http://exhibitfiles.org/browse/index The most recent activity on ExhibitFiles en-us Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:10:22 -0700 This link was sent to a list serv and I thought it was such a valuable resource for us I wanted to be sure that it was saved to this archive. It's a photo collection that documents the history of display and programs at the AMNH. If only we all had the time and inclination to file away our work like this! What a valuable tool for the field--thank you AMNH. There are some really great images of our museum education roots--and some classic museum exhibit styles here. Check it out! http://exhibitfiles.org/amnh_history_of_display http://exhibitfiles.org/amnh_history_of_display Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:03:05 -0700 A friend reccomended that I visit the Hong Kong Science Center. Went on a Wednesday night, Wednesday is the free night at the Museum. Lots of families and young couples on dates. I started at the top floor and worked my way from the third floor to the basement. The Museum has lots Exploratorium Cookbook exhibits. As I was leaving the basement I noticed "The Deep" exhibition. I walked in and at first I thought it was an exhibition about movie props. Doubled back and read the intro panel and watched the intro video and then started going through the exhibition. The exhibition is divided into sections, by ocean depth, with a video at the end showing the species in their habitats. It was facinating viewing the species and learning about the ways they adapted to their environments. After I went through once, I doubled back and went through a second and third time and noticed many visititors doing the same. I loved the exhibition, it felt like I had visited "another planet", it was hard to believe these creatures live on our planet. I appreciated the tone of the exhibition it was not sensational, just factual, which made it that much more interesting. The exhibition is approximetly 30' by 70' or 2100 square feet, I spent 40 minutes in the gallery and many visitors were spending longer. http://exhibitfiles.org/the_deep http://exhibitfiles.org/the_deep Thu, 24 Jul 2008 11:47:55 -0700 Flip It, Fold It, Figure It Out! Playing with Math is a 1500-sq. foot traveling mathematics exhibition with companion take-home educational materials. There are two copies of the traveling exhibit: one for the members of the North Carolina Grassroots Science Museums Collaborative reaching over 500,000 visitors, and a second that travels nationally to science centers reaching an estimated 750,000 additional visitors. The exhibit is organized into seven clusters of related components. Each cluster comprises a main activity area surrounded by a collection of related objects and images—from blueprints and telescope lenses to sneakers and rugs. These collections, gathered from around the world, illustrate how architects and product designers, craftsmen and scientists, extend the same skills that visitors are using to create works that fill our everyday lives and the world around us. Project goals: 1. Engage participants in mathematical thinking and problem solving in familiar and interesting contexts. 2. Expand participants' understanding of the range of activities within the field of mathematics. 3. Involve participants in math activities aligned with the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) standards. 4. Strengthen a statewide informal mathematics learning initiative. 5. Provide professional development for staff in smaller North Carolina museums. 6. Enhance the opportunity for museums across the nation to present mathematics exhibits. Other guiding principles for the project: • Math concepts made explicit. Visitors will know they are using mathematical thinking skills, or will engage in activities that reveal an underlying mathematical principle. • Accessible to broadest possible audience (physically, culturally, and intellectually). • Core content to target upper-elementary-aged children with enough depth to be intellectually interesting for adults. • Culturally inclusive. Math concepts illustrated by interactive devices in the context of human endeavors in the arts, trades, etc. and using examples drawn from cultures around the world, historic and contemporary. http://exhibitfiles.org/flip_it_fold_it_figure_it_out_playing_with_math http://exhibitfiles.org/flip_it_fold_it_figure_it_out_playing_with_math Tue, 22 Jul 2008 20:10:45 -0700 Science happens all around us, all the time. Multiple-award-winning <i>Science Buzz</i> grew out of an initiative to develop and test ways to tell stories about "current science" and make it relevant to visitors. (The definition of "current science" has shifted and expanded over time, and now includes science behind the headlines, emerging research, and seasonal science.) Why? Because science is an essential literacy for full civic and economic participation. Visitors might not ever need to create a recombinant vaccine or a clone, manipulate quantum dots, or generate a stem cell line, but they're asked to make sense of issues surrounding those techniques and products with every election, trip to the grocery store, or visit to the doctor's office. The exhibition as it stands today is a thematic thread throughout