The Missing Letter

I had never been to a museum like this!  Around 1971, my family took a trip to Toronto.  Just a few years before, in 1969, Ontario Science Centre (OSC) had opened up and immediately started changing ideas about what an interactive science museum could be.  (In one of those zeitgeist-y moments in history, the Exploratorium opened in 1969 also.)

I'm not even sure how my parents found out about OSC and knew to take my brothers and me there, but from the moment we rode the escalators "through the trees" to enter the exhibit halls we were all excited and showing each other new things we had found.  In addition to the interactive components, I know I was especially fascinated by the live demonstrations --- somebody just blew a hole through a brick with a gigantic laser!

After we returned home to Detroit, I wrote a "fan letter" to the scientists at Ontario Science Centre and asked them if they could send me science experiments that I could do at home.  To my delight, a week or two later, I received a kind reply on official OSC letterhead with a little booklet of cool chemistry demonstrations. WOW!

One of the experiments allowed you to create a "carbon snake" with sulfuric acid(!) and sugar.  I showed my grade school science teachers the letter and chemistry experiments, and asked if they had any sulfuric acid I could borrow.  They did! So I took the big glass bottle with the faded label home as fast as my bike would carry me.

I didn't have any beakers, but my mom thought an empty jar would do the trick.  So I went into the basement laundry room with my supplies and started pouring sulfuric acid into the jar that had some sugar in the bottom.  Once the acid hit the sugar, bubbling and smoking commenced and an evil black looking cylinder snaked up and out of the mouth of the jar accompanied by the strong smell of burning sugar.  "Look! look!" I said to my family as I showed them the "carbon snake."  I tried other experiments with different amounts of sugar and acid to see how I could change the resulting "snake."  Everything was going great until I had the bright idea of quickly pouring some of the sulfuric acid into the jar with sugar in it and then screwing the lid on to see what would happen.

BOOOOOM!

Thank goodness the laundry sink was deep and made of sturdy metal, since I hadn't been wearing any gloves or goggles.  After the smoke cleared, and I cleaned up all the broken glass that the deep sink had captured after the jar exploded (and after my mom was done freaking out!) I learned a valuable (and memorable) lesson about the effects of containing a strong exothermic reaction in a closed jar.

Somewhere along the line, that letter and booklet of chemistry experiments have gone missing, although I had them for a long time.  I often wonder if any museum would be crazy enough to send some kid experiments using sulfuric acid anymore. Probably not.

I also think of all those letters I sent to museums (in pre-email and Web days!) asking for a job when I was about to graduate from college.  And how much the letters that offered even a small bit of encouragement or an idea or suggestion meant to me, especially compared to the obvious form letter rejections --- or no response at all.

Those messages that we as museum workers send, intentionally or unintentionally, can have a big impact on our visitors, and our potential future colleagues.

Electronic communication and the world-wide reach of the Web means that I often get messages from people asking for advice or for jobs, and I really try to give a thoughtful answer to each one of those folks who took the time to write me --- because I still remember how much receiving that letter from the Ontario Science Center meant, and I suppose still means, to me.



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Design Inspiration: Project RE_

"Using familiar things in unfamiliar ways" is one wonderful definition of creativity.

Project RE_ is a great place to get ideas that play with the notions of upcycling (increasing the value of broken or unused objects by giving them new functions or forms) and creative reuse.

Project RE_ was started by Samuel Nelson Bernier,  an industrial designer from Quebec as a university research project.

There are some really novel DIY ideas on the  Project RE_ site, and each idea features a materials list and instructions for you to make your own "upcyclables"!

So look through your junk drawer or attic and head over to Project RE_ to get inspired to start your own project!


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A Repertoire of Experiences: An Interview with Maria Mortati

Maria Mortati is a Museum Exhibit Developer and Project Planner. She lives and works in the Bay Area on a variety of projects that span the temporary to long term, and are often experimental in nature.

Maria was kind enough to answer a few questions for this ExhibiTricks interview:


What’s your educational background?
I have a BFA in Studio Art from the University of Colorado in Boulder and an MFA in Design from Stanford University. I also spent some time in between those two degrees studying graphic design. I learned User Interface design on the job in the 90’s and taught in HCI (Human Computer Interaction) and basic mechanical engineering design classes at grad school.  



What got you interested in Museums?
I was always interested in art, drawing, and design from a young age. My parents took us to museums, as did my school, sometimes unrelentingly. They let us know this was important in some way, even if I wanted to (and did) kick my brother.

Museums and galleries became my go to place as a young person.  As a teenager, contemporary art museums especially resonated. Modern art at that time was still “modern”.  I used to haunt the galleries in Greenwich Village and go home at night with my friends and draw. Nerds, I know.

After the inevitable post-BFA pay-the-rent-jobs, I worked in visual and user interface design for about a decade. It was fun, I learned a lot about engagement, identity, and teamwork.

