the 1930's.

I've been thinking about the power of museum spaces a lot over the past few months, especially since experiencing Rain Room at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in NYC, and, most recently, James Turrell's lightwork, called Aten Reign, that now inhabits the entire central core of the Guggenheim Museum.

In all three cases (Rivera's murals, Rain Room, and Turrell's Aten Reign) there's something really special, maybe even essential or magical, about the combination of the art+physical environment.

When you come into Rain Room, or Rivera Court, or the transformed Guggenheim rotunda, it's like entering a church or sacred space.  You can see people's body language change, and the sound level change as well --- everyone realizes intuitively that they're in for something special.  And, even if they come alone, that the experience will ultimately be a shared/social one.

This powerful combination of aesthetic and architectural and social elements plays out in the artwork of Olafur Eliasson and theatrical installations like "Sleep No More" as well.  (As an aside, there's a great article about the effects of Turrell's Guggenheim installation on visitors here.)

In the age of omnipresent electronic screens, I think we underestimate this aesthetic/architectural/social power a bit.  How can we leverage museum spaces to become more interesting (and welcoming!) to communities that normally don't think of visiting museums?  It's an interesting and continuing challenge for all of us in the field.

But if you look at the folks who waited in line for hours to get inside Rain Room, you know there's something important to pay attention to there.


What are some of your favorite Museum Spaces? Let us know in the "Comments" section below!


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Design Inspiration: Daily Rituals

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work is a collection of short vignettes about how people (writers, artists, scientists, composers, poets ...) create.

I found it surprisingly engaging and packed with great quotes and stories about famous creators ranging from Albert Einstein to Louis Armstrong to Maya Angelou.

It's a great way to think about your own creative process(es)!

Available from Amazon and other booksellers.

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Museums Worth A Special Trip: Bay Area Edition

What makes a museum worth a special trip?  Why would you tell a friend they had to go see a particular exhibition or institution?  I've blogged about this before, but my recent trip to the West Coast --- specifically the Bay Area, made me think about some of the qualities that make up a great museum visit and a great museum.

So without further adieu, here's a group of museums that I definitely think are worth a special trip:

The (new) Exploratorium   Despite the herculean task of moving out of their old home and into their tony new digs at Pier 15 in the heart of San Francisco, I think the (new) Exploratorium is super!  

Somehow the new exhibits (both indoor and outdoor) manage to peaceably coexist with the "classic" exhibit components and experiences.   Also, despite the fact that the building is "new" it feels remarkably "un-new" a little lived in, in a very comfortable way. 

Because the spaces expanded, cool spaces (like The Tinkering Studio pictured below) have gotten larger.

Was everything perfect?  Of course not, but so many things were done so well, it just made me happy to be a visitor there.  The (new) Exploratorium also added things like more natural light, a beautiful, accessible location on the Bay, and not one, but two (!) restaurants to add a nice level of visitor services that the (old) Exploratorium seemed to willfully (and gleefully) disregard.  Hats off to everyone involved --- I know it wasn't easy!

Bay Area Discovery Museum  Next up, across the Golden Gate Bridge is the Bay Area Discovery Museum (BADM) in Sausalito.  A children's museum located on the grounds of what was once Fort Baker military base.   BADM uses its unusual collection of restored military buildings and surrounding outdoor spaces to its advantage by creating individual, and "bite-sized" exhibition and programming environments.

Each building houses a specific offering, whether that's a traveling exhibition gallery, a themed space, or a programmatic space like a collection of Art Studios.  The indoor and outdoor spaces blend seamlessly and comfortably into an environment I would characterize as a "learning landscape."

I really appreciate the thoughtful use of simple materials in both the indoor and outdoor spaces at BADM.  And I like how there are cool surprises around every turn in the outdoor areas, like the collection of musical frogs (pictured below) that you can make "croak" by rubbing a stick across their backs!  Of course, you also have a perfect view of the Golden Gate Bridge across the Bay from BADM --- just remember to bring a jacket, since it's Northern California!

de Young Museum  Located in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, the de Young is the encyclopedic fine arts museum of San Francisco.  The museum building is beautiful (and comfortable) both inside and out, being composed of warm, natural materials including copper, stone, wood, and glass.

It was great to maneuver around the spaces inside the de Young which seemed to complement the art on display, not compete with it.   The visitor services at the de Young were well done also --- the entry and admissions sequence was straightforward  (I got free admission by using the Google Field Trip app!) and the museum had a great cafe with indoor and outdoor seating.

