http://exhibitfiles.org/browse/index The most recent activity on ExhibitFiles en-us Mon, 22 Jun 2009 14:49:10 -0700 "Beautiful Science" is a permanent, 2500sf library exhibition that aims to present highlights from the history of science in intriguing and accessible ways. Our primary goal: To make a (truly) engaging library exhibition, bringing the books & their ideas to life. Responding to a few commonly observed pitfalls in library exhibitions, 1) books are de-contextualized in huge, alienating cases 2) library & history exhibits very text heavy 3) content is not focused or accessible to a general audience we came up with our core goals: 1) to make the books and manuscripts the primary focus of the exhibition; 2) to build exhibition cases that would not overwhelm the exhibit materials; and 3) to use graphics, text, interactives, and multi-media to reinforce the books and the ideas contained in the books. http://exhibitfiles.org/beautiful_science_ideas_that_changed_the_world2 http://exhibitfiles.org/beautiful_science_ideas_that_changed_the_world2 Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:41:08 -0700 The "Hidden Life of Ants" is a temporary exhibition on view through October 2009 that asks: What if we could see into the world of ants on their level? What would we learn? What parallels could we draw between them and us? We wanted to reveal their amazing behaviors and complex social interactions and tell incredible stories about the lives of ants. We also wanted to feature the work of entomologists in the field, explore how and why they study ants, and how such photographs aid their research. The exhibition featured about 40 large-scale photographs taken by Dr. Mark Moffett (research associate of the Smithsonian and photographer with National Geographic) with the aid of a macro lens. We also included a living ant colony of leafcutter ants in the type of clear plastic box and tube assembly our entomologists use to study ants, an aluminum cast of a Florida harvester ant nest made by Dr. Walter Tschinkel, 2 panels about entomology work in the field, and a video showing leafcutter ants carrying leaves back to their nests. The three main ideas we wanted to communicate through this exhibit were: 1. Ants are highly social creatures that solve basic problems in a cooperative manner. 2. Ants have evolved to successfully dominate their ecological niche. 3. Many new, exciting discoveries about ants are currently happening in the field and in the laboratory. Our visitor/educational goals were: To broaden visitors’ perceptions of ant as fascinating, complex creatures that live in cooperative, social colonies To encourage visitors to consider the impact ants (and humans) have on the ecosystems in which they live To engage visitors’ curiosity about scientific research and discovery in the field so that they are inclined to explore ants in their everyday life To encourage visitors to interact with the displayed photos and objects as a scientist would in discovering and learning about these creatures The exhibition’s organization and interpretive themes is meant to speak most directly to pre-teen and adolescent students, multi-generational families with children in that age range, and adults with an interest in insects, sociobiology, and ecology. The language used in the labels and the catchy, almost irreverant, titles used were to appeal to a pre-teen and adolescent audience and make cultural references they would identify with. http://exhibitfiles.org/farmers_warriors_builders_the_hidden_life_of_ants http://exhibitfiles.org/farmers_warriors_builders_the_hidden_life_of_ants Tue, 16 Jun 2009 11:57:28 -0700 This exhibition was produced as a class project in a course on Social Technology in the UW Museology program. I challenged the students to create an exhibition with one goal, "get strangers to talk to each other." There was no content or artifact base, and I didn't care what the content was as long as they hit that interaction goal. The concept team developed these visitor goals: * Visitors will give, receive and exchange advise with strangers in a variety of media. * Visitors will share past advice, relevant, irrelevant, controversial and comical. * Visitors will evaluate advice from different sources, and consider the relation of source/authority to this process (i.e. professional vs. colloquial, friendly vs. unfriendly, for entertainment vs. serious). * Visitors will 'remix,' 'flip' or edit advice furnished by others in the exhibit, transforming individual exchanges into socially-mitigated ones. The team defined "strangers talking to each other" as something that can happen in real-time via conversation or asynchronously via shared narrative on the web or in the physical space. Here are the components of the exhibit: PHYSICAL • a display of visual advice in the form of photographs of bumper stickers, allegorical pictures, comics, and other visual manifestations of advice as submitted to the exhibit Flickr group or found by students. • a button-making station where visitors could supply parts of speech for inclusion on a free, Mad-Libs-inspired button • a space designated for visitors to both respond to a selection of "classic questions" using sticky notes • a space designated for visitors to pose their own "burning questions" and respond to others' "burning questions" using sticky notes • a "Free Advice" booth where self-proclaimed and self-described "advice experts" offered counsel