Justine Roberts, executive director of the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire in Dover, looked back at several case studies and reviews as she reflected on the many roles professional art can play in science and children’s museums.

At the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire (left) we are home to the largest art gallery in Dover, right inside our museum. Gallery 6 changes three to four times a year and features regional 2D and 3D artists. It is literally the heart of the physical museum and also its conceptual center. So we think a great deal about the different ways art functions in other children’s and science museums, and how we want to use art in our space.

As the following examples — drawn in part from case studies and reviews on ExhibitFiles — show, the role and use of art in and by non-art museums is hugely variable:

• Glenn A. Walsh, in his case study about art in the original Buhl Planetarium and Institute of Popular Science, Pittsburgh, talks about how the Buhl traditionally used art to “help explain science topics to the general public.” Artworks clarify and communicate ideas to the audience.

• Museums like the Exploratorium use art also to inspire curiosity, wonder, and awe. In this sense, as Paul Orselli puts it in his Bit about the Smart Art installation in the American Museum of Natural History’s Brain exhibition (right), art helps science museum visitors experience the way something works.

• But take the Chihuly installation at the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis. Although it is clearly there to inspire, it is not there to teach about glass, color, luminosity, or structure. What it does is establish the museum as an environment with built in affordances, provocations, and opportunities for exploration. In this case, the art is not an element in the space but of-a-piece with the visitor experience.

• I understand the art program is similarly integrated throughout the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh. What feels innovative to me in Pittsburgh is how art helps make the museum welcoming to adults — communicating that this is their place, too.

This isn’t just about science centers and children’s museums. Take Systema Metropolis and Who Am I? (both reviewed on ExhibitFiles) from two different London museums. These projects both use art to invite participation — to invite the visitor to organize and sort information.

• As Lynda Kelly explains it, Systema Metropolis, part of a contemporary art exhibition at London’s Natural History Museum, combined art with graphics and other materials to create a layered exhibit that provoked and engaged visitors in the process of scientific inquiry – the “artistic process of enabling visitors to make their own meaning” (and did you know the London History Museum has a contemporary art program?!).

• Who Am I?, at London’s Science Museum, was similar but went another step and, in the lobby, installed a collection of Identity Dolls (left) made by community members. Art was not just about helping communicate complex ideas. The audience made their own art about the issues in the exhibit — they used art-making to organize their thoughts and express what they knew.

The Children’s Museum of New Hampshire’s Gallery 6 serves a combination of these roles. It provides inspiration to visitors, and helps establish the museum as a creative and interdisciplinary space. It also attracts adults who browse the work and often initiate conversations with their kids in a way we don’t see in other exhibits. The gallery also adds a dimension to our aesthetics that are not standard for a children’s museum. We show professional art in all it’s complexity and interest.

Just as importantly Gallery 6 establishes a visual link between visitors’ playful self-expression and that of professionals. You can see Gallery 6 from our studio space (pictured above), and children’s artwork is hung so that you can see it from the gallery. We are intentionally layering together what visitors do and what professional creatives in our community do. For us, integrating art into the museum is part of positioning the museum as a meeting place for ideas and people. We haven’t yet done a project like the Identity Dolls but it would be in keeping with how we understand the role of art in our work.

So . . . art and science are historical cousins but the story doesn’t end there. The dynamic is as complex, variable, and evolving as the field as a whole.

Christine Reich, director of research and evaluation at the Museum of Science, Boston, visited Central Asia a few weeks ago. (She appears, right, with a docent at a museum in Tajikistan). In this post, she shares observations and reflections about museums she encountered there.

Imagine you work for a museum in one of the most powerful republics in the world. Then one day, seemingly overnight, the republic dissolves. How would your museum respond? This very scenario occurred 20 years ago with the disbanding of the Soviet Union. I recently had the opportunity to visit the five ‘stans of Central Asia (Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan) and experienced firsthand how this disruptive event influenced the museums in these five nations.

