IMAX or IMIN? (Is smaller better? Part 1)

A recent discussion on the ISEN-ASTC listserv dealt with visitors' visceral (sometimes literally!) reactions to big-screen theatre shows.

While there is no argument that such shows are often lots of fun, are they really the best way to allocate a museum's precious resources?

John Bowditch, from the Ann Arbor Hands-On Museum coined the excellent term "IMIN" as an alternative to the often overwhelming confluence of bombast and technology employed inside museums.

It is interesting that many visitor studies show the value of human-scale interaction inside museums. Also, formal and informal surveys of visitors' positive memories of museum experiences invariably relate to a positive interaction with one or more museum staff members.

If "human scale" experiences in museums are so important, why do so many museums continue to tout big screens and blockbusters? I'm afraid the field has often let funders and fundraising call the tune rather than visitors --- it's "easier" (so the common wisdom states) to raise money for BIG stuff rather than more subtle experiences. But even interesting human-scaled experiences can use technology and be "sexy" to donors, like this installation from the Royal Ontario Museum.

How to break the BIG cycle? Create more small museums and small experiences that set out to "whelm" visitors rather than "overwhelm" them.

Magic Tape: Promising New Lighting Material for Exhibits?

Check out "Magic Tape" from Elshine s.r.l.

I am trying to latch onto a sample to noodle around with.
(I'll insert a critique once I've tried it.)

What sorts of exhibit applications could we use this stuff for?

Paul Orselli in The Wall Street Journal!

Yes, even before it may be sold to Rupert Murdoch, I got a small mention in today's Wall Street Journal (Friday, June 29th)

Carl Bialek, WSJ's "Numbers Guy" wrote a piece about how "countdown clocks" are used (or misused) in museum exhibits and other public venues.

If you read down to the end of the article, you'll notice my comments as they relate to museum exhibits.

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.

Making a "Little Sky" in Big Sky Country

I've just returned from beautiful Helena, Montana where I've been working with the fine folks from ExplorationWorks! (an emerging museum of science and culture) set to open later this Fall of 2007.

Aside from their wonderful community-built "green" building next to the cool Montana-themed Great Northern Carousel downtown, we've been working together over the past few visits to help ExplorationWorks find its unique voice, rather than just replicating things they've seen in other museums.

RANT BEGINS HERE

Which brings me to the topic of perennial favorite exhibit themes for start up museums like "grocery stores" or "mini hospitals." As I've said before, I'd be quite happy never to see another "grocery store" exhibit inside a museum! It's not that I have any problem with these "exhibit chestnuts" per se, but rather the idea that having a mini grocery store is a substitute for doing the real hard and creative work of finding your own "institutional voice." I realize it may be tempting to get the local grocery chain to donate money to outfit a space with kid-sized baskets and bins of plastic fake food, and their logo plastered all over everything (naturally!) but is that really the best possible use of your valuable exhibit space? Personally I'd say you've just created an "entropy exhibit" rather than a grocery store exhibit.

And, don't get me started, on all the amazing learning about nutrition, "cultural diversity" ("we have plastic ethnic food in our store") and the like, that's supposed to occur in these spaces. Little kids like to take things out of containers and pile them up or put them into other containers. PERIOD. I have a toybox in my living room that my kids use for this purpose, but I wouldn't call it an exhibit!

RANT ENDS HERE

But, getting back to our friends in Helena...I almost had an existential exhibit developer crisis when Suzanne Wilcox, the Director at ExWorks said she wanted to change some things around in our initial design for their Early Childhood Gallery (called "Little Sky Country") and include a mini Post Office and set of stores. HORRORS! Was I going to be forced to give up my strongly held beliefs in the name of making a living? Fortunately not, and I think the resolution we came to in Montana could be useful for other museums considering mini "anythings" in the exhibit galleries.

Mostly we realized that the specific "wrapper" for different exhibit components was not as important as promoting a flexible design architecture that could support the content and desired visitor behaviors such as role-playing, sorting, decision-making, etc. So rather than trying to create a miniature urban "mini Main Street" in the midst of a nature-themed early childhood space, we created a single flexible structure with a Foresty facade whose signage and "props" could be changed and experimented with. (A few initial ideas include "Ma Nature's Cafe" to explore what animals eat, and "The Nest Depot" to discover what sorts of materials animals use to build their homes.)

I'm really excited about what POW! (in collaboration with DCM Fabrication in Brooklyn) has in the "works" for the big ExplorationWorks grand opening of Little Sky Country in late Fall 2007!

London (Exhibits) Calling

A recent report of a mention of the Exhibit Cheapbooks by Ian Russell during the recent ECSITE Conference in Lisbon, Portugal got me thinking about the differences between museums and exhibit development, here in the US, and "across the pond" in the UK.

"Boffins" are greatly appreciated in the UK. Museum and exhibits people, like the chaps at Science Projects in London, really love to tinker and prototype, and it shows in their exhibitions. Here in the US, many museum folks talk about prototyping, but I'm not sure how much of it actually occurs.

Exhibit meetings, just for the sake of having a meeting, seem to be disdained in the UK. Unlike the US Exhibit Development process, which seems to thrive on meetings. In the UK, BIG, The British Interactive Group, runs regular Fabricators' Weeks where exhibit folks crash around with each other in workshops filled with materials to create as many working prototypes as they can before a big public showing on Friday. Sort of like a Science Fair for adults. (Except with pubs and pints thrown in.)

Many museums in the UK tend to approach things in a simpler, more playful way than US Museums. (except the Science Museum, with its bridges made of glass, looking like the NYC Apple Store. Although even there, the older exhibits like Tim Hunkin's exhibition called "The Secret Life of the Home" are excellent. I guess they have more twee designers in charge, and less boffins, there now.)

Perhaps museum visitors are more "polite" in the UK than their US counterparts. There seems to be a less obvious presence of guards and protective barriers in all types of museums in the UK, even surrounding "valuable" objects. It makes me wonder if environmental cues in museums don't help reinforce expectations of visitor behavior. (It is always comical to see how visitors delight in "foiling" the protective barriers around exhibits by shoving bits of trash, oft-times printed material provided by the museum, inside. It's almost as if each piece shoved inside is saying "HA! you tried to keep me out, but I got in anyway!" Unfortunately, the protective barriers are often such a pain to remove that the poor museum staff must leave the junk inside for long periods at a time, detracting from the exhibit objects.)

The UK Interactive Museum Community has had the advantage of learning from the triumphs (and failures!) of the older US Interactive Museum Community. Rather than trying to recreate models formed in the US, museum folks in the UK have put their own distinctive twist on things, gathering things to use from colleagues around the world, and creating their own distinctively UK museum and exhibit models. One example in the Science Center field is Techniquest , located in Cardiff. For a US visitor familiar with Science Centers, poking around TQ is a strange and wonderful experience, both like and unlike a US Science Center at the same time.

So I say "Cheers!" to our museum colleagues in the UK. You all have a reason to be "chuffed" about your work.