to visitors • a continuously-played soundtrack of recorded, spoken advice of participants, interspersed with "advice-themed" songs • a simulated bathroom stall door on which visitors could write or draw advice VIRTUAL • a Twitter account which both broadcast to, and received advice from, off-site participants using a hashtag • a Flickr group to which off-site participants could submit images of advice and comment on the images of others • a Simple Voice Box account which off-site participants could call and leave a recorded message containing advice • a Gmail account to which off-site participants could submit advice in text, photograph, video, or audio form • a Tumblr website where select participant content and all exhibit-related Twitter activity was displayed You can read more about the individual components and visitors' participation in each in the evaluation report, available here: http://strangemuse.pbworks.com/Evaluation http://exhibitfiles.org/advice_give_it_get_it_flip_it_fxxk_it http://exhibitfiles.org/advice_give_it_get_it_flip_it_fxxk_it Wed, 27 May 2009 03:23:47 -0700 Every year some classes of this Italian secondary school (pupils 11-14 years old) organize an exhibit on different scientific topics and open their exhibits to the classes of the primary schools near the Coletti school. This year the teachers (Sandra Turra and Rossella Bettiol) choose to prepare a travel inside the Human body. 1. From the macroscope organs to the organic molecules (models...) 2. Experiences on digestion (with saliva, pepsin, iodine solution...) 3. Models of small intestine 4. Models of lungs and experiences on breathing 5. Models of heart valves 6. Experiences on touch sense 7. Fingers mark 8. How to see the sound... 9. How the sound run... 10. The visual perception 11. The CO2 in the respiration and in the combustion. 12. Cell models with real world objects. 13. Bones. 14. Models of the central nervous system. This exhibition is an activity of the European LongLife Program Project "SMILe" (Science and Mathematics Interactive Learning). SMILe is a Comenius project between two Italian schools, one Greek school, one Polish school and one Estonian school: the project has this url: http://smile.kornelowka.com Here you can find mathematical and science activities. You can visit the documentation (in Italian) about the previous exhibitions on the website of the school: http://www.scuolamediacoletti.org http://exhibitfiles.org/viaggio_nel_corpo_umano_travelling_inside_the_human_body http://exhibitfiles.org/viaggio_nel_corpo_umano_travelling_inside_the_human_body Thu, 28 May 2009 04:59:55 -0700 Innovative use on a large (and expensive) scale of LED lights behind opaque glass at the new BMW Museum, Munich. Museums of transport often seemed designed so that visitors can admire the beauty of the engineering and absorb the technical data: rows of parked cars, motorbikes, buses trams and trains and their vital statistics. Some, however, attempt to go the extra mile by creating the illusion of movement around the inevitably stationary objects. The cars, motorbikes and body parts in the new BMW Museum, which opened in June 2008, are in mint condition, whatever their vintage. And there is plenty of technical minutiae about them: luxury cars, sportier models, motorbikes piled high, and the company’s original product, aircraft engines made during the first world war. There is also an uncanny sense that the museum’s largest space is in slow motion. Uwe Bruckner, the Stuggart-based designer, who collaborated with the electronic-media designers Art + Com, to create the effect compares it to sitting in a train in a station. If another train alongside moves, for a moment it feels as if your train is departing. “Because a museum is, more or less, a static system, you can only create a certain sort of movement in the head of [the visitors]. I often use the way we imagine more than we see as a method to create certain situations,” he says. The illusion of motion in the car museum is created by the car-related imagery floating across the luminous double height walls. There are millions of LED lights behind the opaque glass forming arty black and white close ups of a dash-board, a forest of trees or an abstract pattern. The intension wasn’t to create the impression of 0-60 mph acceleration in a few seconds: they float rather than zoom by. “We wanted to get closer to the myths and fascination of these objects. What they reflect about our desires, especially German desires? There is a saying, Germans like their cars more than their partners sometimes,” explains Bruckner. [Extract of a longer profile of the German designer, Uwe Bruckner, that appeared in Museum Practice magazine, Spring 2009, by Javier Pes] http://exhibitfiles.org/bmw_museum_media_walls2 http://exhibitfiles.org/bmw_museum_media_walls2 Fri, 22 May 2009 05:17:25 -0700 Willy Brandt was the chancellor of West Germany, mayor of Berlin during the Berlin Airlift and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971. The German statesman’s eventful life and many achievements are chronicled in the Willy Brandt Haus, a biographical museum, which opened in December 2008 in his home town of Lubeck, North Germany. On their arrival, visitors receive a plastic card. It is a novel use of electronic technology. Embedded with a RFID tag, the card triggers the numerous soundtracks that are cleverly integrated into the displays. There are excerpts of speeches