Have you tried making your museum a more interesting place?

The title of this post is inspired by some ideas from Austin Kleon (his newsletter is really worth subscribing to, and Kleon's book "Steal Like An Artist" is a great read ...) where he relates several (possibly apocryphal) tales of writing teachers giving similar tough, but straightforward, advice to their students who want to become more interesting writers.


"Have you tried making yourself a more interesting person?" 


The upshot of Kleon's musings boil down to the idea that if you want to be interesting, you have to be interested.

I started triangulating this notion of becoming a more interesting person with possible ways of creating more interesting museums, based on my love (and previous blog posts: here, here, and here) of "Museums Worth A Special Trip."

How can museums not currently worth a special trip become more interesting?  Let me immediately suggest two overused approaches that many museum folks try that quite often lead to less interesting museums:

1) Equating bigger with better   Of all the blunt force approaches to becoming a more interesting museum, nothing beats a large building (or building expansion) project.  Here's a news flash --- most museums should be improving their existing programs, exhibits, and facilities, not becoming bigger.

2) Adopting "best practices"  Best practices for who?  Best practices for where?  I'd argue that every museum should develop practices that are unique to their location and the communities they serve.  Why try to apply a "one size fits all" approach?


When I think about museums that I (and many other people!) find truly interesting, places like The City Museum in St. Louis, The Discovery Museums in Acton, MA, or the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh  the staff in these places seem to share a resistance to growth for growth's sake, or merely adopting someone else's notion of "best" practice, and instead have an insatiable desire to try new stuff, to experiment, and, most importantly, to quickly iterate through the physical manifestations of their ideas and to trust that their visitors will respond to their efforts --- even their failures.

Maybe another way to develop more interesting museums is to get things WRONG the first time!  To really push for ideas and interests that aren't completely tested and "safe" in every instance.


My wish is that you can discover something(s) in your own institution to become really interested in, so you can create an even more interesting museum for yourself and your visitors.

Onward!



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Collective Impact: Impressions of the 2016 InterActivity Conference

Children's Museum colleagues from around the world (including representatives from Bulgaria, El Salvador, Korea, Israel, Nigeria, Australia, and China!) recently converged in Connecticut to meet, learn, and discuss about topics of common interest during the annual InterActivity Conference put on by the Association of Children's Museums (ACM).

I attended the entire conference, so I offer my impressions here for those who were not able to attend, but also to give a sense of the current state of the Children's Museum field.

The theme of this year's conference was "Collective Impact." Building on the notion that no single organization can create large-scale lasting social change, but rather we have more impact when different parts of the community work together.

This theme of collective impact --- of learning together and changing the world through common cause was evident throughout the sessions and keynote talks at the conference.

Here are my impressions of the sessions and events that I participated in:

Welcome Dinner and Opening Program
This was a great way to start the conference by getting everyone together.  A nice opportunity to eat and chat with old friends, and to meet new colleagues.  In addition to the meal the program featured Jeff Edmondson, the Managing Director of StriveTogether, and a Children's Museum "Fashion Show."

Mr. Edmondson's talk, while energetic, felt a little too motivational speaker-y for my tastes. It also felt a bit like a generic talk that could be presented to any kind of professional group (in fact, Mr. Edmondson misspoke and said "Children's Hospitals" instead of "Children's Museums" at one point and got quite flustered apologizing for a simple mistake.) But extra points to Mr. E for his energy and brevity!

The Museum Fashion Show was quite fun, since every participant had a DIY outfit with elements highlighting some part of their museum's programs or exhibits.  Pictured below is Megan from the Fairbanks Children's Museum with a book dress highlighting the Fairbanks "take a book" program that allows young visitors (who are often upset when they have to leave the museum) to take home a children's book from a designated book shelf near the front desk and entrance/exit door.

Thursday Morning started with a great Professional Networking Breakfast where I found out a little bit about the "Mind in the Making" program -- a way for the public and organizations like museums to plug into children learning research,  and also the Daily Vroom app --- a way for parents to discover "brain building" activities with their kids using their everyday activities.  I'll definitely be looking more into both of these resources, based on my fortuitous breakfast conversations!

Thursday morning I attended the Material Matters 2.0 session, which I found interesting and useful. I love a session that gives me practical takeaways!  Panelists spoke about the pros and cons of using specific materials in exhibit projects and brought samples for folks in the audience to handle and look at. For example HDPE is a good material to use for removable access panels since it holds up to repeated inserting and removing of mechanical fasteners. It would be great to have more deliberately practical sessions like this at every museum conference!

