So I am finally getting settled in Syracuse and today is the first day at my new internship at the Warehouse Gallery, part of the Syracuse University Art Galleries, located in the downtown area of Syracuse.
This internship is a departure from what I would have looked for had I stayed in DC this semester.
First of all, this museum is an art gallery and I have never really aspired to work in an art gallery, mostly because I love history so much and I have absolutely no background in art theory or art history. And not only is this museum an art gallery, but it is a living art gallery, which means we're working with live artists who plan their own instillations in the gallery. Which brings me to...
Second of all, it looks like there will be relatively little design work such as I am used to. As the artists design their own installations, there isn't much 'exhibit design' to do, though I believe that there may be some brochure graphics to work on at some point.
The exciting part (and I hope it really does turn out to be exciting), is that I think I'll get the chance to work with/ under the new preparator, who starts in three weeks. Here is where some design work might come in, as well as the chance to physically work on the next show installation, which will take place the first couple of weeks in November. Since I have been out of town for the past two weeks, I missed the installation and opening of the current show, but hope to be more involved with the next.
For now, it looks like I will be more involved with the social media aspects of the gallery, trying to successfully transition their fans to their new fan page and offer suggestions for their website.
I have already passed on some information on Omeka, a public open-source design tool that I learned about in my technolgoy class last semester, and we'll see if this is somewhere that they want to and are able to go. If they are, that would be a great project for me to work on as it is design and content related, but a lot of it depends on what kind of server they have, if they even have one at all.
I will try to post an entry about once a week to keep everyone up to date on my continued internship experience as I work towards a December graduation!
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Friday, August 27, 2010
Lessons Learned Part III
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.
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 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
Thursday, July 29, 2010
Change of Plans
My wife was recently offered a year-long fellowship in Syracuse, New York. She started the application process back in April and we didn’t know what her chances were or when we might know for sure if she would get it. At that point, I was still in the middle of my internship at Air and Space and hadn’t really thought too far ahead towards my next internship or what the fellowship might do to our short term life plans. In June, about the time I was finishing up at NASM, she was invited for a phone interview with the director of the fellowship and then shortly afterwards invited for a second phone interview with the team of graduate students already on the project. At this point, it started to seem like there was a real possibility that she would get the fellowship, which prompted us to start thinking about what the opportunity would mean for us.
The possibility of her (and eventually me) moving to Syracuse caused me to do some rethinking of my academic plan. As I’ve mentioned earlier, at the end of my internship at NASM, I was mentally exhausted from the long days and long hours that resulted from me juggling school, work, and an internship. I was really dreading jumping back into a crazy schedule again and was silently hoping for a reason to not have to start until at least the fall.
In addition, after a couple of weeks in a normal schedule, I realized how much happier I was when I was not tired and anxious all the time. There was definitely a marked improvement in our home relationship as well now that we had time to talk to each other and do things together.
So I started thinking, that if the fellowship worked out, perhaps I would delay my graduation until May 2011, finish my coursework this fall, and then finish my final internship in the Syracuse area next Spring. I was keeping my fingers crossed that we would get some good news!
And finally, with just three weeks until the start of the fellowship, my wife was offered the position!
It’s pretty crazy to think that she will be leaving so soon and it will definitely be a challenge to be apart so much of the time. Especially since we haven’t been married that long and we haven’t been apart more than a couple of weeks in the last 3 years. But it is an amazing career opportunity for her and after it ends, it puts us in a much better place to make some decisions about what to do next (on our radar is a year-long working holiday in New Zealand, a relocation to Portland or Denver, or her enrolling in a PhD program somewhere).
Now my job is to find an internship in the Syracuse area. I’ve already emailed my advisors to see if they have any recommendations and to find out about the process of doing my internship away from DC, and now I’m just waiting to hear back.
I think until then, a Google search will be the best place to start.
The possibility of her (and eventually me) moving to Syracuse caused me to do some rethinking of my academic plan. As I’ve mentioned earlier, at the end of my internship at NASM, I was mentally exhausted from the long days and long hours that resulted from me juggling school, work, and an internship. I was really dreading jumping back into a crazy schedule again and was silently hoping for a reason to not have to start until at least the fall.
In addition, after a couple of weeks in a normal schedule, I realized how much happier I was when I was not tired and anxious all the time. There was definitely a marked improvement in our home relationship as well now that we had time to talk to each other and do things together.
