Lessons about…finished products
8. Many problems don’t surface until after installation
This is a very common occurrence in the exhibit design field and I would say that the majority of it is because you can never know how an audience will experience your finished product. You can have the best laid plans in the world, but if a key area is too dark or a kiosk is awkwardly placed and visitors are discouraged from looking at something as a result, then your exhibit is affected. The average attention span of a museum visitor is 15 minutes or less per gallery so you don’t want anything to deter, detract, or confuse the visitor or you risk them leaving the gallery and not seeing anything.
Of course, experience in the field and familiarity of what has worked in the past and what hasn’t will go a long way and designers learn how to tackle some would be design issues before the fabrication phase. But something is always bound to come up that you did not expect.
For example, shortly after I started at NASM, a revamp of the Mars corner in a gallery was installed. The new section had updated graphic panels, amazing images, nifty videos and a few artifacts. During the first week of installation, Ashley and I took half an hour to go down to the gallery and just sit and watch to see how people reacted and what they did. Some of the things we witnessed were so surprising! Which leads me to lesson #9…
9. Always spend time in your gallery space
This is important both at the beginning of any newly opened space and periodically throughout the life of the exhibit.
In the case of the Mars corner, we saw kids leaping down a safety ramp, hanging on artifact cases mounted on a wall, punching every monitor they came to as if it was a touch screen, even if it clearly wasn’t, and completely bypassing an area with a really cool video. It was obvious that there were some changes that needed to be made to make the area safer for visitors, provide clearer instructions, and to protect the exhibit artifacts. Unfortunately this process usually involves extra work by fabrication staff, which costs more money, but is often a necessity.
As a safeguard against these changes, every exhibit budget should have a built in 10% contingency amount, because inevitably, things will come up that you haven’t expected.
Friday, August 27, 2010
Friday, August 20, 2010
An Update
So it looks like I have finally gotten some details worked out regarding my next internship, and my life, for that matter.
Originally my wife and I thought it would be in our best interest for her to move to Syracuse in August and for me to finish up my classes and internship here in DC and then move to New York in December. But after sitting down and crunching the numbers, we decided that it made much more sense financially for us to stick together and to avoid paying rent in two places. Even though we will be replacing my income with hers rather than gaining a second salary, the cost of living in Syracuse is much lower than in DC which will make it much easier to make ends meet. I have to admit, while it has been a good decision for me to work for GW and receive tuition benefits, it was still quite difficult for two people (both in school) to live off of one base salary in the DC area.
So, we are moving my wife up to NY tomorrow and I will follow in a couple of weeks. We have been super busy this week between trying to pack up the necessities for her (since I will be keeping all of the furniture for the next two weeks) and painting our current apartment. Our cats have had a blast with the jungle gym of furniture that we had to create in order to make room for painting [*note to self—never try to paint a one bedroom apartment with the furniture still in it].
As for my internship, I have secured a position with the Syracuse University Art Galleries, with their design team, which I think will a great experience. I’m not exactly sure what I will be doing yet, but in my phone interview with their director, we discussed my interest in exhibit graphics and space planning, as well as fabrication. I haven’t done much fabrication, outside of a painting for my first exhibit design class, but I know it would be tremendously useful for the design process to understand the materials and what goes into building an exhibit. The director did emphasize that he wanted to make sure that my experience at the art galleries enhanced my degree and gave me the experience I want, so I feel confident that I will gain some valuable insight with this internship. I will be meeting with the director and some of the designers on staff during my first week up in Syracuse and hopefully I will start soon after that!
I plan to continue to blog during my coming internship, since it is still part of my GW degree and I will also be taking an online class to finish my coursework requirements.
All in all, lots of exciting and new experiences coming my way!
Originally my wife and I thought it would be in our best interest for her to move to Syracuse in August and for me to finish up my classes and internship here in DC and then move to New York in December. But after sitting down and crunching the numbers, we decided that it made much more sense financially for us to stick together and to avoid paying rent in two places. Even though we will be replacing my income with hers rather than gaining a second salary, the cost of living in Syracuse is much lower than in DC which will make it much easier to make ends meet. I have to admit, while it has been a good decision for me to work for GW and receive tuition benefits, it was still quite difficult for two people (both in school) to live off of one base salary in the DC area.
So, we are moving my wife up to NY tomorrow and I will follow in a couple of weeks. We have been super busy this week between trying to pack up the necessities for her (since I will be keeping all of the furniture for the next two weeks) and painting our current apartment. Our cats have had a blast with the jungle gym of furniture that we had to create in order to make room for painting [*note to self—never try to paint a one bedroom apartment with the furniture still in it].
As for my internship, I have secured a position with the Syracuse University Art Galleries, with their design team, which I think will a great experience. I’m not exactly sure what I will be doing yet, but in my phone interview with their director, we discussed my interest in exhibit graphics and space planning, as well as fabrication. I haven’t done much fabrication, outside of a painting for my first exhibit design class, but I know it would be tremendously useful for the design process to understand the materials and what goes into building an exhibit. The director did emphasize that he wanted to make sure that my experience at the art galleries enhanced my degree and gave me the experience I want, so I feel confident that I will gain some valuable insight with this internship. I will be meeting with the director and some of the designers on staff during my first week up in Syracuse and hopefully I will start soon after that!
I plan to continue to blog during my coming internship, since it is still part of my GW degree and I will also be taking an online class to finish my coursework requirements.
All in all, lots of exciting and new experiences coming my way!