Founded in 1991, the ‘stans are relatively young. Similar to young adults at the age of 20, these nations are in the process of forming their identities, which are built upon yet distinct from that of their parent nation— the Soviet Union. This identity-shaping is reflected in the countries’ national museums, which often seek to connect these newly formed countries to glorious empires of the past. In Tajikistan, a museum emphasizes the region’s historic connections to the empires of Persia and Alexander the Great, while in Uzbekistan the museums highlight the territory’s past as the birthplace of the great conqueror Tamerlane.

While the ‘stans are similar in their status as young nations, their political climates are quite different, and this difference is evident in the content of their museums. Nowhere is this better exemplified than through a comparison of the museums in Turkmenistan and Kyrgyzstan. Over the past 20 years, Turkmenistan has been a dictatorship that is ruled by a cult of personality. Images of the immediate past and current president are ubiquitous. Multiple museums are home to galleries filled with pictures of the current president as he engages in all kinds of activities: riding a bike, steering a yacht, teaching children how to use computers, wearing traditional clothing, cooking outdoors, and my personal favorite—fixing someone’s teeth (he used to be a dentist). These pictures were the same in each museum, and like the omnipresent images of the president that existed in all cities and towns, the presidential portraits in these museums always left me with the distinct feeling I was being watched.

Unlike Turkmenistan where the government has been relatively stable (albeit authoritarian) since the time the nation was formed, Kyrgyzstan’s recent history has been rife with conflict and instability. April 2010 marked the occurrence of a revolution that both ousted an unjust dictator and initiated a violent, inter-ethnic conflict. Kyrgyzstan’s Historical Museum did not shy away from this struggle, but rather embraced it. Amidst the Soviet-era bronze sculptures that portrayed the glories of the Bolshevik revolution, the Historical Museum mounted a new exhibition that depicts the events of the April 2010 revolution. Images in this exhibition did not glorify the revolution, nor did they denounce it. They were human images of loss and struggle, depicting the pain that comes from losing someone you love as well as the joy that emanates from knowing that freedom may be close at hand. This Sunday, October 30th, the existing, interim President in Kyrgyzstan did not run for re-election and the country held open elections. This was a first within the five ‘stans. Due to this exhibition, I found myself watching the election closely, wishing peace and stability for a country that is now near and dear to my heart.

As I visited the museums of the ‘stans, my first reaction was to dismiss many of their practices as they were antithetical to my own personal view of museums as democratic institutions. Over time, I became less judgmental and eventually came to the understanding that it is difficult for a museum to serve as a democratic institution when it does not exist within a democracy. Despite the (at times overt) political agenda of many of the museums, all the museums I visited had powerful stories to tell. Each provided insights into the political climate of the nations, the future aspirations of the people, and the history with which they chose to identify. Slowly, I realized that similar to our own museums, these museums were both shapers of and shaped by the societal context in which they exist.

Thus, I began to wonder, if someone from the ‘stans visited the United States tomorrow, what would he or she see in our museums? What national identity do we portray in the objects we choose to exhibit, and in the historical stories we choose to tell (or not tell)? What do our museums betray about our political climate? I leave these questions for you to ponder.

The Boston Children’s Museum was probably not the first museum to engage in organized methods of direct visitor feedback, but we were surely in the game early.

It was an obvious step. We believed in being “client centered,” so finding out what the client needed, wanted, or thought about our museum was important to us. This was in the late 1960s and early’70s. Visitor research, as we now understand it, barely existed.

In our beginning use of “talk-backs,” as we called them, we simply cut to the chase and asked people what they thought about the Children’s Museum. We posted many of these comments, both good and bad, and the suggestions for improvements or new exhibits and programs for other visitors to see.

We eventually began to incorporate talk-backs into specific exhibitions. One of the first of these was for a project called Lito the Shoeshine Boy. This 1974 exhibition was based on a photo-documentary-style children’s book about a day in the life of a poor, abandoned street boy in Guatemala. A maze-like space, stage-set-style rooms and large black-and-white photos and text from the book suggested the environments and activities of Lito’s everyday life, as he made it more or less on his own, with little adult help and no schooling.

