Food for Thought: Selected Nutrition Exhibit Resources

I've gathered some cool links based on some interesting and useful food/nutrition resources I've come across on the Web as part of my research for an upcoming health exhibition.

The links below come from a dedicated Evernote "notebook" that I've kept during the entire reasearch and development work on the aforementioned health exhibition.  I've posted before about Evernote, but I can't enthuse enough about this FREE multi-platform, multi-device way to keep track of web pages and other digital assets (including images that you capture with your cellphone, computer, or digital camera.) Did I mention that Evernote can search the text in your captured images as well? 

But enough about Evernote, now back to the Web resources.  Here are seven sites I've selected because I think they're either handy references for anyone working on a health and/or food related project, or they're fun departures from what can often be mind-numbing discussions of Calories and portion sizes.  In no particular order:

1) Calories burned in 30 minutes:  This chart from the Harvard Medical School is a handy reference to determine "Calorie burns" for everything from Billiards to Bicycling.

2) USDA's MyPlate:  The US Department of Agriculture has dumped the old "Food Pyramid" and replaced it with the "MyPlate" scheme.  There are still different food groups, but the MyPlate icon is meant to help us all keep proper portions of the food groups on our plates as well.  Try to make at least half your grains whole grains!

3) Sugar Stacks:  One of the food ingredients we all need to keep careful track of is sugar.  But reading a label and finding 35 grams of sugar listed is a bit abstract.  Enter the site Sugar Stacks!  Here they show you visually how many cubes of sugar each grams listing for a particular food product translates to.  It's a little disconcerting to see how many cubes of sugar a can of soda contains, for example.

4) Is Your Meat Made With Meat Glue?  Technically "meat glue" is called transglutaminase, and is made from animal blood. Yum!  A glimpse at what "processed food" really means.

5) Portion Size Plate:  This graphic app from WebMD let's you see the proper size portions you should be eating of particular foods by comparing them to familiar objects like baseballs or decks of cards.  It's not just what you eat but how much you eat. 

The last two items are things I would have liked to incorporate somehow into the health exhibition, but they didn't quite make the cut.  Perhaps you'll find some use for these last two links in one of your future projects?

6) Tiny People's Wonderful World of Food:  Seattle-based artist Christopher Boffoli uses food as a jumping off point for his fanciful photographs.


7) Odors and consumer behavior in a restaurant:  Researchers found that introducing certain odors, like lavender, into a restaurant increased the length of stay of customers and the amount of food purchased.  An interesting study that emphasizes how little we understand about how our sense of smell guides some of our behavior.

I hope you find the links and sites above interesting. If you have food or health related Web resources that might be useful for exhibition or program development, please let us know in the "Comments" section below.

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The Green Exhibit Checklist

I'm an advisor on a wonderful project designed to create tools for the museum/design industry that help to foster more sustainable project development and exhibit production.  Or in simpler terms, helping exhibit folks to be more thoughtful about the broader ecological impacts of our work .

The project is headed up by the fine folks from OMSI (Oregon Museum of Science and Industry) with funding from the National Science Foundation.

One of the "in-process" products that I'm most excited about is "The Green Exhibit Checklist"

The Green Exhibit Checklist is a tool to evaluate the environmental sustainability of exhibits. The goal of the Checklist is to inspire exhibit/design teams to plan exhibits with environmental considerations in mind. It awards points (along the lines of the LEED process) for five key strategies for reducing the environmental impact of exhibit production:

• Reducing new material consumption
• Using local resources
• Reducing waste
• Reducing energy consumption
• Reducing products with toxic emissions

Rather than focusing on a dogmatic list of “dos and donts” or a list of “must use” green materials, the Green Exhibit Checklist considers sustainable design as an institution-wide, evolving process.

If you'd like to find out more about OMSI's Promoting Sustainable Decision Making project, you can click on over to the website called "Exhibit SEED" or better yet, click here to download a PDF of the most recent version of The Green Exhibit Checklist, so you can start using it yourself!