The other Thursday morning session I attended was called "Engaging a Community Through Social Media" and it also was a winner.  Three museum practitioners and a marketing professional gave their practical tips and experiences with Social Media through examples.  One great takeaway for me was the idea that nowadays people often come to your Social Media channels first, and then your website. So it's important to think about how best to use your resources for your institution's online presence.

The entire rest of the afternoon was spent inside Norwalk City Hall in a format of presentations inspired by New England Town Hall meetings.   Let me start off with a positive by saying the local Soweto Melodic Voices musical group were amazingly entertaining.

As for the rest of the Town Hall program, it was, frankly, a train wreck --- if a train wreck could also be boring. The format of speakers pouring out dense bits of information very rapidly with little, if any, interaction with the audience felt like being forced to drink from an informational fire hose --- if drinking from a fire hose could also be boring.

I know the organizers' motivations for developing a Town Hall format were good, but I'd like to offer a suggestion for future ACM Conferences in the form of a Town Hall resolution.

RESOLVED:  ACM and InterActivity Conference Planners shall offer interactive session blocks on selected topics such as the "Achievement Gap" instead of theatrical programs that force all conference attendees to passively be gathered into one large auditorium space.

If an entire session block of eight or nine smaller sessions had been offered around the topic of the Achievement Gap, for example, with each smaller session focusing on an aspect of the Achievement Gap like Education, Health Care, Literacy, etc.  We could have then gathered as an entire conference group to have each session moderator report out on what was discussed in a more digestible (and actionable!) format.

(For context: when InterActivity was in Pittsburgh a few years ago, an extended session format of "Small Talks" (like TED talks) was introduced.  It was fun and successful.  Since then, subsequent InterActivity hosts have tried similar extended sessions for all the conference attendees at once that have been much less successful. People come to conferences to learn things and interact with their colleagues, not attend a multi-hour lecture.)

Stepping off soapbox now ...


Moving on to the Thursday evening event, hosted by Stepping Stones Museum.  It was wonderful in every way.  Stepping Stones has a super museum and their staff and sponsors offered plenty of inspiration (AND plenty of great food and drink!) for everyone.

Friday sessions included excellent presentations on working with artists and developing museum leadership, entitled respectively: "Need a New Knockout Installation? Try Partnering with an Artist" and "Strategies to Develop the Next Generation of Leaders."   Both sessions were really well done and involved good takeaways.  One interesting connective thread between the two topics that I found was the importance of clear communication and expectations making the difference between highly successful (or less successful ..) interactions between museum staff themselves or with museum visitors.

Another highlight of Friday was the ACM Marketplace, where vendors show off their ideas and wares to the Children's Museums community.  There were a good range of folks showing interesting stuff, but I especially liked nWave letting me pet Owlbert the owl!

The 2016 InterActivity conference wound up for me with a morning session entitled "Mistakes Were Made." I was one of the speakers/facilitators that first shared our own mistakes and lessons learned, and then small groups shared their mistakes/lessons before one grand mistake winner was chosen, and awarded the coveted "Mistakes Were Made" trophy.  You'll have to attend next year's InterActivity conference in Pasadena to ask Brenda Riley, the Director of Fairbanks Children's Museum to share her prize-winning story (and lesson!) with you herself.

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Tinkering and Building Things: An Interview with Clifford Wagner

Clifford Wagner started his Science Center career in 1980, and since then has created interactive exhibit components and traveling exhibitions for countless museum visitors.  Over 35 years later,  he still loves trying to come up with great visitor experiences.

I was delighted that Clifford took the time to share his thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers in the interview below:

What’s your educational background?  I’ve got a Degree in Art and Design.  But you could say my education started with my mother being a teacher and my father an engineer.  She always encouraged creativity. My father passed along a lot of his knowledge to me with the tinkering and building things in the basement we did together. 

What got you interested in Museums?  Truth to tell, I stumbled into it.  I did a couple of years of custom furniture making.  Then in 1980 I got hired as a cabinetmaker at the Franklin Institute Science Museum.  Immediately I was building hands on interactive exhibits and that is what I have been doing ever since. I was the chief interactive device designer/prototyper when I left the Franklin eleven years later, to jump across the street to Please Touch Museum for Children as Director of Exhibits.  The Science museum work focused me on creating the best possible interactive experiences for our visitors.  The children’s museum work got me to be more playful. 