Visitors were asked to consider this story and write to us about it on notepaper that could be tacked up on a bulletin board. And write they did, about their sorrow for this boy, with thanks for telling his story, or appalled that we were telling such a sad story in a “fun” place. There were also political opinions about how the Litos of the world had been created—one writer blamed the United Fruit Company and included a snide suggestion about our possible connection to those scoundrels!

Our motives may have been a bit disingenuous. We knew that this exhibition would raise a few eyebrows, and we wanted feedback about this risk from our visitors. We suspected that visitors who opposed our installation for whatever reason would feel a bit more forgiving of us if offered the chance to tell us so in public. We also thought that visitors who were emotionally touched by the exhibition would be grateful for a place to reveal their feelings.

Thus was born the notion of the talk-back as a Boston Children’s Museum device that might do three things:

• inform us, the producers, if our products were found to be useful and enjoyable to the people for whom we had produced them;
• provide a place for people to vent strongly felt emotions or opinions that the exhibition may have evoked;
• mitigate controversy evoked by some of our possibly risky undertakings by providing a public forum for naysayers to “tell us off.”

Subsequent experiments would bear out the utility of all three of these suppositions and eventually add two others:

• provide a medium for visitors to talk to each other;
• provide a way for visitors to become part of the exhibit by continually adding to its content.

If ever an exhibition cried out for the use of talk-backs for all these purposes, it was the 1986 Endings: An Exhibit about Death and Loss. We designed three talk-backs for the 5,000-square-foot space. (As developer of this exhibition, I should have known to have made it four… but more about that later.)

The first component asked visitors if they had been named for anyone. We expected a light response, mostly citing grandparents, aunts, and uncles. The response was light, but surprisingly featured many examples of children named for soldiers—kin and friends—lost in the Vietnam War. This was fascinating both to us and our visitors.

The second component asked for opinions about the afterlife. After describing a variety of beliefs (unattached to a specific religion), including the notion that there is none, visitors were asked, “What do you and your family believe?” Two of my personal favorites were, “My family believes in heaven, but I’m not so sure,” and “Our soils (sic) fly up to heaven,” complete with an illustration thereof.

The third component should have been two: It asked visitors to tell us what they thought of the exhibition or to share an experience they had had with death. I think some visitors were confused by this double question, though most chose to answer one or the other. Visitors answering the first question were all over the map, often responding to other people’s postings. Some thought it brilliant, others that it was inappropriate for a children’s museum, or that we should read our New Testaments—then we’d know that there was no such thing as death! Some younger visitors wanted to tell us that they thought the material was OK for them (9- or 10-year olds), but they feared it was inappropriate for “younger” visitors.

Answers to the second question were sometimes poignant, sometimes funny, and sometimes so personal they weren’t posted, but placed in the box we provided. Many of these were written by adults. Many were very long and heartfelt. One often had the sense that some of these visitors had been looking for a way to tell someone about their feelings for a very long time. In many ways, the content provided by our visitors was just as engaging as the exhibition itself.

Talk-back boards were used with equal effect and poignancy in an exhibition called Families, about the love and commitment of members of nontraditional families to each other. Here again, we, and our visitors, heard how grateful kids felt that their own particular type of family had been recognized, although some adults took issue with the appropriateness of the presentation of a homosexual couple in a children’s museum.

In the mid-1980s, Michael Spock and I took our love of this device with us to the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. One of its first uses there was to help us and our visitors focus on an old, miniature diorama called “Morning Star,” in the Native American Hall. In it, a young woman was being sacrificed by a group of men. Label copy explained that this was an annual event meant to please the gods. Though the diorama had sat un-remarked upon for 30 years or more, a white feminist visitor was so outraged by it that she wrote a scathing letter to us. We consulted a Pawnee eldress, and she too wrote a letter explaining that this really did happen, that they weren’t proud of it, but that there was no reason not to talk about it. These two letters were posted in a talk-back, in which other visitors could state their opinions. Should we get rid of this exhibit, we asked, or keep it? In the meantime, staff research revealed many flaws in both the presentation and the label copy. Based on visitor commentary over a long period, we decided to keep the diorama and correct it. It became a less lurid presentation and more accurate—for instance, the whole village had participated, not just a group of overexcited-looking men.

