Museum Exhibit Design Resource: Exhibitionist Journal

Here's the punchline for this post: if you're in the Museum/Exhibit/Design game you should subscribe to Exhibitionist.  Period.

Exhibitionist is a Journal of Reflective Practice published by NAME (The National Association for Museum Exhibition) in the Spring and Fall of each year.  Exhibitionist features thought-provoking articles on exhibition theory and practice, exhibition critiques and commentary, book reviews, technical articles, and other essays of interest to everyone engaged in the design, development, and creation of exhibits.  At two 100 page issues a year, an Exhibitionist subscription is a real bargain compared with other museum publications.

But don't just take my word for it.  You can check out (and download if you wish) free content from past Exhibitionist issues in the continually expanding digital archive.  Editor Gretchen Jennings does a great job of gathering some of the best and brightest folks in the museum world together for each thematic issue.

You may or may not know that because of recent changes to the AAM (American Alliance of Museums) structure, Exhibitionist is now available to anyone by subscription – you no longer have to belong to NAME and AAM to subscribe.  For people out of the country or more aligned with other museum groups, this means they can subscribe to Exhibitionist without paying AAM membership fees. 

The Exhibitionist subscription rates are just $25 per year if you do belong to AAM, and just $35 per year if you are not an AAM member.  Just head over to this Web page to subscribe.

So what are you waiting for?  Subscribe now, and help support a great resource for the museum community (and help yourself become a better informed practitioner!)



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Don't Let Them Squash Your Dreams!

Ideas, especially fanciful ideas that are just starting to take shape, can be delicate things.

It's easy, at times, to get discouraged and listen to the inevitable naysayers who seem to be able to enumerate an endless list of reasons why something won't work, instead of just rolling up your sleeves and getting on with making your dreams a reality --- naysayers be damned.
  

Don't let them squash your dreams! 

Visitor Voices: Cacophony or Chorus? Thoughts on NEMA 2012

I just breezed out of beautiful Burlington, Vermont as the 2012 NEMA (New England Museum Association) wrapped up for another year.

My big takeaway centered on all the session (and hallway!) chatter involving the issues and challenges regarding the increasingly greater inclusion of visitor input into museum exhibits and programs.

Certainly fostering cultural organizations that are more responsive to, and inclusive of, the many different communities that interact with each museum is important, but I was struck by an odd little nuance during many of the conversations in Burlington.

So many NEMA folks seemed hesitant (or downright ashamed) of sorting/curating/editing the vast piles (physical and/or digital) of visitor-generated content they were gathering.  Somehow it seemed that unless many square feet of inane sticky note comments weren't allowed to remain posted at "Talk Back" boards across New England's museums, we were inherently insulting (or censoring?) visitors by sorting and organizing more meaningful comments for display.

The "signal to noise" ratio at most of these comment boards really makes me question if this technique is becoming a painfully overused cliche akin to mini grocery store exhibits inside Children's Museums.  Crafting careful "prompts" or thoughtful questions that elicit more than repetitive and banal responses from visitors can be tough.  But why bother to even waste the sticky notes if you're only going to ask such overly open-ended questions as: "Tell us about your favorite memory about (insert exhibition theme here)?"

If you do come up with good questions for visitors to answer, have you provided a comfortable environment where they can focus a bit to produce a thoughtful answer?  Or did you just slap up a board on a wall right in the middle of a bustling exhibition gallery?  Again, why waste the sticky notes if you've set up the situation to realistically produce only the most cursory, dashed-off comments?

But let's say you've come up with great questions, and really crafted an environment that encourages the careful expression of thoughts as well as an opportunity to review and ponder what others have shared.  Do you really want to present everything in an undifferentiated mass like an intellectual "town dump"?  (It's great to keep past comments accessible, but what's your mechanism for allowing visitors to easily search through older contributions?)

Two analogies that I heard in Burlington really helped me think about the role of museum staff in this process:

The first compared visitor comments and community contributions to a museum's physical collections.  Curators care for physical collection objects and keep them, but museums only put their most interesting, most significant (perhaps even most upsetting) things on display, not everything!  Shouldn't we treat visitor and community contributions in similar ways?

The second analogy compared the role of museum staff to that of a conductor with an orchestra or choir.  You keep things a bit organized, and let individual contributions shine through, but you also help prevent everything from completely going off the rails.  It's important for community members to feel that their contribution "counted" but you can do that in many different ways.

I thought the analogies neatly balanced both sides of the visitor contribution "coin." One focused on careful curation and sorting, the other allowed for the recognition a broader collective effort.  I'm glad that the opportunity to interact with colleagues from around the region during the NEMA Conference got me to think more deeply about this topic.

What do you think?  What techniques have you used to "orchestrate" thoughtful visitor and community input?  Let us know in the "Comments Section" below.


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We Interrupt This Blog ...

... for "Superstorm" Sandy!

Until all the infrastructure gets put back a bit more firmly into place on Long Island, please enjoy some previous ExhibiTricks posts.  (Check out "Links" or "Favorite Posts" on the right side column of the ExhibiTricks blog homepage, or use the Search Box and enter the term "interview.")

Also, if you're so inclined, please consider a donation to the Red Cross to help victims of Sandy.