How does actually building your own exhibits inform your design process?  I make my own mechanisms and cabinetry, so I have a good idea of what is workable.  This hands-on knowledge informs my design process at every stage.  Whether I’m working on my own projects or with another museum or science center, the process starts with brainstorming.   At the beginning,  don’t rule something out because it seems impossible to achieve.  Who knows? It might be doable. One of my favorite lines I use in brainstorming is “And the luxury version of this device would be….” Quite often  the final, doable device can incorporate much from the pie in the sky version.

When I design and build interactives I pay very close attention to where our eyes go when we are looking at something for the first time.  An interactive can be confusing to visitors if the sequence isn’t logical.  I’ve seen text, just six inches away from where it should be. Because it is not in an intuitive place, for the visitor it might just as well be on the other side of the moon. I do this eyetracking as a mental process but now eyetracking hardware can be had for as little as $500.  I can’t endorse this because I haven’t used it, but it does exist.

Tell us a little bit about your current thinking about traveling exhibitions?  When we make  a traveling exhibit we must ensure that visitors are going to have a meaningful response to it, whether that response is humor or emotion or pure delight or relevancy to their lives. Every component that makes it into my traveling exhibits is there because it has a high probability of the visitor reacting to it by pulling over their friends  “Come here, you’ve got to see this!” Are your exhibits doing that? If not, tweak them until they do.

What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?   Museum conferences are great. This is when all of our virtual colleagues turn real. Go and talk to everyone doing the same sort of work you are doing.  Do not be shy. For me there is nothing more valuable than being at a host city museum with other people whose lives are creating exhibits and being able to ask them: what do they think? What do they think of the exhibit that you both are standing in front of? Ask, talk, listen, learn and teach.

What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing more variety into their exhibitions?    Museum professionals have a lot to learn from each other. Science Centers can learn a lot about playfulness from Children’s Museums. Children’s museums can learn how to engage adults as well as kids. Art Museums can enhance visitor experiences by having more hands-on devices. For variety from a purely design point of view, a good interactive has both hooking and holding power. It has to attract the visitor’s attention, and then keep that attention. One way to get variety into an exhibition is to have as many different kinds of hooks as possible. An unexpected way to control the action. A mirror so people can see their own faces. A sign with an interesting question.

What do you think is the “next frontier” for traveling exhibitions?  Science Centers have been exploring timely and relevant topics for quite a while, since pioneering exhibits such as Darkened Waters about the Exxon Valdez oil spill. When we produce an exhibit we are asking for our visitors' time and attention.  Are our exhibits worthy of their attention?  Are we putting all this time and energy into illuminating things that inspire visitors and help our civilization continue to flourish? Children’s museums have to make sure that any traveling exhibition they bring in works for the adults as much as the kids.  Adults are 50% of your audience.  Giving adults good stuff will make them want to come back.

What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?   I love the extraordinary playfulness of the City Museum in St. Louis. I also love the questions raised by the exhibit and book called Massive Change by Bruce Mau.  How is this for an opening statement in an exhibition:  “Whether we realize it or not, we live in a designed world. The question is: will this be a design for destruction or for a sustainable new world that we can safely hand down to our children and our children’s children?”   How’s that for relevancy?

Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?  Earlier this year,  I built five interactives  for The Discovery Museum and Planetarium in Bridgeport, Connecticut based on The Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement (Project APE) exhibit book produced by the Exploratorium.  A couple of them I built much as described in the book with minor improvements, others like the Thermal Camera exhibit I redesigned and added on to provide more opportunity for visitor engagement.  

I was happy to give The Discovery Museum an extra device I developed  for the thermal camera.  It is a 4 pane rotatable window. Two of the panes are clear to our eyes but opaque to the thermal camera and two are clear to the camera but opaque to our eyes. It is so cool to see visitors react to this counterintuitive effect showing the camera seeing what we can’t.  That’s the hook in this - the unexpected- and it’s a really good hook.     

I’m also building theatrical props, including some that are on tour with Cirque du Soleil.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?  I’d love to put together a team to make an exhibit that helps people really think about their place in the world and how we can help achieve sustainable well being for all people and for the planet.  I sincerely believe we have the knowledge to do so.  It wouldn’t be an easy exhibit to create—it’s a tough topic.  But I can’t imagine anything more important.

For me, the most important question of all is  How are you helping?  How are you helping all of us have quality lives?  For us working in museums, the way we help is to make things that enrich our visitors’ lives. We help visitors understand science phenomena, we make creative spaces where kids  play and grow.  The work we do is so important.  So thank you all for what you do. 

To find out more about Clifford Wagner and his exhibit work, click on over to his website!