the museum, blending up-to-the-minute science news (using digital feeds) with more traditional interactive experiences, graphics, and object-based displays. Everything works through the use of templates--a library of portable, reusable furniture pieces, graphic formats, digital components and programs, and conventions for structuring content--that allow the project team to identify a story, create some experiences, and deliver the final product to the exhibit floor very quickly. The digital templates use an array of techniques--RSS, tagging, XML, VXML, and an open-source content management system--to deliver content to displays, computer kiosks, and the website. By aligning current science stories with the topics and content of our galleries, we extend and deepen the value of the basic science exhibits by connecting new meaning to them. A happy byproduct is that scientists, other content experts, museum staff, museum visitors, and web visitors are all able to contribute content (from full stories to comments and questions, to simpler interactions such as voting in a poll) to the exhibits and the website. Evolving social technologies have allowed us to revolutionize our exhibit development process, creating rapid change in each of SMM's galleries, while giving museum visitors, both physical and virtual, a new way to discuss science issues. http://exhibitfiles.org/science_buzz http://exhibitfiles.org/science_buzz Wed, 23 Jul 2008 12:54:27 -0700 In 2007 we were commissioned to provide creative installations for the new Tree Top Walkway, Rhizotron passageway and Plaza at the Royal Botanical Gardens, Kew, London. When I first started thinking about this exciting project…doodling on the back of envelopes and thinking about trees, I came up with the idea of ‘tree as service provider’ as a way of delivering our message. Choosing bronze as the main material was a challenge, but it is a fantastic medium and has really worked well. At Engineered Arts we delight in working with artists and the creative team we used on this project really helped pull it all together http://exhibitfiles.org/tree_top_walkway_and_rhizotron http://exhibitfiles.org/tree_top_walkway_and_rhizotron Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:38:51 -0700 My three sons (ages 13, 10, and 8) gave Liberty Science Center's outdoor exhibition called "Wildlife Challenge" a whirl recently, and they had a great time. There are many high-minded arguments that science centers make about their exhibits being "educational." But, let's face it, sometimes our visitors just want someplace to flex their muscles as well as their minds, and to blow off a little steam in the process. Wildlife Challenge, an outdoor obstacle course with a light-handed content overlay relating to animal locomotion and behavior in the New Jersey landscape, is a breath of fresh air (literally!) for every young visitor to the Liberty Science Center. Each of the exhibition's set pieces is placed around a nicely landscaped area with paths, shrubs, rock walls, and seating areas. Young visitors get to complete a series of themed obstacle course stations as they move through each wildlife challenge. They can "Scamper Like A Squirrel" on a set of balance beams before they dash like egrets into a maze-like "salt marsh" complete with misters overhead and a squishy substrate below. One of the activities my sons enjoyed most was the "Worm Wiggle." Dozens of large (perhaps just under three feet in diameter) inflatable exercise balls were tethered underneath a low canopy of netting to hold them into place. Wiggling just like a worm, young visitors needed to find the interstitial spaces to move to the exit of this station. (Kudos to the LSC team for finding a simple and economical way to create this truly "immersive"experience!) Visitors scurry through pitch black culvert pipes in the "Rat Ramble" (my favorite comment about this section from my son Philip, the future entomologist, "It smells like ants inside here!") before moving through a fairly standard "Spider's Web" made of large ropes, to climb the "Falcon Flight" tower for the grand finale ride down a zip line. But what are kids really "learning" from the Wildlife Challenge exhibition? Perhaps that some things inside (or in this case outside) a museum can be mostly about having some gross motor fun rather than being force-fed a college semester's worth of information about a given area of science content. In speaking with some of the LSC exhibits folks, it was clear that their in-house development and installation of Wildlife Challenge was a bit of "fast, cheap, and out of control" but the LSC staff clearly put a lot of heart into their efforts, and it shows in the smiling faces and boisterous laughter of the satisfied visitors to this outdoor exhibition. http://exhibitfiles.org/wildlife_challenge http://exhibitfiles.org/wildlife_challenge Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:43:20 -0700 There are at least 3 aspects which have the potential to make the Terror House an outstanding institution: the location, which is the actual headquarters of the nazi and then communist secret police in Hungary; the museology, which is quite recent (the museum opened 6 years ago), and employs a variety of media and scenographic techniques; the