So I started thinking, that if the fellowship worked out, perhaps I would delay my graduation until May 2011, finish my coursework this fall, and then finish my final internship in the Syracuse area next Spring. I was keeping my fingers crossed that we would get some good news!
And finally, with just three weeks until the start of the fellowship, my wife was offered the position!
It’s pretty crazy to think that she will be leaving so soon and it will definitely be a challenge to be apart so much of the time. Especially since we haven’t been married that long and we haven’t been apart more than a couple of weeks in the last 3 years. But it is an amazing career opportunity for her and after it ends, it puts us in a much better place to make some decisions about what to do next (on our radar is a year-long working holiday in New Zealand, a relocation to Portland or Denver, or her enrolling in a PhD program somewhere).
Now my job is to find an internship in the Syracuse area. I’ve already emailed my advisors to see if they have any recommendations and to find out about the process of doing my internship away from DC, and now I’m just waiting to hear back.
I think until then, a Google search will be the best place to start.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Lessons Learned Part 1 (cont)
Lessons from…the Exhibit Team (cont)
3. It takes a village
There is a lot of talent involved in making an exhibit. At a small museum this talent may have to be divided between 3 or 4 people. In a large museum the talent is distributed in more specialized areas and there might be 15-20 people involved. If I remember my numbers correctly, on the Time and Navigation team there were 4 curators, 2 designers (one graphic designer and one CAD designer), 2 educators, a fundraising or development manager, an editor/ writer, a project manager, and several other people (fabricators, AV specialists, department heads, archivists) who popped in and out to various meetings. On top of this there is a whole production crew that usually gets involved once the plans are basically complete. That’s a whole lot of people!
And while too many cooks in the kitchen can be a bad thing, as long as everyone has an open mind and perspective on the final goal, teamwork is a GREAT thing when producing exhibits.
4. Poll the audience
One week, the Time and Nav team visited the National Archives to learn about some of the technology that they have used in their exhibits. During the briefing we learned that they don’t do audience testing or polling because federal regulations prevent them. Apparently for federally funded organizations, any poll or question that is asked to more than 9 people needs special federal approval. Since a poll of 9 people is essentially useless in gathering pertinent information, they don’t do it.
As a quasi-funded institution, the Smithsonian doesn’t have such limitations, and it’s a good thing since evaluating the audience is a key step in testing concepts and components of the exhibit.
As part of the Time and Nav process, the Education department conducted several surveys of museum visitors, asking questions about prior content knowledge, interest levels, and even the understandability of certain key sentences from the script. The answers were integral in making sure that the script tailored to the areas of most interest to the audience and helped them see when a concept (clear to an academic or specialist) needs to be broken down and explained further.
Up next: Lessons about day to day work
3. It takes a village
There is a lot of talent involved in making an exhibit. At a small museum this talent may have to be divided between 3 or 4 people. In a large museum the talent is distributed in more specialized areas and there might be 15-20 people involved. If I remember my numbers correctly, on the Time and Navigation team there were 4 curators, 2 designers (one graphic designer and one CAD designer), 2 educators, a fundraising or development manager, an editor/ writer, a project manager, and several other people (fabricators, AV specialists, department heads, archivists) who popped in and out to various meetings. On top of this there is a whole production crew that usually gets involved once the plans are basically complete. That’s a whole lot of people!
And while too many cooks in the kitchen can be a bad thing, as long as everyone has an open mind and perspective on the final goal, teamwork is a GREAT thing when producing exhibits.
4. Poll the audience
One week, the Time and Nav team visited the National Archives to learn about some of the technology that they have used in their exhibits. During the briefing we learned that they don’t do audience testing or polling because federal regulations prevent them. Apparently for federally funded organizations, any poll or question that is asked to more than 9 people needs special federal approval. Since a poll of 9 people is essentially useless in gathering pertinent information, they don’t do it.
As a quasi-funded institution, the Smithsonian doesn’t have such limitations, and it’s a good thing since evaluating the audience is a key step in testing concepts and components of the exhibit.
As part of the Time and Nav process, the Education department conducted several surveys of museum visitors, asking questions about prior content knowledge, interest levels, and even the understandability of certain key sentences from the script. The answers were integral in making sure that the script tailored to the areas of most interest to the audience and helped them see when a concept (clear to an academic or specialist) needs to be broken down and explained further.
Up next: Lessons about day to day work
Tuesday, July 13, 2010
Lessons Learned Part 1
As I continue my search for my second internship, I thought I’d take some time to talk about my general observations and lessons learned from my first internship at NASM. My internship was the perfect jump back into the museum design world and despite the hectic schedule, I loved every minute that I spent in the 3rd floor Exhibits Department.