Other talk-backs were used, especially in Life Over Time, the Field Museum’s large exhibition about evolution and the history of life on Earth. These talk-backs addressed some sticky issues that would be seen by some to have religious implications. One asked (in the context of the Urey-Miller experiment* of the 1950s and a book of creation stories from all over the world) what visitors thought about how life began on Earth. Responses to this ranged from “kill all abortion doctors” to “Darwin is God” to “evolution is a glove on the hand of God.” None of these, of course, addressed the question we asked, but all made it clear that visitors of every persuasion were eager to state their opinions and show what side they were on or, like the last, that they could see both sides.

One important lesson learned at the Field Museum was in Animal Kingdom. An early talk-back in that conservation-minded exhibition asked, “What can you do to help the environment?” and provided some prompts, such as recycling, or saving gas or electricity. To this, visitors replied with observations like “Charlie loves Sally” and a variety of four-letter words. Why? Because they knew they were being set up. We weren’t really asking them what they thought, we just wanted them to parrot something back to us, and they refused. We took it out.

Now, a few words about technique. Readers will have noticed that every example uses paper and pencil and not computers. The biggest innovation seems to be that of the Post-it. (And how glad I am of it—no more worrying about little ones with thumbtacks or pushpins!) Though computers were considered at the Field Museum, we eventually decided in each case to stick to the old technique. There are a couple of reasons. One is that it is much easier (and easier for more people at one time) to scan the comments of others or to add their own. Another reason is that people can place their comments in relationship to others or to graphics that are supporting an idea.

This is not to say that the variety of uses of computers and video kiosks for feedback in many institutions doesn’t work fine. In addition to having innate appeal for some visitors, computers also offer the institution a simple way to keep all the comments, instead of having shoeboxes of “stickies” floating around. But it is also important to remember that no matter how consistently or scientifically talk-backs are collected, they are no replacement for actual visitor research, and that collecting talk-backs will not yield a reliable database for analysis.

At the Field Museum, we also experimented with the use of a “comment book” at the end of Daniel’s Story, a traveling exhibition about the Holocaust. This is a perfectly good way to allow for visitor feedback. But even using paper and pencil, it shares some of the aspects of computer feedback, in that only one person can use it at a time, and it’s more difficult for other visitors to review what others have written or to respond in a direct way to the comments of others.

It is for these reasons that the single question “talk-back” seems to me to be the most useful format. It becomes a temperature-taking device, a venting mechanism, a dialogue enhancer, and an integral part of the exhibition content. All in all, talk-backs, by their very participatory nature, help to turn every exhibit they are in to one of dynamic daily change and thereby change the tenor of each installation for the better.

* In this stunning experiment, the combination of water, hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and an electrical spark yielded the creation of three life-essential amino acids in a week’s time, suggesting that life on Earth could have begun through a happy, but accidental combination of common materials.

Janet is now an independent museum consultant and member of the Museum Group. This post was adapted from articles that appeared in the Journal of Museum Education, Volume 28, Number 3 (Fall 2003), and in Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions, edited by Kathleen McLean and Wendy Pollock (ASTC 2007).

A number of ExhibitFiles posts have celebrated the delightfully simple and small. This seems like a good day to remember some of them.Take, for example, Nina Simon’s post about the “decaying dice of Ricky Jay” at LA’s Museum of Jurassic Technology. Nothing but dice and labels, dramatically lit. The exhibit “drops a tiny question mark like a monkey wrench into assumptions we make every day,” she says. “It takes the basic concept of chance and turns it into a beautiful challenge to think—an open question instead of a closed experience.”

Paul Orselli wrote about toasters – that’s right, an exhibit about toasters at St. Louis’s City Museum, where a volunteer armed with a loaf of bread offered to make visitors a slice of toast. Dan Spock added a comment: “I liked the simplicity of the conception and design and the use of real toasting and the delicious toasty aromas.”

