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

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