Speaking of Clifford's exhibit work, he will soon be retiring some of his most popular and visitor-tested traveling exhibitions after very successful tours --- but he would like to find good homes for all those exhibit components!  So if your museum is in the market for some top-notch exhibit components (or entire exhibitions!) at incredible prices, check out these PDFs featuring exhibit descriptions, images and prices for Garden of Gizmos, Color Play, and Contraptions A to Z.  These exhibitions are well built and in great shape, so much so that Clifford is providing a full one year warranty on every exhibit component purchased.

As a BONUS to ExhibiTricks readers, if you purchase any components from the traveling exhibitions mentioned above before May 30, 2016 and mention "ExhibiTricks" you'll get a 5% discount! 

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.

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Exhibitionist Changes To Exhibition

The National Association for Museum Exhibition, otherwise known by the acronym NAME, has just released the newest issue of its journal, which is published twice a year.  It is a thematic issue about the power of words in every aspect of exhibitions --- written, spoken, and designed.

Every article is filled with thoughtful information that anyone involved in the exhibition process will find valuable.

And there are big changes afoot with each part of NAME's journal. First the name has been changed from "Exhibitionist" to "Exhibition."  (There are many reasons for the name change, not least of which include unfortunate Google search results, but "Exhibition" is the new name.)

Exhibition has been entirely redesigned and has gone to a full-color format.  Having just received my own copy of Exhibition, I can attest that the graphic and organizational design is beautiful, and the inclusion of color exhibition images is a great leap forward. (In fact, here's a link to a PDF sample of what you can find inside the newly revamped Exhibition journal.)

NAME's journal was previously only available to AAM members, but now any museum/exhibit/design professional can subscribe to Exhibition.  I may be a little biased since I write the "Exhibits Newsline" column in every issue, but I truly believe that Exhibition is the best professional museum journal available.  If you are already a subscriber, I'm sure you agree!

If you are not already an Exhibition subscriber, what are you waiting for?  Click this link now to subscribe and move your professional practice forward today!



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.

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What Does Your Museum's Stroller Parking Look Like?

Today, during a Master's Thesis defense on creating shared learning spaces inside History Museums, a conversation came up about Stroller Parking that really intrigued me.  So let's step deep, deep into the weeds of a very specific museum/exhibit/design topic, shall we?

As all types of museums (not just Children's Museums and Science Centers!) and cultural organizations strive to become more welcoming to family audiences, these institutions often find themselves facing traffic jams of strollers inside their pristine hallways and common areas.

Many museums, in an effort to restore a semblance of order (visual and otherwise) often designate areas willy-nilly near stairways or gallery entrances with a sign stuck on the wall labeled "Stroller Parking."

But let's face it, most of these Stroller Parking areas have all the visual panache of a turnpike restroom.  Can't we do a little better (for ourselves, and our family visitors) than a virtual used stroller lot jammed into an underutilized corner?

Let's have some fun and put together images of great examples of Stroller Parking inside museums (and other cultural institutions like zoos or theaters ...)

We've done this before with a crowd-sourced ExhibiTricks post about donor recognition walls, so I'm expecting great things from you, dear readers!  I'll give you some inspiration to get started on your submission by highlighting the image at the top of this post showing one of the Phoenix Children's Museum's Stroller Parking areas.  It's fun, it's intuitive, and it sends the right kinds of messages to family visitors.

So, email me an image of a well-considered Stroller Parking area, a brief description of why you like it, as well as the location or institution featured, and I will gather up all the words and pictures for a future ExhibiTricks post and a downloadable PDF on the subject!



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!)

Design Inspiration: Polymagnets!

What's a Polymagnet?  Correlated Magnetics Research (CMR) is a company that has developed techniques to imprint everyday magnetic materials with a layer of patterns that can produce uncommon magnetic behaviors.

Essentially, Polymagnets are "Smart magnets."

Now designers can create a more nuanced physical experiences in their products or creations through magnetic feel and function. Polymagnets can provide the sensation of a spring or latch or a twisting open/close behavior unlike traditional magnets with only fixed north/south poles.

Words don't really do Polymagnets justice (and, quite honestly, I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the museum/exhibit/design possibilities!) so watch the demonstration video  below to get a better sense of what Polymagnets can do.  (If you want, you can skip ahead to the 2:00 mark to get directly to the Polymagnet part of the video.)



For more information about Polymagnets, check out the CMR website or peruse the Polymagnet catalog to discover Polymagnet materials that can spring, latch, shear, align, snap, torque, hold, twist, soften or release!


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.

Looking for a designer that can help you explore exciting new materials like Polymagnets?  Then click on over to the POW! website and find out how working with Paul Orselli can change good ideas into great exhibits!

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!)