As a side note, I'll be speaking at the upcoming NEMA (New England Museum Association) Conference in Hartford during the Exhibits Luncheon on Thursday, November 17th on just this topic.


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ReWind: Sugru is great stuff!

Sugru is a great addition to the toolkit of any hacker/fixer/maker/artist.

I've been working on a few projects recently to stick exhibit-y things together or to make small replacement parts that need to be flexible and strong, and Sugru really does the trick.  So I thought I'd ReWind this posting. Enjoy!

In fact, "Hacking Things Better" seems to be the company motto!

Plus Sugru has a great story --- creative young woman works with two materials scientists to develop a better (silicone-based) material to fix and improve things.

As you can see on the Sugru website there are lots of clever ways to repair and/or improve even everyday items. 

What's your favorite museum/exhibit/design "fixit" material?  Tell us about it 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 "Sign up for Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Back to Basics: Reflecting on the ASTC 2011 Conference

Over 1700 people from around the world converged on Baltimore recently for the ASTC (Association of Science-Technology Centers) conference.  It truly was an international affair with delegates coming from Africa, Asia, Australia, Latin America, the Middle East, and North America.

I was fortunate to attend and be part of two sessions, so here are some of my takeaways on this year's get-together:

If there has been one overarching conference "theme" (there was an official conference theme, but I couldn't tell you what it was ...) that I've been thinking about since I've returned from Baltimore, it's "Back to Basics".

Many of the sessions, conversations, and most striking things in the Exhibit Hall really seemed to be getting back to science center "fundamentals" like exhibit development, evaluation, community engagement, and pure scientific phenomena.

Starting with the science phenomena first, the folks from the Superconductivity Group in the School of Physics and Astronomy at Tel-Aviv University were demonstrating what they called "Quantum Levitation" using powerful magnets and thin sapphire wafers coated with a very thin ceramic layer of yttrium barium copper oxide cooled with Liquid Nitrogen.  You can see the YouTube video below.  If you think it looks amazing in the video I can tell you it was really AMAZING in person, and it was the hit of the Exhibit Hall.  (Also the video has gone viral with over 3 million views!)



One of the other popular areas in the Exhibit Hall was the NASA area.  Even though the last Space Shuttle has left the launchpad, NASA is doing incredible science, and is quite willing to share their educational resources with museums and the public.  (I like to imagine all my tax dollars going to NASA and NSF instead of some the less beneficial and interesting things the government does ...)

As far as sessions, it was interesting to note the sheer volume of presentations geared toward engaging the public with "real" scientific information and research (as opposed to "bogus" information like immunization conspiracy theories.)  One of the best examples of this was the keynote presentation by author and reporter Michael Specter. 

Mr. Specter delivered many of his talking points from his recent book "Denialism" and provided a vigorous defense of both science and reason by excoriating everyone from Michele Bachman and her irresponsible statements about the HVP vaccine to "raw" milk fanatics. Good Stuff!

As for the conference sessions, I really enjoyed the "nuts and bolts" topics the most.

I participated in the "Knowledge that Works for Small Science Centers" session where the entire range of operational concerns like evaluation, fund raising, education, marketing, and exhibits for small(er) museums was addressed.  Some common threads were that museums need to build sane and sustainable operations, while continually thinking about how to increase their internal capacity.  The double session was well-attended and judging from the comments and conversations, there is a real need for this type of info.  (You can download our session notes and resources from this web page.)

The other session I participated in was entitled "Exhibit Evaluation: Useless bureaucratic hurdle or valuable tool?"   As you might gather from the title, there was lots of frank discussion and audience participation.  How can you not love a session that name checks Mary Poppins, Frank Oppenheimer, and The Spanish Inquisition?

From my perspective, the good news is that people are passionate about figuring out what "works" in exhibit and education programs in museums.  The bad news is that there are many different ideas about what makes for useful and effective evaluation, and it seemed that many of the evaluation folks felt that the exhibits folks just "don't get it."

All that being said it was interesting and spirited. Emily Schuster from ASTC gave a fair and detailed recap in this blog post from the ASTC website.