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!)

Bet On The Charette!

Working with other people can be tricky.  Group dynamics often degenerate into a pat way of thinking about other people (Oh, there's crazy George talking about visitor numbers again ...) or other departments (Those marketing folks don't have any idea of what it takes to put an exhibit together ...)

Unfortunately, in a constantly shifting marketplace that practically demands that museums are continually innovating and evolving, falling into boring operational patterns or getting locked into interpersonal cul-de-sacs is not great for business.  It also makes working with other people a lot less fun.

So how can you break the mold of past practice (or even get past the goofy term "best practice") and shake your museum working groups up in a fun and positive way?

I'd offer one suggestion:  The Charette.

A little history first from Wikipedia: The term "charette" was thought to originate from the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 19th century, the word charrette is from the French for "cart" or "chariot." It was not unusual for student architects to continue working furiously in teams at the end of the allotted term, up until a deadline, when a charrette would be wheeled among the students to pick up their work for review while they, each working furiously to apply the finishing touches, were said to be working en charrette, in the cart. Émile Zola depicted such a scene of feverish activity in L'Œuvre (serialized 1885, published 1886), his fictionalized account of his friendship with Paul Cézanne. Hence, the term metamorphosed into the current design-related usage in conjunction with working right up to a deadline.)

Bringing together a small group of folks, including some from outside your organization, to bash around ideas for a fixed chunk of time, can bring incredible results.  The best charettes are not just  random brainstorming sessions, but rather concentrated bursts of activity surrounding a fixed topic (or topics) leading toward some conclusions about a particular aspect of a project by the time you're finished.

These past few months I've been whizzing around the country, helping to organize, or be part of, exhibit charettes.  I am always heartened and gratified by the large amount of high-quality thinking that can come out of a charette process that puts people into a room without the normal work-day distractions of phone calls, emails, and memos.  The charette process really compels people to bring their "A Game" to the table and contribute their best thoughts and ideas.

We so often complain about the lack of time in the museum business, so it's great to find a process that has a goal of producing tangible, actionable results in a short time.

So pick two or three specific thorny problems your organization has been struggling with, block out a day, and bring in some outsiders to shake things up a bit.  Who knows what sorts of ideas you can fill your "chariot" with?


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Goodbye Columbus, Hello Makers!

The biggest takeaway I had from the 2012 ASTC (Association of Science-Technology Centers) conference that just wrapped up in Columbus was all the session (and hallway) chatter about making and Makers.

In some ways, I find the interest in giving museum visitors access to (relatively) open-ended situations where they can use cool tools and materials a great step forward from past years of over-designed, neon-encrusted exhibition spaces (especially in Science Centers.)

On the other hand, is the term "making" destined to become an over-used "hot" topic that starts to mean so many things to so many people that it becomes a mushy buzzword like "interactivity" or "multimedia"?

It worries me when the appellation "Maker Space" fits everything from a "rebranded" recycled crafts area (where, let's face it, the main activity is globbing together pieces of junk with gallons of glue ... sort of like a bad real-life Katamari Damacy) to a well-staffed space filled with truly generative activities for visitors to explore (like MAKESHOP in Pittsburgh or the tinkering studio at the Exploratorium.)

That tension definitely came out in conversations and session presentations where some ASTC attendees thought letting kids "mess around" with tools and materials in any way they wanted was fine (and seemed to fit their definition of "making") while others felt that unless activities were "framed" in careful ways that lots of opportunities for "authentic making" as well as learning about science were getting lost in the rush to hop on the maker bandwagon.

My own feeling is that this is all getting shaken out during an incredibly active time, with inevitable leaps forward (as well as howl-worthy missteps.)  Ultimately though, if the buzz around "making" can help organizations like museums (and schools, too) get motivated to provide space, tools, and materials for people to push the boundaries of their own skills and experiences, what's the downside? 

But I also think it is important to acknowledge that if you give some people a pile of tools and materials they immediately feel comfortable "jumping in" while other folks need a bit more guidance or examples to help them get started.  And it would be wrong to design a space that makes either end of this learning/personality spectrum feel excluded.

The Maker Movement is in the air both inside and outside of our museums.  I hope we can find ways to capture the core making experiences (like access to new tools and materials) inside exhibit areas without those fundamentals getting swept away by all the media hoopla.

What do you "make" of these topics?  Are you excited by the possibilities for "real making" or are you concerned about "fake make"?  Let us know in the "Comments" section below! 

(Also, if you attend the ASTC Conference --- since I'm just coming onto the Program Committee, I'd like to encourage you to submit session proposals on make (and non-make!) topics for the 2013 meeting in beautiful Albequerque.)



UNABASHED PLUG: In the whole "making" vein, I've just embarked on a collaboration with Brad Larson of Brad Larson Media (that's Brad and me pictured at the top of the post) and Jim Polk of Canstruct to create a series of "Pop-up Maker Space" exhibits and activities for museums. 

We're helping our museum partners help their visitors to make cool projects, share their ideas, and then continue creating and making at home.  You can find out more by checking out (and Liking!) our Pop-Up Maker Space Facebook page, or by going to the newly-started PopupMakerSpace.com Web site (where you can download a free animation activity to make at home.)




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!)