topic, a highly contentious subject which remains very much a contemporary issue. Places like Robben Island or the District 6 museum in Cape Town are among my terms of reference in this sense: museums which have a high significance for the local community, and succeed in communicating to a wide variety of publics the history, the stories and the emotions they stand to represent. Unfortunately the Terror House did not deliver as it could have been. The building is authentic, but the way it is organized internally bears little or no resemblance to its original function; and the museology is rather shallow, focussing more on “theming” and staging rather than on interpretation and engagement. Which is a pity, considering the potential that this institution could have. The first impact with the Terror House is intriguing: it’s clear since the entrance and the first rooms that design, or better, scenography, plays a fundamental role in this museum. Several icons which I had seen on the museum’s literature are prominently exposed: a military tank in the main hall of the building; the dinner table for the Arrowcross party officers; a black AVH car etc. Such icons however are rarely combined with an interpretive support to make sense of them; most of the time their function is to “scare” the visitor and stimulate the sense of terror that gives the museum its name. On the emotional level, the Terror House works very well: it is like a rich, ever changing stage for a theatre performance. After passing the first couple of rooms, one always wonders what will be the stage and décor in the next room. But the museological endeavour stops there: in almost all rooms there’s nothing more than a one or two page English text to make sense of the setting. Media and objects are functional to the stage, the “theming” of the room, not the other way around. One could argue that the Terror House is a memorial to be enjoyed mostly by Hungarians: I disagree, and there are plenty of examples where multiple languages are used to address a variety of publics. Some rooms could lend themselves to a much higher degree of interpretation: the one dedicated to propaganda, for example (actually 2 contiguous rooms) contains only advertisement posters, wall to ceiling, certainly very eye catching but rather shallow in terms of how propaganda worked during the communist regime. To me the main disappointment after visiting the Terror House was the fact that it didn’t tackle at all the main questions of the subject it deals with: why did that happened? Why political terror, violence and fear are such a human aspect – to the point that they go across political sides, as it is clear in the first rooms and from the building itself? If the historical perspective can be found in books, the Terror House is more like the illustrations that come with a history book: but the museum remains weak on the narrative, the critical look at facts, and the meaningfulness of the objects it contains. http://exhibitfiles.org/the_terror_house http://exhibitfiles.org/the_terror_house Tue, 01 Jul 2008 21:26:02 -0700 The Secret Life of Objects, an Interactive Map of Finnish Design is a selection of objects from the collections dating from 1874 to 2008 on show in the Design Museum. In the interactive map visitors can give their comments about the objects and enjoy comments that were left by other visitors. We organized workshops in which teenagers and children were invited to work with design objects using music, poetry, photography and drawing. Audio-visual materials gathered in the workshops are accessible in the exhibition and on-line through the interactive map and the blog. We also organized one workshop inviting the museum staff to comment. These comments worked as triggers of visitors' contributions. They were the pre-prepared material that was in the interactive map before the exhibition started. Visitors can comment on the historical material related to the objects, on the material coming from the workshops, on the objects of the exhibition, on other visitors' comments, on the exhibition as a whole, and on the future design. Text comments left through the stand were printed and placed near the design objects. This project is making the museum collection accessible to new audiences (children, teenagers, and virtual communities), to different moments (after, during and before the visit), to linguistic minorities (written material in Swedish, English and Finnish) and to different perspectives and vocabularies (visitors’ and museum staff’s). In parallel it is is improving access by showing different materials (videos, poems, music and drawings) coming from museum’s resources (workshops). All these possibilities allow people with different abilities to engage with the visit. For making this interactive map we have used an open source software developed in Systems of Representation Research Group: ImaNote. http://imanote.uiah.fi/ http://exhibitfiles.org/the_secret_life_of_objects_an_interactive_map_of_finnish_design http://exhibitfiles.org/the_secret_life_of_objects_an_interactive_map_of_finnish_design Tue, 05 Aug 2008 11:10:22 -0700 This link was sent to a list serv and I thought it was such a valuable resource for us I wanted to be sure that it was saved to this archive. It's