and interviews given made by Brandt, and news commentaries of momentous events in Germany’s history since 1945. On screens mounted into Bundestag-style lecturns, visitors can watch film of Brandt addressing the West German parliament during critical debates about which policy to adopt toward compatriots in East Germany. At the moment the audio cards provide visitors with two choices of language: German or English. This falls somewhat short of Brandt’s own linguistic skills. He was fluent in Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish French and English. Not bad for someone who got poor marks in school for languages. The champion of international cooperation and understanding, Brandt was ever the proud German, and astute politician. As he once said: “If I'm selling to you, I speak your language. If I'm buying, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen.” (This first appeared in Museum Practice magazine, spring 2009, issue 45) http://exhibitfiles.org/willy_brandt_haus_museum_audio_cards http://exhibitfiles.org/willy_brandt_haus_museum_audio_cards Tue, 12 May 2009 18:22:38 -0700 In April, I sat in a half-empty classroom in the middle of the day with an actor and a bunch of visitors and cried. I was in a children's museum. I wasn't injured. I'm not imbalanced. The Power of Children exhibition is just that good. I visited The Children's Museum of Indianapolis during the Museums and the Web conference with some colleagues from the science center world. I love the museum, but was particularly struck by The Power of Children, a newish addition to the institution (built in-house) that focuses on three courageous children in history--Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White--and their ability to rise above adversity to contribute to the world. The Power of Children is an attractive object- and story-rich exhibit. The floor plan is open enough to let you relax as you deal with stressful concepts like death and bigotry--not in the abstract, but as they actually impacted real kids (two of whom died before adulthood). There were a few excellent interactives, including an interesting version of the "you be the reporter" teleprompter activity in which visitors not only read the news but listened and responded to the ongoing story as it developed. We watched a girl do it for at least 20 minutes. There were also some misses--jigsaw puzzles installed for the smaller kids that have little relevance to the overall topic. But The Power of Children shines most in its extraordinary use of live theater. There are three spaces in the exhibit that can transition from open exhibit space to closed theater space via a couple of strategically placed doors. There are several 10-15 minute shows in the exhibition per day, each of which features a single adult actor. We watched one of the Ruby Bridges shows in an exhibit space designed to simulate the classroom in which Ruby took her first grade classes alone. Ruby is the black girl immortalized in the Norman Rockwell painting walking to school between two US marshals. She spent a year going to school by herself because all the white parents chose to remove their children from school rather than have them contaminated by an African-American classmate. In the show we watched, a male actor portrayed one of the US marshals, reflecting back on his time protecting Ruby as she walked to school. The piece was incredibly written. He bridged past and present, fiction and reality, in a way that allowed the experience to feel emotionally powerful but also respectful of our intelligence. There was some interactivity, and he used historic props (photos from the time, artifacts in the room) and questions to connect us with the story and the real person. It was the most gentle, elegant piece of theater I've ever experienced in a museum. I spent about half of the time with tears in my eyes. What made the show so successful? Having a room to itself was fabulous. There was zero distraction from outside the play, and yet the fact that the room transitioned in seconds into an open exhibit space meant that I didn't feel like I had to decide to move into a special theater space to experience the show. It also meant that after the show, I could explore the artifacts and props in the space in greater detail without being rushed out. Clearly, the show was also developed to be appropriate to its audience both in terms of duration and complexity. The museum chose to use adults instead of kids as actors and that contributed to my comfort level with the intense content being presented. It also meant that the museum did not try to create representations of the children presented in the exhibit themselves, which I appreciated (it made them less of a caricature, more respected real children). Because the actors were "outsiders", we as audience members could relate to their experience and confront our own reactions to the story. I wasn't asked to BE Ruby Bridges--I was asked to be a citizen at that time, scared, confused, uncertain. The use of adult actors also made me feel comfortable approaching the actor with questions after the show. I'm not sure whether a kid would feel similarly about having an adult as the actor. There were only two kids in the show with us and they were minimally responsive. At the end of the exhibit, there is a large metal "tree of promise" where you can make a digital promise at computer kiosks for what you are going to do to