Join an online discussion, June 14–28, with Beverly Serrell, evaluator and veteran observer of science centers and museums, public gardens, and aquariums. In a recent article,  “Paying More Attention to Paying Attention,” she analyzes tracking-and-timing studies from more than 100 exhibitions and offers observations about the characteristics of what she calls “thoroughly used exhibitions.” As she notes, “Time spent paying attention is a prerequisite for learning, and studies have shown a positive relationship between the amount of time spent in an exhibition and learning.” Her observations are suggestive not only for designers of place-based science learning experiences, but for those who study learning across the informal science education field.

To join the week-long discussion and share your experiences, go to connect.astc.org, set up an account, find the “CAISE Forum,” and enroll yourself using the word “informal” as the enrollment key. If you need help, contact info@caise.insci.org.

About the image: “Where Do You Sit in the Cafeteria?” is part of the Science Museum of Minnesota exhibition RACE Are We Different? Tracking-and-timing data “showed surprisingly high levels of visitor attention to text and graphic panels, challenging the assumption that ‘nobody reads the labels.’”

There are some influences that run so deep, we may forget where they came from and how they got started. Like the use of everyday materials in exhibits, and the deep belief in the value of tinkering and messing about.

Boston Stories, a website that’s being lovingly created by Mike Spock and colleagues, promises to help us remember one very important influence on the museum scene – the Boston Children’s Museum and all those who were part of what George Hein calls “an optimistic time.” Check it out.

At right, in an image from the website’s archives, a child explores an exhibit and practices blowing bubbles.

Last week in Milan, at the annual meeting of ecsite, the European Science Centre Network, in a session about art in science centers organized by Claire Pillsbury, an old topic came up: What ethical guidelines should we follow, as a field, in copying others’ work? Remo Besio of Techorama in Switzerland spoke passionately about instances he had observed in recent years of organizations profiting from sale of copies of work that had been developed by other organizations and individuals, without permission or compensation. There was at least one example right there in the exhibit hall.

The original spirit in the science center field was generous. The Exploratorium freely shared plans for their exhibits, for the cost of a Cookbook, and in that way inspired hundreds of others around the world to start their own science centers. The Cheapbook series begun by Paul Orselli and colleagues like Dan Goldwater (who contributed plans for a Harmonic Cantilever) and Steve Pizzey (who contributed Windy City, shown here) continued the tradition of generosity – a tradition with echoes in the contemporary open source movement.

There are very few museums that can afford to secure legal protection for their exhibit designs, or to defend those rights. But it was clear from the discussion in Milan that most people hope that we can embrace ethical guidelines that will help protect the spirit of common purpose and mutual aid that are such an important part of the history and culture of this field.

This topic was discusssed at length some years ago by a group that met at ASTC conferences and summarized their position in what was then the ASTC Newsletter.  The guidelines they suggested are still online, here. Are there any updates or suggestions?

Gretchen Jennings, editor of the NAME journal, is looking for leads for an upcoming issue. You can get in touch with her or post here. Here’s Gretchen’s note:

Hello all. For the Spring 2010 issue of “Exhibitionist,” the exhibitions journal that I edit (www.name-aam.org), we want to look at issues that come up over and over again in developing and designing exhibitions – like should we do an intro film? are dioramas out forever or in again? lighting for accessibility or low lighting to preserve objects? Should this be a staffed exhibition? etc? I’m soliciting examples of exhibition frictions that you experience continually – and especially those that have been addressed creatively. Any ideas? I’d love to hear them. I would like to hear from you by end of June 2009.

Thanks, Gretchen

Over the last 18 months, we’ve received a lot of suggestions for new features for the ExhibitFiles site. One recurring request is to allow members to post not just full Case Studies or Reviews of exhibits and exhibitions, but short message or media elements. In other words, members could share one image (or video) or just an idea or a question. We’ve been thinking about how best to incorporate this potential new feature.

We want to make it easy to add media so we are envisioning a system that would allow for direct uploads to the ExhibitFiles server or links to images on Flickr, videos on YouTube, along with other services.

Here’s a few mock-ups of how it might work. The first one shows the “Add” page, where members are asked what they would like to contribute to the ExhibitFiles site.

The next screen shows how the ‘Bits main page might look. (Obviously, the gray thumbnails would be populated with images.)

Finally, here’s a mock-up of an individual ‘Bits page. We’re hoping to add the ability to make comments that have associated media files. Notice there is an integrated media-player. This improvement would also be added to Case Studies and Reviews.

This is all preliminary and we’re still working through the details. I didn’t post the proposed form for adding ‘Bits, as this has many layers due to the multiple choices.  (There are lot’s of options for that screen, since we are allowing members to include images and video that already exists on external social media platforms).

We’re open to any comments or questions you might have about ‘Bits. We’ll let you know how this all progresses.

An Inquiry Group working under the auspices of the Center for Advancement of Informal Science Education (CAISE) is looking to catalog efforts that make informal science education experiences more inclusive of people with disabilities. Founded in 2007 with support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), CAISE is a center that works across the entire spectrum of informal science education to strengthen the community’s ability to gather evidence, communicate value, and improve practice.

The Inquiry Group wants to understand:
1. In what ways has the informal science education community worked in the past to include people with disabilities in informal science learning?
2. What does this prior work tell us about actions that should be taken in the future?

