POP! goes the Exhibit Design

POP! goes the Exhibit Design

(This posting is a slightly modified "encore" presentation from the ExhibiTricks vaults.)

Museums, being the notoriously cheap places that they are, can often benefit from helping their exhibit makers discover interesting and inexpensive new materials to use for their own devices.

One interesting resource in this regard is the world of POP Design. (I'm just a kid from Detroit, so when I hear the word "pop" I always think of a cold carbonated beverage like Faygo Redpop.)

But in this case, POP stands for "Point of Purchase." Think about all those shiny (sometimes motorized or moving or lit) displays near the chips or cold tablets or ball point pens that you see in all the stores you go to. Now multiply that single display for Doritos by thousands (or millions!) of copies worldwide and you'll begin to get a small sense of the scale of the POP industry.

So, what does this have to do with developing museum exhibits? Just this: once any material has been manufactured in sufficient volume (to be used in POP Displays, for example) the unit price goes way down. Low enough for museums to become interested in using color-shifting plastic, inexpensive digital audio repeaters, or scented laminates(!) in new exhibit components.

As you might expect the POP Design industry has their own journals, one of which P.O.P Design you can check out online.

What other unusual trade organizations or groups could we in the "Exhibits Biz" learn from?


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Prototyping 101: Become an Office Supply Ninja!

Thomas Edison said,  "To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk."  His reference was to inventing, but he could have also been speaking about prototyping.


To me, prototyping is an iterative process that uses simple materials to help you answer questions about the physical aspects of your exhibit components (even labels!) early on in the development process.  

As I mentioned in a previous post, it's always a bit discouraging to hear museum folks say "we just don't have the time/the money/the space/the materials to do prototyping ..."  (By then I'm usually thinking "So how is setting an ill-conceived or malfunctioning exhibit component into your museum, because you didn't prototype, saving time or money?"  But I digress...)


Maybe it's just me, but I can't imagine anyone fabricating an exhibit component without trying out a quick-and-dirty version first.  So in today's post I thought I'd lay out the simple steps I use to show how quickly and inexpensively prototyping can be integrated into the beginning of any exhibit development process, and how you too can become an Office Supply Ninja!


STEP ONE:  Figure out what you want to find out.

In this case, a client wanted me to come up with an interactive version of a "Food Web" (the complex interrelationship of organisms in a particular environment, showing, basically, what eats what.)  We brainstormed a number of approaches (magnet board, touch screen computer) but finally settled on the notion of allowing visitors to construct a "Food Web Mobile" with the elements being the various organisms found (in this particular case) in a mangrove swamp.  The client was also able to provide me with a flow chart showing the relationships between organisms and a floor plan of the area where the final exhibit will be installed.

The two initial things I wanted to test or find out about from my prototype were:

1) Did people "get" the idea conceptually?  That is, did they understand the relationships and analogies between the Food Web Mobile and the actual organisms in the swamp?

2) Could they easily create different sorts of physical arrangements with the mobile that were interesting and accurate?


STEP TWO: Get out your junk!

As in the Edison quote above, it helps to have a good supply of "bits and bobs" around to prototype with.  You might not have the same sorts of junk that I've gathered up over years in the museum exhibit racket, but everyone should have access to basic office supplies (stuff like paper, tape, markers, index cards, scissors, etc.)  And really that's all you need to start assembling prototypes. (The imagination part is important, too.)


STEP THREE: Start playing around with the pieces ...

Before I even start assembling a complete rough mechanism or system I like to gather all the parts together and see if I like how they work with each other.  In the case of the Food Web Mobile prototype, I used colored file folders to represent different levels of organisms.  I initially made each color/level out of the same size pieces, but then I changed to having each color be a different size.  Finally, I used a hole punch to make the holes, and bent paper clips to serves as the hooks that would allow users to connect the pieces/organisms in different ways.



STEP FOUR:  Assemble, then iterate, iterate, iterate!

 
This is the part of the prototyping process that requires other people beside yourself.  Let your kids, your co-workers, your significant other, whoever (as long as it's somebody beside yourself) try out your idea. Obviously the closer your "testers" are to the expected demographic inside the museum, the better --- ideally I like to prototype somewhere inside the museum itself. 

Resist the urge to explain or over-explain your prototype.  Just watch what people do (or don't do!) with the exhibit component(s).  Take lots of notes/pictures/video.  Then take a break to change your prototype based on what you've observed and heard, and try it out again.  That's called iteration.


In this case, I saw right away that the mobile spun and balanced in interesting ways, but that meant that the labels would need to be printed on both sides of the pieces.  Fortunately, my three "in-house testers" (ages 6, 11, and 13) seemed to "get" the concept of "Food Webs" embedded into the Mobile interactive, and started coming up with interesting physical variations on their own.


For example, I initially imagined people would just try to create "balanced" arrangements of pieces on the Mobile.  But, as you can see below, the prototype testers enjoyed making "unbalanced" arrangements as well (which is fine, and makes sense conceptually as well.)   Also, we discovered that people realized that they could hang more than one "organism piece" on the lower hooks (which was also fine, and also made sense conceptually.)

STEP FIVE: Figure out what's next ... even if it's the trash can!

Do you need to change the label, or some physical arrangement of your prototype?  Using simple, inexpensive materials makes that easy.

Do you just need to junk this prototype idea?  Using simple, inexpensive materials makes it easier to move on to a new idea, too. (Much more easily than if you had spent weeks crafting and assembling something out of expensive materials from your workshop...)  It's not too surprising to see people really struggle to let a bad exhibit idea go, especially if they've spent several weeks putting it together. Quick and cheap should be your watchwords early on in the prototyping process.

In this case, I sent photos of the paper clip prototype and a short video showing people using the Food Web Mobile to the client as a "proof of concept."  They were quite pleased, and so now I will make a second-level prototype using materials more like those I expect to use in the "final" exhibit (which I'll update in a future post.)  Even so, I will still repeat the steps above of gathering materials, assembling pieces, and iterating through different versions with visitors. 

I hope you'll give this "office supply ninja" version of exhibit prototyping a try for your next project!

If you do, send me an email and I'd be happy to show off the results of ExhibiTricks readers prototyping efforts.

 

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!)

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

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!)

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!



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!)

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.



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!)

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.

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!)