Beth Redmond-Jones wrote about an installation at the Battery Maritime Building in New York (right) that turned the building, with its pipes and pillars, “into a giant musical instrument.”

Kathy Krafft wrote about a low-budget in-house exhibition the Sciencenter in Ithaca made, with inspiration from a book of puzzles available from the public library.

Dave Stroud wrote about the Try It! Lab, a prototyping space at Utah’s Thanksgiving Point Institute where visitors and developers interact and “the ‘wow factor’ of the décor” is limited.

And how about Tom Nielsen’s beautiful essay about soap bubbles? What could be simpler, or more beautiful?

Last week, the Hull-House Museum’s director, Lisa Yun Lee, spoke at the closing session of the Visitor Studies Association meeting in Chicago about her vision for museums. She critiqued the economic impact argument that’s often made these days– that museums are important as economic engines and generators of local revenue and jobs. While this is certainly valid, museums contribute much more, she said, including fostering conviviality and offering “an opportunity to unleash our visitors’ radical imaginations about what might have been and might be.”

It seems a modest beginning, a corner and a couple of rakes. But even with limited resources, there are things we can do to make a real difference.

Contribute your images and stories about convivial museums and exhibitions through the ExhibitFiles Facebook page or by posting a Bit. More

In our recent book, The Convivial Museum, we suggest that these are key dimensions of conviviality: a welcoming spirit, orientation to the community, comfort, opportunities for social engagement, and places for healing and renewal. The book focuses on physical features of museums—like approaches, entryways, seating, lounges, and nooks—because although they are often overlooked, they have profound effects on the quality of a museum experience. For more, check out the discussion Nina Simon hosted on her blog earlier this year.

Use the Bits feature of ExhibitFiles to submit your image, video, or story of a convivial museum experience, and be included in a dynamic discussion of successes and failures, obstacles and opportunities. Be sure to identify the image and include a comment about the convivial quality of the place, how you (or others) are working to make it more convivial, or a question or challenge it represents.

Log in and post a Bit; or share your image and story on Facebook (or email me). The conference session is on Monday, October 17, in Baltimore,10:45 a.m.- 12:00 noon.

About the images: Darcie Forhman’s photograph of visitors to Washington, D.C.’s National Gallery of Art (above) is in a section of The Convivial Museum about ambience. Erik Thogersen’s photograph of comfortable seating (left) is from his review of a new building at the Denver Art Museum. Another example is the Center for Creative Connections, which Kathleen McLean profiles in her case study.

• traveling exhibitions in the traditional sense – designed by an organization or consortium and sent on the road to a number of venues
• museum-sponsored vans or buses that extend a museum’s reach in its community or state
• “pop up” exhibitions- created by one or more designers or by visitors themselves – that appear in neighborhoods or other venues, not necessarily museums.

If you’re interested, send an abstract by August 1st to editor Gretchen Jennings. In 250 words maximum, briefly describe your article; how it relates to issue theme; your background/qualifications for writing the article. Abstracts will be vetted by our editorial advisory board, and you will be notified of acceptance or non/acceptance within several weeks.

For back issues of the journal, visit the NAME website.

Contact: Gretchen Jennings, Exhibitionist Editor, gretchenjennings[at]rcn.com.
Abstract deadline: August 1, 2011.

In this guest post,

Exhibits are catalysts for encouraging group interaction. People bring their personal histories to their encounters with exhibits, they talk with one another – and that is how learning happens. We know this intuitively – and over the years, we’ve also gathered considerable evidence about characteristics of exhibition design that support and encourage this outcome.

In 1992, the Philadelphia/Camden Informal Science Education Collaborative (PISEC) started working on the Family Science Learning Project (NSF/ESI #9355504) to systematically test and refine our understanding of the learning behavior of the visiting unit characteristic of most museums: the small group. We identified seven characteristics of exhibits that our observations and collective experience suggested were associated with what we called “family-friendly” exhibits.