Wednesday, August 4, 2010
Lessons Learned Part II
My internship search in the Syracuse area is a bit crazy and up in the air right now, made a bit more difficult by some frustrating rules from GW. I’ll update more once I have some more concrete news, but for now, let’s go back and explore some more lessons learned at NASM…
Lessons about…day to day work
5. Every project takes at least 2 hours longer than you think it will---usually it takes two days longer
Ashley passed me this bit of wisdom about a month into my internship and I have a feeling that I will be passing it on to my own interns or students one day because it is true.
Since I was on a limited schedule at NASM (existing of only about 3 hours of work a day), it was sometimes hard to get into the groove of working on a project. With creative projects, I’ve found that I often work a bit like my car in winter—slow to warm up and shift into the correct gear, but capable of long trips after that. Sometimes I just need a bit of time to get in the right gears to be productive. The result at NASM, though, was that I occasionally felt like I had just gotten started when I had to leave my work to go to a meeting. I remember showing up several times thinking that I would be able to finish a project by the time I left that day. But when all was said and done, and my three hours were up, I was usually not nearly as close to finishing as I thought I would be.
On top of this, once projects are completed, they have to go through an approval process, often several proof processes, and then finally a production stage before the work can get on the floor.
As a perfect example, I finished a visitor services sign the week before I left that was supposed to inform visitors that they could carry water bottles with them, but that all other food and drink had to be thrown out before they entered the museum.
Three weeks later I got an email from Ashley showing just how badly they needed to get their signs up!
Occasionally, a project would get out with just a couple of days turnaround, but this was typically controlled by the staff in charge of the approval process more than the designers.
6. Sometimes you need a little GLEE
As a designer, sometimes the task is pretty mundane. For example, one of my major projects was to manipulate basic Illustrator line drawings into a drawing format that could be read by a router and cut out as a 3-D tactile display. The final product was made of metal and the front view of the airplane in each one had to be a cut out that showed depth and allowed visitors to feel the shape of the plane. Once I figured out how to visualize what the 3-D final product would look like, manipulating the line drawings was not hard, but it was very time consuming.
On these days, a little music went a long way. My favorite soundtrack at the time was Volume 1 and 2 of GLEE, which I plugged into my IPod and rocked out to as I worked. Others in the office used their music to get them started each day and IPods and Pandora are common.
7. The proof is in the…proof
Because most computer monitors are not calibrated, the color you see on the monitor usually does not match the color that will print. Printing materials, as well as gallery lighting, can also affect how a color looks on display. For this reason alone, printing proofs is extremely important, but proofs also give you an opportunity to pick up on design discrepancies, misspellings, and poor image quality. The proof stage is also vital because it gives the entire team (designers, writers, editors, curators) a chance to look at your work and make comments and suggestions. This is also the time when a lot of dialogue and creative thinking can take place between colleagues. At NASM the hallway en route to the exhibits offices showcased works up for proofs and it was always fun to stop and check out the progress. As an intern, it also gave me a lot of opportunities to notice how good the designers were, and to give me something to work towards!
Up Next: Lessons learned about finished products
Lessons about…day to day work
5. Every project takes at least 2 hours longer than you think it will---usually it takes two days longer
Ashley passed me this bit of wisdom about a month into my internship and I have a feeling that I will be passing it on to my own interns or students one day because it is true.
Since I was on a limited schedule at NASM (existing of only about 3 hours of work a day), it was sometimes hard to get into the groove of working on a project. With creative projects, I’ve found that I often work a bit like my car in winter—slow to warm up and shift into the correct gear, but capable of long trips after that. Sometimes I just need a bit of time to get in the right gears to be productive. The result at NASM, though, was that I occasionally felt like I had just gotten started when I had to leave my work to go to a meeting. I remember showing up several times thinking that I would be able to finish a project by the time I left that day. But when all was said and done, and my three hours were up, I was usually not nearly as close to finishing as I thought I would be.
On top of this, once projects are completed, they have to go through an approval process, often several proof processes, and then finally a production stage before the work can get on the floor.
As a perfect example, I finished a visitor services sign the week before I left that was supposed to inform visitors that they could carry water bottles with them, but that all other food and drink had to be thrown out before they entered the museum.
Three weeks later I got an email from Ashley showing just how badly they needed to get their signs up!
Occasionally, a project would get out with just a couple of days turnaround, but this was typically controlled by the staff in charge of the approval process more than the designers.
6. Sometimes you need a little GLEE
As a designer, sometimes the task is pretty mundane. For example, one of my major projects was to manipulate basic Illustrator line drawings into a drawing format that could be read by a router and cut out as a 3-D tactile display. The final product was made of metal and the front view of the airplane in each one had to be a cut out that showed depth and allowed visitors to feel the shape of the plane. Once I figured out how to visualize what the 3-D final product would look like, manipulating the line drawings was not hard, but it was very time consuming.
On these days, a little music went a long way. My favorite soundtrack at the time was Volume 1 and 2 of GLEE, which I plugged into my IPod and rocked out to as I worked. Others in the office used their music to get them started each day and IPods and Pandora are common.
7. The proof is in the…proof
Because most computer monitors are not calibrated, the color you see on the monitor usually does not match the color that will print. Printing materials, as well as gallery lighting, can also affect how a color looks on display. For this reason alone, printing proofs is extremely important, but proofs also give you an opportunity to pick up on design discrepancies, misspellings, and poor image quality. The proof stage is also vital because it gives the entire team (designers, writers, editors, curators) a chance to look at your work and make comments and suggestions. This is also the time when a lot of dialogue and creative thinking can take place between colleagues. At NASM the hallway en route to the exhibits offices showcased works up for proofs and it was always fun to stop and check out the progress. As an intern, it also gave me a lot of opportunities to notice how good the designers were, and to give me something to work towards!
Up Next: Lessons learned about finished products
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