a photo collection that documents the history of display and programs at the AMNH. If only we all had the time and inclination to file away our work like this! What a valuable tool for the field--thank you AMNH. There are some really great images of our museum education roots--and some classic museum exhibit styles here. Check it out! http://exhibitfiles.org/amnh_history_of_display http://exhibitfiles.org/amnh_history_of_display Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:03:05 -0700 A friend reccomended that I visit the Hong Kong Science Center. Went on a Wednesday night, Wednesday is the free night at the Museum. Lots of families and young couples on dates. I started at the top floor and worked my way from the third floor to the basement. The Museum has lots Exploratorium Cookbook exhibits. As I was leaving the basement I noticed "The Deep" exhibition. I walked in and at first I thought it was an exhibition about movie props. Doubled back and read the intro panel and watched the intro video and then started going through the exhibition. The exhibition is divided into sections, by ocean depth, with a video at the end showing the species in their habitats. It was facinating viewing the species and learning about the ways they adapted to their environments. After I went through once, I doubled back and went through a second and third time and noticed many visititors doing the same. I loved the exhibition, it felt like I had visited "another planet", it was hard to believe these creatures live on our planet. I appreciated the tone of the exhibition it was not sensational, just factual, which made it that much more interesting. The exhibition is approximetly 30' by 70' or 2100 square feet, I spent 40 minutes in the gallery and many visitors were spending longer. http://exhibitfiles.org/the_deep http://exhibitfiles.org/the_deep Sat, 19 Jul 2008 14:38:51 -0700 My three sons (ages 13, 10, and 8) gave Liberty Science Center's outdoor exhibition called "Wildlife Challenge" a whirl recently, and they had a great time. There are many high-minded arguments that science centers make about their exhibits being "educational." But, let's face it, sometimes our visitors just want someplace to flex their muscles as well as their minds, and to blow off a little steam in the process. Wildlife Challenge, an outdoor obstacle course with a light-handed content overlay relating to animal locomotion and behavior in the New Jersey landscape, is a breath of fresh air (literally!) for every young visitor to the Liberty Science Center. Each of the exhibition's set pieces is placed around a nicely landscaped area with paths, shrubs, rock walls, and seating areas. Young visitors get to complete a series of themed obstacle course stations as they move through each wildlife challenge. They can "Scamper Like A Squirrel" on a set of balance beams before they dash like egrets into a maze-like "salt marsh" complete with misters overhead and a squishy substrate below. One of the activities my sons enjoyed most was the "Worm Wiggle." Dozens of large (perhaps just under three feet in diameter) inflatable exercise balls were tethered underneath a low canopy of netting to hold them into place. Wiggling just like a worm, young visitors needed to find the interstitial spaces to move to the exit of this station. (Kudos to the LSC team for finding a simple and economical way to create this truly "immersive"experience!) Visitors scurry through pitch black culvert pipes in the "Rat Ramble" (my favorite comment about this section from my son Philip, the future entomologist, "It smells like ants inside here!") before moving through a fairly standard "Spider's Web" made of large ropes, to climb the "Falcon Flight" tower for the grand finale ride down a zip line. But what are kids really "learning" from the Wildlife Challenge exhibition? Perhaps that some things inside (or in this case outside) a museum can be mostly about having some gross motor fun rather than being force-fed a college semester's worth of information about a given area of science content. In speaking with some of the LSC exhibits folks, it was clear that their in-house development and installation of Wildlife Challenge was a bit of "fast, cheap, and out of control" but the LSC staff clearly put a lot of heart into their efforts, and it shows in the smiling faces and boisterous laughter of the satisfied visitors to this outdoor exhibition. http://exhibitfiles.org/wildlife_challenge http://exhibitfiles.org/wildlife_challenge Wed, 16 Jul 2008 00:43:20 -0700 There are at least 3 aspects which have the potential to make the Terror House an outstanding institution: the location, which is the actual headquarters of the nazi and then communist secret police in Hungary; the museology, which is quite recent (the museum opened 6 years ago), and employs a variety of media and scenographic techniques; the topic, a highly contentious subject which remains very much a contemporary issue. Places like Robben Island or the District 6 museum in Cape Town are among my terms of reference in this sense: museums which have a high significance for the local community, and succeed in communicating to a wide variety of publics the history, the stories and the emotions they stand to represent. Unfortunately