After a while I wanted to do more conceptual work and work on larger ideas and environments than the Internet offered, so I went to get my MFA. During those 3 years I did an installation at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and a series of thesis projects that could be best summarized by “is it exhibit or is it art?” They were physical, highly interactive and often social in nature.

From there, the melding of my new creative skills and the museum world seemed a natural next step.



Given your varied background, is your approach to exhibition development different in the context of different museum types?
Do you mean I take a different approach based on the project? Not really, there is always the essential getting to know you, and development phases that help structure the work. Given that these are often large projects, good fences make good neighbors.



What is the San Francisco Mobile Museum project?
The San Francisco Mobile Museum (SFMM) is a “pop-up” project I developed in 2009. I’ve had two exhibitions and it has shown in a number of locations, primarily outdoors in the Bay Area. The SFMM is a platform that can be broken down to fit in my car. Past exhibits have been participatory with the public responding to a theme or prompt by making something. The next exhibition will be moving away from that model, and will focus more on onsite engagement. It will be called “Observatorium” and I’ll be posting about its progress on our blog.

(If you want to learn more about the San Francisco Mobile Museum project, there is an article on it coming out in Spring 2012 issue of Exhibitionist.)



Tell us a little bit about how your mobile projects inform your exhibit design work?
They help give me some grounding in reality. My work projects tend to span years into the future and don’t offer much room for experimentation. However, there is often a lot on the line. Having the SFMM there to test things out gives me some solid experience (if even on a tiny scale) with an idea or an approach. It’s not that I’m exactly testing out an idea for a specific project, but if I want to be a part of the conversation, then I need to be participating in the conversation.

A project I did in 2010 with Machine Project at the Hammer Museum (The Giant Hand) was also very important in terms of how it shaped my professional perspective and gave me insights. I had a chance to be both artist and designer, so I stumbled into some unique issues and challenges that museums face and got to be creative while doing it.



What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about exhibition development?
The report recently released by Machine Project on the above-mentioned residency at the Hammer Museum. And not just because I’m in it! It’s a great resource for exploring the potential of a museum.

Exhibit developers come in all types- that's’ good because museums do too. So there is no one compendium I turn to, but I do visit a lot of museums, take pictures, and write about it when possible. It’s good to always be developing a repertoire of experiences.



What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing aspects of storytelling into their exhibitions?
Storytelling or narrative is a tool or technique that is quite powerful- when dealing with human stories (as we often are). They are the glue that can give a visitor a point of access into a world of ideas.

With the SFMM, we let the visitors “tell” their own stories about their objects, but we provided the framework. Another project that did this very well was the Denver Community Museum, who we collaborated with on our inaugural exhibit. It’s a good and simple mechanism to draw participants out and the public in.

Storytelling isn’t the only approach. For example, Olafur Elliasson’s work: would it be more impactful if it had a storyline?

Each work, exhibit, or installation has its own set of options. The bigger question that helps sort out which way to go is what is your ultimate goal for this exhibit? There is a logic that flows from there to help drive which techniques to play with.

I tend to approach exhibits with the question: what can I do that would be fun or innovative to explore this idea? For the visitor, the institution, and of course, myself.

For smaller museums, determining the best impact you can have with your resources at hand is the central challenge and their greatest source of strength. It is their key differentiator. Edit down to a few powerful ideas and then save the others for another exhibition. Then find the most impactful technique to bring that choice to life.

What do you think is the “next frontier” for museums?

I think museums need to excel at creating and joining ideas in ever-freer ways, and less focused on traditional notions of silo-ed curation and exhibition. I’m not alone in this idea and I’m also not saying throw our expertise out the door though. Keep it.

We have established dominance in framing and synthesizing concepts, now lets get serious about “engagement”. We are uniquely poised to claim this space, but it’s been slow going due to our institutional make-up and value systems. I'm talking about a paradigm shift from collect and preserve to select and engage.

If a museum could focus on one area it would be to foster an outlook that they are a place of creative production. One way to get there is by having a sense of flexibility with their content. Then having some staff that can design, develop, and produce. Be open to being sites of creation by others such as artists, scientists, thinkers and doers.

This takes a sense of experimentation that is often hard to make room for, but what else are we going to do if not be the best?

What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?

Oh wow that’s hard. There are so many that I see and they are incredibly diverse. For nostalgia the MoMA, for local I like the diversity at the de Young, for wonder the Exploratorium of course, and for power of story on a visit, the Bird Museum in Iceland.

Can you talk a little about some of your current projects?

At the moment I’m working with the Center for Creative Connections at the Dallas Museum of Art on a new exhibition plan. They have been doing innovative work engaging the public with art, and they want to push the envelope further.

I’m also working on the next iteration of the San Francisco Mobile Museum.