• Multi-Sided  - Family can cluster around the exhibit
• Multi-User - Interaction allows for several sets of hands or bodies
• Accessible - Comfortably used by children and adults
• Multi-Outcome - Observation and interactions are sufficiently complex to foster group discussion
• Multi-Modal - Appeals to different learning styles and levels of knowledge
• Readable - Text is arranged in easily understood segments
• Relevant - Provides cognitive links to visitors’ existing knowledge and experience

These features apply to any small group, not just families. The model has also been found to apply to programs by substituting “comprehensible” for “readable.”

Each of the PISEC partner museums – The Franklin Institute, Academy of Natural Sciences, New Jersey State Aquarium (now called the New Jersey Academy for Aquatic Sciences), and Philadelphia Zoo – added a new component that embodied these characteristics to an existing exhibit. Our results were impressive: In each museum, we saw a measurable increase in active family learning. After the publication of the results of this study (Borun et al., 1998), the PISEC museums and others went on to use these “seven characteristics of family-friendly exhibits) in the creation of new exhibitions. At the Franklin Institute, for example, the seven characteristics guided design of Kid Science (above), an exhibition for families with children ages five to eight, which opened in 2001. Prototypes of the interactives were extensively tested to be certain that they appealed to this age group and communicated their messages – and that design reflected those characteristics we knew were likely to be catalysts for group interaction. In our summative evaluation, we found that Kid Science engaged families longer and more actively than any other exhibit in the museum.

Other museums – like the Bay Area Discovery Museum in Sausalito – have also applied these principles.  Justine Roberts wrote about one of these exhibitions in her ExhibitFiles case study of Lookout Cove (left).

The PISEC group has since gone on to extend our experimentation to programs, including museum/community partnerships for underserved families (reported in our latest publication, In Their Own Voices: Museums and Communities Changing Lives).

It is important for museums to be facilitators of family exchange and group learning, not obstacles. PISEC’s findings offer important insights and guidance for those designing new exhibits.

Find out more

• Borun, M., Cleghorn, A., and Garfield, C. (1995). Family learning in museums: A bibliographic review. Curator, 38(4), 262–270.
• Borun, M., Chambers, M., and Cleghorn, A. (1996). Families are learning in science museums. Curator, 39(2), 124–138.
• Borun, M., Chambers, M., Dritsas, J., and Johnson, J. (1997). Enhancing family learning through exhibits. Curator, 40(4), 279–295.
• Borun, M., & Dritsas, J. (1997). Developing family-friendly exhibits. Curator, 40(3), 178–196.
• Borun, M., Dritsas, J., Johnson, J., Peter, N. E., Wagner, K., Fadigan, K., Jangaard, A., Stroup, E., and Wenger, A. (1998). Family learning in museums: The PISEC perspective. Washington D.C.: The Association of Science Technology Centers.
• Borun, Minda. (2002). Object-Based Learning and Family Groups in Scott Paris (ed.) Perspectives on Object-Centered Learning in Museums, Lawrence Erlbaum, Associates, Mahwah, New Jersey
• Borun, Minda, Barbara Martin Kelly, Lisa Jo Rudy, (2011). In Their Own Voices: Museums and Communities Changing Lives, Philadelphia, PA: The Franklin Institute.

Last fall, I was on a panel that discussed exhibits on the waterfront, and Wendy thought it might be good if I shared some of that info here. I thought it might be helpful if I expanded upon some of that thinking for this audience.

My background is in exhibit development and design, and I spent a couple of years at the Exploratorium working on their Outdoor Exploratorium (OE) project during an r+d phase. We created a conceptual framework and developed strategies for siting exhibits on the streets of San Francisco, while building and testing prototypes. The final OE was installed long after I left and can be found here. In addition, I began an informal (and occasional) exhibit platform called the San Francisco Mobile Museum. Most of our exhibits take place outside in the city.

The opportunities and complexities of developing exhibits outdoors are as big as….well, you get the drift. So I won’t attempt to cover it all. Typically though, audience, duration, and partnerships have the biggest impact on any public outdoor project. In the center of that axis lie some possibilities.