make the world a better place and watch it float up into screens in the tree. Somewhat unsurprisingly, a nearby post-it wall was much more active than the kiosks. It's still easier--and more satisfying--to write a promise and stick it right up on the wall with your friends and classmates alongside you than to wait to click through a series of screens and type in your thoughts. Interestingly, this component originally launched with a custom social network where people could track and share their stories, but it was closed due to lack of use and a conclusion that the children's museum audience was too young for it to be valuable. The promises displayed at both the kiosks and the post-it wall were of comparable quality. By a quirk of the open floor plan, the beginning and end of the exhibit are co-mingled, and I saw several people start their visit to The Power of Children by making a promise. In this case, it's probably a visitor participation activity that can happen just as easily at the beginning as at the end of the exhibit visit. The Power of Children is a much quieter exhibition than the rest of the Indy Children's Museum. It felt luxurious to enjoy the reflective space after winding through mirror mazes and crowding around dino skeletons (which I also loved). I'm grateful that Indy felt it worthwhile to develop an exhibition that is outside their target audience and typical content and design style. I can't recall the last time I saw an exhibit about history so powerfully, personally, and thoughtfully rendered. With thanks to Sarah Stewart, who answered all our questions, and Kevin Von Appen, who took most of the photos. http://exhibitfiles.org/the_power_of_children http://exhibitfiles.org/the_power_of_children Tue, 12 May 2009 05:47:33 -0700 Invisible World presents images of parts and processes in the body which are too small, too fast or too slow to be seen without using advanced visualizing technology. Combining this with displayed “key objects”, installations, films and interviews with scientists, the exhibition aims to be a room for reflection upon questions like: What does it mean to see the invisible world through highly advanced microscopes and other devices? It is a conceptual exhibition, focused on science in the making, which, if successful, can be experienced in many ways at the same time. Three goals: Reflection Behind every biomedical picture, there is a long process. Scientific imagery will always include preparation and interpretation. Invisible World investigates the exchange between science and a wider visual culture. How does society influence the way scientific images are made, interpreted and conceptualized? What effect does the flow of scientific imagery have on the way science is presented and on what the general public thinks science consists of? Learning We want the visitors to get some insight in the scientific reasons and practices behind visualisations of the unseen, as well as experiencing what things may look like at this level – as far as we (contemporary science) know. Amusement We wanted to present a visually pleasing and spectacular exhibition, that is, to let people enjoy pictures of things they have not seen before. http://exhibitfiles.org/invisible_world http://exhibitfiles.org/invisible_world Wed, 27 May 2009 03:23:47 -0700 Every year some classes of this Italian secondary school (pupils 11-14 years old) organize an exhibit on different scientific topics and open their exhibits to the classes of the primary schools near the Coletti school. This year the teachers (Sandra Turra and Rossella Bettiol) choose to prepare a travel inside the Human body. 1. From the macroscope organs to the organic molecules (models...) 2. Experiences on digestion (with saliva, pepsin, iodine solution...) 3. Models of small intestine 4. Models of lungs and experiences on breathing 5. Models of heart valves 6. Experiences on touch sense 7. Fingers mark 8. How to see the sound... 9. How the sound run... 10. The visual perception 11. The CO2 in the respiration and in the combustion. 12. Cell models with real world objects. 13. Bones. 14. Models of the central nervous system. This exhibition is an activity of the European LongLife Program Project "SMILe" (Science and Mathematics Interactive Learning). SMILe is a Comenius project between two Italian schools, one Greek school, one Polish school and one Estonian school: the project has this url: http://smile.kornelowka.com Here you can find mathematical and science activities. You can visit the documentation (in Italian) about the previous exhibitions on the website of the school: http://www.scuolamediacoletti.org http://exhibitfiles.org/viaggio_nel_corpo_umano_travelling_inside_the_human_body http://exhibitfiles.org/viaggio_nel_corpo_umano_travelling_inside_the_human_body Thu, 28 May 2009 04:59:55 -0700 Innovative use on a large (and expensive) scale of LED lights behind opaque glass at the new BMW Museum, Munich. Museums of transport often seemed designed so that visitors can admire the beauty of the engineering and absorb the technical data: rows of parked cars, motorbikes, buses trams and trains and their vital statistics. Some, however, attempt to go the extra mile by creating the illusion of movement around the inevitably stationary objects. The cars, motorbikes and body parts in the new BMW Museum, which opened in June 2008, are in mint condition, whatever their vintage. And there is plenty of technical minutiae