Oakland Museum of California  Now let's bop across the Bay Bridge to Oakland to visit the Oakland Museum of California (aka OMCA.)  This museum has reinvented itself in recent years with lots of community involvement.  It's worth checking out the book, How Visitors Changed Our Museum, to find out more about OMCA's exhibit process and products.

My main purpose for visiting OMCA this trip was to see their newly opened (but not quite completed) Gallery of California Natural Sciences.  To quote the museum's website: "At 25,000 square feet,  the reinstalled Gallery presents seven places throughout California that depict the state’s diversity of climate, geology, habitats, ecosystems, and wildlife, while exploring current research, contemporary issues of land use, environmental conflict, and conservation projects."

So it's a whopper of a gallery, but because it's broken up into those seven places, or "theme areas" filled with a welcome diversity of interactive and exhibit display techniques (like the aquarium as landscape painting below) it didn't seem overwhelming at all.  I really liked the new gallery (and the rest of OCMA, too!)

While I was visiting the Natural Sciences gallery, I was delighted to overhear a grandmother (pictured below pulling out a display drawer of "roadkill" specimens from the front of a pickup truck display) have continuing conversations with her 11 year old granddaughter about the things they were experiencing inside the Gallery. 

the reinstalled Gallery presents seven places throughout California that depict the state’s diversity of climate, geology, habitats, ecosystems, and wildlife, while exploring current research, contemporary issues of land use, environmental conflict, and conservation projects.
At 25,000 square feet,
- See more at: http://www.museumca.org/view/gallery-natural-sciences#sthash.kfru03tR.dpuf

the reinstalled Gallery presents seven places throughout California that depict the state’s diversity of climate, geology, habitats, ecosystems, and wildlife, while exploring current research, contemporary issues of land use, environmental conflict, and conservation projects.
At 25,000 square feet,
- See more at: http://www.museumca.org/view/gallery-natural-sciences#sthash.kfru03tR.dpuf

Gallery of California Natural Sciences

Gallery of California Natural Sciences

Gallery of California Natural Sciences

Gallery of California Natural Sciences

Santa Cruz Skateboards Museum (Coming Soon!)

I was lucky enough to get a "sneak preview" of a place under construction that I think will be a museum"worth a special trip."

Santa Cruz Skateboards is one of the leaders in the skateboard biz, and as such has been part of the history of skateboarding over the past 40 years of the company's existence.  Right next to their production facilities, offices, and warehouses in Santa Cruz, they're building a museum that will be filled with amazing artifacts, artwork, and stories about skateboarding.  Here's some pictures from inside their production/assembly facility (they said it was o.k. to take photos in there!)

But they wouldn't let me take photos during our tour of the in-process museum (and I didn't want to be a jerk and sneak any with my iPhone!) so let me just tell you it was AMAZING!  For some of the walls they let people skateboard all over them for a scuffed/distressed look.  Lots and lots of clever display techniques supporting truly wonderful images and artifacts.  The museum is slotted to open in October, so stay tuned!

I know, I know, you're thinking: "But didn't he see anything he didn't like?" Good question!

I had a difficult visit at the California Academy of Sciences (aka "Cal Academy") in Golden Gate Park.  (Sorry Cal Academy folks!)  The building was so, so bad, in so many ways --- it overwhelmed (maybe even squashed) the exhibits, it made finding your way more complicated than it needed to be, it made the spaces feel both crowded and confusing (even on a not so busy day!)

BAD, BAD, BAD!  Despite the fact that a "starchitect" designed the place...

It feels like the architect won every argument about lighting, exhibit placement, traffic flow, etc. much to the detriment of the overall visitor experience.  I literally would not see all the exhibits because I felt compelled to exit the building.  (There may be some rays of hope --- Cal Academy has recently hired some new folks I respect very much into the Exhibits Department.  So maybe the exhibit experiences will find a stronger place in the dialogue with the building.  I hope so!)

All of the parts of a museum visit (entrance, exhibits, visitor amenities, location ...) really add up --- and can "make" or "break" a visitor's experience.  Considering all the things that could go wrong, it's gratifying to find museums that get so much right!


Have you visited any "museums worth a special trip" this summer?  Share some of your own experiences in the "Comments Section" below!



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