One of the last sessions I attended "Are Your Exhibits Safe? A Walking Workshop" was an important look at an often neglected topic --- that of safety.   Exhibit fabricator extraordinaire, Charlie Shaw (pictured below) took us on a "walkabout" through the Maryland Science Center where we took apart and opened up exhibit components to study both the good and bad design features in regard to safety. A super important topic and usually not something that comes up at an ASTC conference --- so kudos to the presenters!

Off course, like most conferences, many interesting conversations happened outside the "formal" presentation times (did I mention there was a Tinkerers' Ball at the American Visionary Art Museum?)  I'll certainly be mulling over my ASTC 2011 experiences to share in future ExhibiTricks postings.


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Off to ASTC 2011

I'm off to Baltimore for the annual Association of Science-Technology Centers (ASTC) conference.

I look forward to meeting up with colleagues from around the world, as well as having the opportunity to be part of two interesting sessions.

The first session, "Knowledge that Works for Small Science Centers" will be a "nuts and bolts" session on a variety of topics of interest to small(er) museums --- from marketing and evaluation to educational programs and exhibits.  I'll be doing a bit of double duty speaking about both exhibits and using social media.

The great part of this double session is that we'll have concentrated "break outs" at small tables for an opportunity to discuss specific topics in more detail.  Come join us on Sunday, October 16th from 2:15 to 4:45 PM in the Convention Center!

The second session is entitled  "Exhibit Evaluation: Useless Bureaucratic Hurdle or Valuable Tool?"  The title probably gives you the clue that this will be a no holds barred session with lots of audience participation.  Evaluation is a topic that is hard to be neutral about so I expect some great discussion. Come join us on Monday, October 17th from 10:45 AM-12:00 PM, also in the Convention Center.

I'll also try to give updates from the conference --- session recaps, exhibit hall updates, and the conversations in-between.  So stay tuned to ExhibiTricks, or check out my Twitter feed (@museum_exhibits) as well.

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 Automatic ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

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Two Exhibit Doctor "Cases"

My post a short while ago about some new ExhibiTricks features has gotten a good response.

Here are two pending ideas for The Exhibit Doctor that I'd like to start to dig into (and also like to receive comments and input from ExhibiTricks readers!)

First off, Mary Jane Taylor from the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia is on the lookout for ways to collect and display information in "flip books" or notebooks.  Here's part of her email:

"In twenty years as a museum professional, and longer as a visitor, I've never seen anyone come up with an attractive, cheap, durable and easy-to-use system of having a flip book of text or images available in an exhibit.  Solutions range from the bulky and impossible to use (thick mountings for pages with heavy-duty grommets and rings) to ugly, disposable three-ring binders from Staples.

"Notebooks" of source material, photographs, and diagrams are a basic in all kinds of museums, so it seems like a problem that somebody should be able to solve!"

I've got some initial ideas that I've been gathering for Mary Jane, but if you've seen an elegant way to gather and display this type of exhibition information feel free to drop me an email or share your "exhibit flip book" ideas in the "Comments" section below.


The second idea in the Exhibit Doctor hopper was submitted by Mary Anna Murphy, and this is from her email:

"This isn't a very knotty problem, but I've run across it again and again in installing 2D works in a non-traditional gallery setting such as a mall, an office that worships its walls, or even the Russell Senate Office building rotunda.  None of those places have walls that want nails or hangers.  I'd be interested in seeing how other folks have managed to make their displays.  Oh, and it always has to be low budget."

If you've got some ideas to share on Mary Ana's question, again drop me an email or share your comments below.

In both these current Exhibit Doctor cases, and in future ones as well, I'll be gathering information from all the sources and resources I can, and then I'll write up a full report (with images and references here feasible) to share (for free of course) here on ExhibiTricks and also on my website.

So if you can help out with this first set of queries please do!  In the meantime, if you have other Exhibit Doctor questions or would like a crack at the ExhibiTricks SoapBox feel free to contact me about that too!


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 Automatic 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!)