about them: luxury cars, sportier models, motorbikes piled high, and the company’s original product, aircraft engines made during the first world war. There is also an uncanny sense that the museum’s largest space is in slow motion. Uwe Bruckner, the Stuggart-based designer, who collaborated with the electronic-media designers Art + Com, to create the effect compares it to sitting in a train in a station. If another train alongside moves, for a moment it feels as if your train is departing. “Because a museum is, more or less, a static system, you can only create a certain sort of movement in the head of [the visitors]. I often use the way we imagine more than we see as a method to create certain situations,” he says. The illusion of motion in the car museum is created by the car-related imagery floating across the luminous double height walls. There are millions of LED lights behind the opaque glass forming arty black and white close ups of a dash-board, a forest of trees or an abstract pattern. The intension wasn’t to create the impression of 0-60 mph acceleration in a few seconds: they float rather than zoom by. “We wanted to get closer to the myths and fascination of these objects. What they reflect about our desires, especially German desires? There is a saying, Germans like their cars more than their partners sometimes,” explains Bruckner. [Extract of a longer profile of the German designer, Uwe Bruckner, that appeared in Museum Practice magazine, Spring 2009, by Javier Pes] http://exhibitfiles.org/bmw_museum_media_walls2 http://exhibitfiles.org/bmw_museum_media_walls2 Fri, 22 May 2009 05:17:25 -0700 Willy Brandt was the chancellor of West Germany, mayor of Berlin during the Berlin Airlift and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1971. The German statesman’s eventful life and many achievements are chronicled in the Willy Brandt Haus, a biographical museum, which opened in December 2008 in his home town of Lubeck, North Germany. On their arrival, visitors receive a plastic card. It is a novel use of electronic technology. Embedded with a RFID tag, the card triggers the numerous soundtracks that are cleverly integrated into the displays. There are excerpts of speeches and interviews given made by Brandt, and news commentaries of momentous events in Germany’s history since 1945. On screens mounted into Bundestag-style lecturns, visitors can watch film of Brandt addressing the West German parliament during critical debates about which policy to adopt toward compatriots in East Germany. At the moment the audio cards provide visitors with two choices of language: German or English. This falls somewhat short of Brandt’s own linguistic skills. He was fluent in Norwegian, Swedish, Spanish French and English. Not bad for someone who got poor marks in school for languages. The champion of international cooperation and understanding, Brandt was ever the proud German, and astute politician. As he once said: “If I'm selling to you, I speak your language. If I'm buying, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen.” (This first appeared in Museum Practice magazine, spring 2009, issue 45) http://exhibitfiles.org/willy_brandt_haus_museum_audio_cards http://exhibitfiles.org/willy_brandt_haus_museum_audio_cards Tue, 12 May 2009 18:22:38 -0700 In April, I sat in a half-empty classroom in the middle of the day with an actor and a bunch of visitors and cried. I was in a children's museum. I wasn't injured. I'm not imbalanced. The Power of Children exhibition is just that good. I visited The Children's Museum of Indianapolis during the Museums and the Web conference with some colleagues from the science center world. I love the museum, but was particularly struck by The Power of Children, a newish addition to the institution (built in-house) that focuses on three courageous children in history--Anne Frank, Ruby Bridges, and Ryan White--and their ability to rise above adversity to contribute to the world. The Power of Children is an attractive object- and story-rich exhibit. The floor plan is open enough to let you relax as you deal with stressful concepts like death and bigotry--not in the abstract, but as they actually impacted real kids (two of whom died before adulthood). There were a few excellent interactives, including an interesting version of the "you be the reporter" teleprompter activity in which visitors not only read the news but listened and responded to the ongoing story as it developed. We watched a girl do it for at least 20 minutes. There were also some misses--jigsaw puzzles installed for the smaller kids that have little relevance to the overall topic. But The Power of Children shines most in its extraordinary use of live theater. There are three spaces in the exhibit that can transition from open exhibit space to closed theater space via a couple of strategically placed doors. There are several 10-15 minute shows in the exhibition per day, each of which features a single adult actor. We watched one of the Ruby Bridges shows in an exhibit space designed to simulate the classroom in which Ruby took her first grade classes alone. Ruby is the black girl immortalized in the Norman Rockwell painting walking to school between two US marshals. She spent a year going to school by herself because all the white parents chose to remove their children from school rather than have them contaminated by an African-American classmate. In the show we watched, a male