If you or your institution has been working to increase access to science education for people with disabilities through informal learning, you can help by completing this survey: http://tinyurl.com/Access-Survey

The survey isn’t limited to exhibitions. But if your work involves exhibitions, we also hope you will post a case study here on ExhibitFiles. (You could refer to it in the CAISE survey, so you don’t have to enter information twice.)

This will help CAISE, and everyone in the informal science education field, to become aware of the good work you have been doing—and, of equal importance, the challenges you encountered.

Thank you for helping.

Joel Bloom, longtime director of the Franklin Institute and ASTC’s first president, died on September 23. As many of us recall, Joel used to speak movingly of his childhood memories of dioramas at the American Museum of Natural History. An obituary in the Philadelphia Inquirer quoted one of his speeches: “One of my favorite exhibits was a magnificent Haida war canoe from the Northwest Coast. I would stand beside this canoe and think and dream…I don’t know if I would have become a scientist and then a museum director if that canoe had not inspired me.”  The museum was a “place of dreams,” Joel said.

Dioramas are one of the puzzles of contemporary museum planning. If you have quiet halls and beautiful, old dioramas, what do you do with them? ExhibitFiles member Colin Purrington points out that the diorama in his photo, shown here, is even toxic. What do you think?

If you’re going to the ASTC Annual Conference in Philadelphia next week, there’s an opportunity to pay a call on some venerable dioramas, like this one from the Academy of Natural Sciences. You can find out more about the Academy’s dioramas here.

It was because of Dan Spock’s informative and thought-provoking review of the Terror House that I found myself there in late May, while I was in Budapest for the ecsite meeting. As it happens, I visited with Andrea Bandelli, who posted his own review the other day, and I shared some of his reactions and reflections. There’s a forced-march quality to the experience, with no place to sit down and think or have a quiet conversation, that makes it hard to address the questions Andrea reminds us of: Why did this happen, and what does it mean for us? (Actually, you could sit, if you wanted to, at the table laid out for Nazi officials.)

There’s no doubt a visit to the Terror House is a powerful experience. Still, I wonder: As captives of a narrative that’s cinematic in its power, are we likelier to leave satisfied that the story is simply over? Is a themed environment that’s polished down to the last detail, lacking in the rough edges of reality, perhaps too smooth for a history of human suffering? Does the implied moral judgment fail to address what Primo Levi called moral gray zones, and thus let us, individually, off the hook? When I visited Dachau in the early 1960s, it was hard to find and starkly real. I wonder if the gritty immediacy made it harder to walk away as if a film had just ended.

Dan notes that the Terror House has stirred controversy within Hungary, at least in part for the very act of remembering it represents. Whatever the advantages and disadvantages of its cinematic interpretive structure, it does create at least one place for highly personal acts of remembrance and reflection, which people have made their own: a row of photographs of people killed after the 1958 revolution that runs around the outside of the building – and under it, a ledge.

What happens when you invite visitors to tell their own stories?

In his recent case study of the Liberty Science Center’s Skyscrapers exhibition, Wayne LaBar described a place among the towering exhibits where visitors can make themselves heard. As Wayne describes it, “Our visitors also have a voice in the story when they write their own memories about tall buildings, when they draw and submit a skyscraper design to be exhibited in the gallery, or when they assemble their own internet-based project, blogging about skyscrapers built in their neighborhood.” Wayne later sent along this postcard, left by one visitor:

Wayne was among the authors who contributed to the recently published book Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions (which Kathy McLean and I co-edited), which explores the museum world’s counterpart of citizen journalism: visitors actively commenting on, contributing to, and even creating exhibitions.

A few other ExhibitFiles case studies and reviews mention this kind of “visitor voice” exhibit (like the Cafeteria area in the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Race exhibition), but we know there are more. We hope others will share their experiences, experiments, and reflections here – and tell us how museums are responding to visitors’ contributions.

Are there topics you, or others you know, consider “unexhibitable”? The AAM’s National Association for Museum Exhibition (NAME) wants to hear about them. The Fall 2008 issue of the NAME journal, Exhibitionist, will consider this and related questions, and the editor, Gretchen Jennings, and Boston Museum of Science exhibit developer Maureen McConnell are looking for comments and reflections now. We also hope you’ll share any case studies and reviews here on ExhibitFiles to build up our collective record. We’ve already seen some examples (was the House of Terror in Budapest a concept that would have been considered impossible 30 years ago?).

More specifically, what Gretchen and Maureen want to know is: If there are ideas or topics you consider to be “unexhibitable” — that is, incapable of being made into an engaging museum exhibition — why is that? These are some of the reasons people have already mentioned:

- too controversial or sensitive
- too violent
- too revolting or disgusting
- too abstract
- too ordinary or insignificant
- untimely – could/could not have been exhibited years ago (or perhaps could e in a few years), but not now
- constrained by place – my museum/country could/could not do it, as opposed to another museum/country

On the other hand, if you think there is nothing that cannot be exhibited, could you share your thinking? Post your comments right here in the ExhibitFiles blog — or write to Gretchen or Maureen. If you’re willing to have your comments considered for inclusion in the issue, please respond by June 15 and identify yourself so they can contact you.