If money were no object, what would your “dream” exhibit project be?

I’d turn my garage and the apartment in our house into a collaborative exhibition residency with ongoing talks, exhibits, and studios. It would be a blast.



Thanks again to Maria for sharing her insights with us!  To find out more about Maria Mortati and her work, check out her website and blog.



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Rhythm in Exhibitions

Why is there such a desire to touch things in an art museum?  Does all that concentrated looking create a pent up demand to use our other senses?  Or do we long to get a better sense of how an artist created something, and the materials they used?  Can a museum experience be "interactive" if you don't touch anything?

I was thinking about these things after a recent visit to the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) with a group of my graduate students from Bank Street's Museum Education program.  (Yes, that's us touching sculptures in the picture above.)


Not in any way to pick on MoMA (since it's one of my favorite museums) but the galleries there (and in many other museums) often seem to lose track of the intellectual and design values of rhythm.

Rhythm in the sense of changing up and varying the sensory stimuli and patterns for visitors.  In the case of MoMA, a visitor is faced with the classic "pure white box" style gallery repeated over and over.  And within each pure white space, artworks are arranged linearly or in grid patterns on the walls or floors.  Couldn't an occasional gallery wall be painted red or blue? 

I'd contend that one reason for the amazing success of recent shows by Tim Burton and Olafur Eliasson at MoMA was (aside from the great art) that each installation deliberately broke away from the white/grid aesthetic.

And lack of rhythm in exhibitions isn't just an Art Museum issue.  My kids once remarked on a History Museum exhibition as a "bunch of old brown things" because the furniture, textiles, and documents on display were all old and brown!  The visual rhythm of "brown" and "old" became a sort of unvarying metronome that overwhelmed the ultimate content goals of the designers.  Each object in every glass case was set on sepia or earth-toned backgrounds as well.

Have some museum genres become like particular radio stations for both exhibition designers and visitors?  Tune into pristine white spaces on the Art Museum channel, and dimly lit galleries full of "old brown stuff" on the History Museum station?

Are the typical design "rhythms" of many science centers filled with bright colors, neon, and wildly varying architectural forms really conducive to thinking deeply about tricky scientific content?

How can we as exhibition creators find our "design rhythm" to help create more interesting museum spaces and content-driven experiences for our visitors?

Please share your own experiences or examples of rhythm in exhibitions (good or bad) in the "Comments" section below!


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Hidden Tech and Stealth Evaluation?

I'm hoping ExhibiTricks readers might provide some good examples of two interesting types of exhibit/design challenges:


• "Hidden" Tech: by which I mean exhibit components that make clever use of technology by making it integral to the design and essentially invisible to the user.  The exact opposite of the "shiny new toy" syndrome where touch screens (or tablets, or iPads, or projection surfaces) are so out front that it looks like a Best Buy store.


• "Stealth" Evaluation: moving away from people with clipboards (or the digital equivalents) to looking for exhibit design aspects that provide both quantitative and qualitative data about visitor experiences and content acquisition.  An example (pictured above) is the "Would you go to Mars?" digital counter gates. A matching set of gates is placed at both the entrance and exit of the Ontario Science Centre's Facing Mars traveling exhibition. Visitors (and museum staff) can see how opinions might be different before (and after) finding out more details about potential space missions to Mars inside the exhibition.

What are some of your favorite examples of hidden tech and stealth evaluation?  Post your examples (with links to websites and/or images if possible) in the "Comments" section below, or send me an email with more info.


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Thanks Dad!

Today would have been my father Orlando Orselli's 78th birthday.

My dad worked most of his adult life for The Ford Motor Company, first at the Rouge Plant, and then at the World Headquarters building (The "Glass House") in Dearborn, Michigan.  He was a Stationary Steam Engineer, which basically means he worked with BIG boiler systems.

Even though he didn't go to college, my dad instilled a love for books and learning, and the importance of education, upon myself and my two younger brothers while we were growing up in Detroit.

Because he worked the midnight shift, he made time to go on school (or scout or Boys Club) field trips during the day and then take a nap before he would drive to work later that night. He thought it was important that my brothers and I helped him fix things around the house and knew the names and uses of the tools in his basement "workshop".

When people ask me how I got into the museum business, I am sure memories of the day when my father took me when I was little (by myself, without my mom and brothers, for some reason) to Detroit's "Cultural Center" to visit the Historical Museum (the streets of "Old Detroit"!) and the Children's Museum (things I could touch!) and the Institute of Arts (Mummies!) all in one long afternoon have something to do with it.  Many, many family trips involved museums, or zoos, or nature centers.

Even though my career choice might have puzzled my father a little bit, he always told me, and other people, how proud he was of the work I was doing.

Please never underestimate how important museums can be to people, especially kids and the adults they will become.

Thanks Dad!