the Terror House did not deliver as it could have been. The building is authentic, but the way it is organized internally bears little or no resemblance to its original function; and the museology is rather shallow, focussing more on “theming” and staging rather than on interpretation and engagement. Which is a pity, considering the potential that this institution could have. The first impact with the Terror House is intriguing: it’s clear since the entrance and the first rooms that design, or better, scenography, plays a fundamental role in this museum. Several icons which I had seen on the museum’s literature are prominently exposed: a military tank in the main hall of the building; the dinner table for the Arrowcross party officers; a black AVH car etc. Such icons however are rarely combined with an interpretive support to make sense of them; most of the time their function is to “scare” the visitor and stimulate the sense of terror that gives the museum its name. On the emotional level, the Terror House works very well: it is like a rich, ever changing stage for a theatre performance. After passing the first couple of rooms, one always wonders what will be the stage and décor in the next room. But the museological endeavour stops there: in almost all rooms there’s nothing more than a one or two page English text to make sense of the setting. Media and objects are functional to the stage, the “theming” of the room, not the other way around. One could argue that the Terror House is a memorial to be enjoyed mostly by Hungarians: I disagree, and there are plenty of examples where multiple languages are used to address a variety of publics. Some rooms could lend themselves to a much higher degree of interpretation: the one dedicated to propaganda, for example (actually 2 contiguous rooms) contains only advertisement posters, wall to ceiling, certainly very eye catching but rather shallow in terms of how propaganda worked during the communist regime. To me the main disappointment after visiting the Terror House was the fact that it didn’t tackle at all the main questions of the subject it deals with: why did that happened? Why political terror, violence and fear are such a human aspect – to the point that they go across political sides, as it is clear in the first rooms and from the building itself? If the historical perspective can be found in books, the Terror House is more like the illustrations that come with a history book: but the museum remains weak on the narrative, the critical look at facts, and the meaningfulness of the objects it contains. http://exhibitfiles.org/the_terror_house http://exhibitfiles.org/the_terror_house Fri, 08 Aug 2008 12:23:12 -0700 http://exhibitfiles.org/christine_farris http://exhibitfiles.org/christine_farris Fri, 08 Aug 2008 09:36:44 -0700 http://exhibitfiles.org/christopher_cummings http://exhibitfiles.org/christopher_cummings Fri, 08 Aug 2008 08:10:22 -0700 http://exhibitfiles.org/hilary_howes http://exhibitfiles.org/hilary_howes Fri, 08 Aug 2008 07:58:41 -0700 http://exhibitfiles.org/jodi_schoemer http://exhibitfiles.org/jodi_schoemer Tue, 05 Aug 2008 16:58:47 -0700 I miss the old days, when times were simpler, and CB Radio was at it's peak.. Seems computer users have grown, but today cb radio is only a fraction as popular as it once was! It would be nice if we had exhibits like this again, however CB Radios have been sterotyped as being low technological break through, (which I disagree with) but it is still fun nonetheless!!! CB Radio will always be a favorite hobby of mine, and I encourage others that ever thought about giving the hobby a try, to dive in, as it can be tons of fun, and you can meet and make new friends! Peanuts CB Shop www.peanutscbshop.com http://exhibitfiles.org/cb_radio http://exhibitfiles.org/cb_radio Mon, 28 Jul 2008 12:37:34 -0700 Hi, all. We're working on our summitive evaluation, but we don't have anything to compare our data TO. We've got the data from the Pew internet study, but it's not too helpful. I'm particularly interested in studies of online communities. What's a decent participation rate? Any way, without resorting to discourse analysis, to figure out what people are learning? Any suggestions? Any evaluators out there particularly interested in this problem? Love to hear what everyone's thinking. http://exhibitfiles.org/science_buzz http://exhibitfiles.org/science_buzz Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:29:39 -0700 Thank you for bringing us the story of such a fabulous artifact. Your explanation of the competing priorities related its preservation are very clear . . . and painful. Thanks for the review! http://exhibitfiles.org/solar_boat_museum_at_giza http://exhibitfiles.org/solar_boat_museum_at_giza Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:56:49 -0700 Do you think the use of the word "math" in the signage made a difference in visitors' understandings? How explicit to be in use of language is a question for a lot of science exhibit developers. From your findings, it looks as if this did make a difference, at least in the ways people talked about the exhibition. http://exhibitfiles.org/flip_it_fold_it_figure_it_out_playing_with_math http://exhibitfiles.org/flip_it_fold_it_figure_it_out_playing_with_math