Free yourself from permanence
One approach I have found to yield fairly quick results from a public, maintenance, and political perspective is to take a tack of “ritualized temporary” vs. permanent (especially at a waterfront). Ritualized temporary means that you’re putting something up in the same framework – be it location or time – and changing it out regularly. These can be just as impactful as a permanent installation, and create delightful change.

Why else might this work? Your audience’s appetite for change, and…
When working outdoors, oftentimes you may be dealing with an audience that sees it everyday. So accommodating some form of change is good. Think of anything such as a tidal indicator to Anish Kapoor’s “Cloud Gate” (a.k.a. Millennium Bean). These objects reflect, frame, or rely upon the inherent change in the outdoors as their primary interactive aesthetic.

… your funders, naysayers, and just plain big teams
It’s much easier to get buy-in, sign off, or the big OK from a temporary installation than a permanent piece. Really. It’s also a great way to get a new partner, group, or space to make room for something new if it’s not going to be around forever (even thought sometimes it ends up that way).

It’s a growing experience
In the rare event I’ve been too subtle, it’s extremely complex and consumes a lot of resources to develop outdoor exhibits. However, I believe in any museum it’s important for exhibit teams (and individuals) to have experiences that offer them opportunities for practice. So using strategies such as a ritualized temporary approach ensure that happens. It helps grow institutional competency and can also broaden your reach.

Note: Here is a very rough list of notes and resources I have found inspirational and useful when looking overall at developing for the outdoors. As you can imagine, I’m far from the last word on the topic, so please feel free to suggest additions – it might be nice to flesh it out further and perhaps post it here!

Maria Mortati

How often should a museum change its exhibits, and how extensive should those changes be? These are not new questions. I first encountered them working on Exploration Place, Inc., where we —White Oak Associates, Gyroscope, Inc., and Talking Spaces, led by Museum President Al DeSena—talked about creating a “delta museum.” The core concept was that large parts of the exhibits could be reused and rethemed, making it less expensive to refresh the museum. The Delta Museum moved past reliance on a changing exhibit gallery, and instead looked at the whole museum as changeable.

The Big Lab, at the California Science Center in Los Angeles (right), designed by Gyroscope, Inc., is an example of this. The scale of the exhibits supports collaboration, the activities encourage creative problem solving around science-based inquiry, and they are flexible enough to allow daily use by children even as those users gain in skill or their interests change.

Explora, in Albuquerque, takes this to another next level, treating even walls and work surfaces as flexible. There is almost no infrastructure. In the middle is the idea of an exhibit “platform,” which provides a designed environment, but leaves room for staff and for visitors to co-create the final museum experience. (This image, left, is from a review by Nina Simon.)

There is a significant cost difference between a traditional exhibit that visitors are invited to use until they grow tired or it gets old, and one that staff and visitors are encouraged to change seasonally, if not hourly, and incrementally.  The first model is capital intensive, the second is staff intensive.  This is an important difference since many museums find it easier to raise money for new exhibits and harder to fund staff.  Although when I think about why change matters, I am more drawn to the co-created model as a way to support active participation, customization, and durable relationships.

At the Children’s Museum of New Hampshire, where I recently became the executive director, we do not have a changing exhibit gallery in the traditional sense. Instead, we focus on staff-driven change throughout the museum.  We also seed change with Gallery 6—an art and craft gallery in the physical and emotional center of the museum—which hosts 3-4 shows a year. These shows create a continuum between the playful investigations of our young visitors and those of professional artists, and they inform drop-in activities, workshops, and evening events.

The question remains how much to change, and what types of change are meaningful.  Each organization struggles with its own challenges around supporting change and each is dealing with a different physical plant, and other constraints.  Jennifer Farrington of the Chicago Children’s Museum, will be hosting a conference session at InterActivity in Houston on Thursday, May 19, on this topic. In addition to CCM and CMNH you can learn about the innovative strategies being piloted at Zeum, in San Francisco, The Children’s Museum of Phoenix, and the Children’s Museum of Pittsburgh.