Part one: Lessons on…the Exhibits Team
1. Exhibits take a long time to plan
I was privileged to be able to sit in on team meetings for the developing exhibit “Time and Navigation”, which featured weekly meetings with designers, curators, writers, and educators to discuss concepts, scripts, fundraising, and design. I was present for about six months worth of meetings and during this time it seems like progress was good. However, I gathered from the discussions that this exhibit has been in development for about 10 years and the direction of the content has changed many times. 10 years!
I am glad that my time at the museum coincided with a time when the exhibit really did seem to be moving forward. Not only did the team reach its fundraising goal, but the distribution of funds put an absolute timeline on the project, meaning that there was a timeline for the dismantling of the previous exhibit as well as the construction phase for the new one. I think this timeline really helped the team push forward in the script development, since it is the basis of so many other decisions involving design, lighting, collections, and interactives.
However, even with the forward moving progress, the nature of an exhibit with an institution as large as the Smithsonian is such that the exhibit still isn’t scheduled to open until late 2011, early 2012.
2. Design is intricately tied to the script
Often design is guided by a finished script, and projects, especially graphic panel based exhibits, come to the design department with a clear starting point. At this point it is the designer’s responsibility to take the script and make it interesting and fluid from a visitor’s perspective. This can be achieved with thoughtful space planning and traffic flow or it can be achieved graphically. Often it is both. Usually much of the script is inflexible and the designer must think creatively about how to best present the ideas.
Sometimes, a designer is involved in the entire process of the exhibit and has input in the script along the way. From what I have observed, this is the preferred method of operation, but it does make a designer’s job a challenge. In the early stages of an exhibit the designer often has little solid work because the concepts are still being hammered out in the script. Without at least a good solid foundation, space planning and graphics are hard to visualize and you don’t want to do too much work on a concept that may change in the near future.
At the same time, a designers input can be instrumental in helping the curators grasp how concepts will come across to visitors. Sometimes a suggestion on how graphic panels or an interactive component will actually be placed in the gallery can help a curator realize what their most important concepts are and help them better define them in the script so the concept, and its importance, is easy to understand.
Overall the process requires balance and teamwork.
Next: More lessons on the Exhibit Team
Part one: Lessons on…the Exhibits Team
1. Exhibits take a long time to plan
I was privileged to be able to sit in on team meetings for the developing exhibit “Time and Navigation”, which featured weekly meetings with designers, curators, writers, and educators to discuss concepts, scripts, fundraising, and design. I was present for about six months worth of meetings and during this time it seems like progress was good. However, I gathered from the discussions that this exhibit has been in development for about 10 years and the direction of the content has changed many times. 10 years!
I am glad that my time at the museum coincided with a time when the exhibit really did seem to be moving forward. Not only did the team reach its fundraising goal, but the distribution of funds put an absolute timeline on the project, meaning that there was a timeline for the dismantling of the previous exhibit as well as the construction phase for the new one. I think this timeline really helped the team push forward in the script development, since it is the basis of so many other decisions involving design, lighting, collections, and interactives.
However, even with the forward moving progress, the nature of an exhibit with an institution as large as the Smithsonian is such that the exhibit still isn’t scheduled to open until late 2011, early 2012.
2. Design is intricately tied to the script
Often design is guided by a finished script, and projects, especially graphic panel based exhibits, come to the design department with a clear starting point. At this point it is the designer’s responsibility to take the script and make it interesting and fluid from a visitor’s perspective. This can be achieved with thoughtful space planning and traffic flow or it can be achieved graphically. Often it is both. Usually much of the script is inflexible and the designer must think creatively about how to best present the ideas.
Sometimes, a designer is involved in the entire process of the exhibit and has input in the script along the way. From what I have observed, this is the preferred method of operation, but it does make a designer’s job a challenge. In the early stages of an exhibit the designer often has little solid work because the concepts are still being hammered out in the script. Without at least a good solid foundation, space planning and graphics are hard to visualize and you don’t want to do too much work on a concept that may change in the near future.
At the same time, a designers input can be instrumental in helping the curators grasp how concepts will come across to visitors. Sometimes a suggestion on how graphic panels or an interactive component will actually be placed in the gallery can help a curator realize what their most important concepts are and help them better define them in the script so the concept, and its importance, is easy to understand.
Overall the process requires balance and teamwork.
Next: More lessons on the Exhibit Team
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