actor portrayed one of the US marshals, reflecting back on his time protecting Ruby as she walked to school. The piece was incredibly written. He bridged past and present, fiction and reality, in a way that allowed the experience to feel emotionally powerful but also respectful of our intelligence. There was some interactivity, and he used historic props (photos from the time, artifacts in the room) and questions to connect us with the story and the real person. It was the most gentle, elegant piece of theater I've ever experienced in a museum. I spent about half of the time with tears in my eyes. What made the show so successful? Having a room to itself was fabulous. There was zero distraction from outside the play, and yet the fact that the room transitioned in seconds into an open exhibit space meant that I didn't feel like I had to decide to move into a special theater space to experience the show. It also meant that after the show, I could explore the artifacts and props in the space in greater detail without being rushed out. Clearly, the show was also developed to be appropriate to its audience both in terms of duration and complexity. The museum chose to use adults instead of kids as actors and that contributed to my comfort level with the intense content being presented. It also meant that the museum did not try to create representations of the children presented in the exhibit themselves, which I appreciated (it made them less of a caricature, more respected real children). Because the actors were "outsiders", we as audience members could relate to their experience and confront our own reactions to the story. I wasn't asked to BE Ruby Bridges--I was asked to be a citizen at that time, scared, confused, uncertain. The use of adult actors also made me feel comfortable approaching the actor with questions after the show. I'm not sure whether a kid would feel similarly about having an adult as the actor. There were only two kids in the show with us and they were minimally responsive. At the end of the exhibit, there is a large metal "tree of promise" where you can make a digital promise at computer kiosks for what you are going to do to make the world a better place and watch it float up into screens in the tree. Somewhat unsurprisingly, a nearby post-it wall was much more active than the kiosks. It's still easier--and more satisfying--to write a promise and stick it right up on the wall with your friends and classmates alongside you than to wait to click through a series of screens and type in your thoughts. Interestingly, this component originally launched with a custom social network where people could track and share their stories, but it was closed due to lack of use and a conclusion that the children's museum audience was too young for it to be valuable. The promises displayed at both the kiosks and the post-it wall were of comparable quality. By a quirk of the open floor plan, the beginning and end of the exhibit are co-mingled, and I saw several people start their visit to The Power of Children by making a promise. In this case, it's probably a visitor participation activity that can happen just as easily at the beginning as at the end of the exhibit visit. The Power of Children is a much quieter exhibition than the rest of the Indy Children's Museum. It felt luxurious to enjoy the reflective space after winding through mirror mazes and crowding around dino skeletons (which I also loved). I'm grateful that Indy felt it worthwhile to develop an exhibition that is outside their target audience and typical content and design style. I can't recall the last time I saw an exhibit about history so powerfully, personally, and thoughtfully rendered. With thanks to Sarah Stewart, who answered all our questions, and Kevin Von Appen, who took most of the photos. http://exhibitfiles.org/the_power_of_children http://exhibitfiles.org/the_power_of_children Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:50:41 -0700 http://exhibitfiles.org/vincent_blech http://exhibitfiles.org/vincent_blech Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:36:49 -0700 http://exhibitfiles.org/linea_hansen http://exhibitfiles.org/linea_hansen Wed, 01 Jul 2009 13:47:54 -0700 http://exhibitfiles.org/scott_alvey http://exhibitfiles.org/scott_alvey Tue, 30 Jun 2009 16:03:00 -0700 http://exhibitfiles.org/katie_powers http://exhibitfiles.org/katie_powers Thu, 02 Jul 2009 09:55:25 -0700 you have some great photos on thetechvirtual.org site! http://exhibitfiles.org/reflexive_architecture_in_second_life http://exhibitfiles.org/reflexive_architecture_in_second_life Sun, 14 Jun 2009 10:41:05 -0700 it's all about being clever. I don't think they really care, as long as their visitors are having "fun." http://exhibitfiles.org/california_academy_of_sciences http://exhibitfiles.org/california_academy_of_sciences Sat, 13 Jun 2009 20:50:36 -0700 I had a weird experience back in the "Islands of Evolution" section. There's an open structure that looks sort of like a car wash auto bay. The floor has a projection of a rainforest floor with lots of plants, and there are bugs skittering about in the projection including ants and what look like giant cockroaches. A bunch of children were in there leaping about after the bugs and viciously stomping on them. Parents stood idly by at the open sides of the bay watching their kids. The child I was with found the whole thing too intimidating and violent and preferred to just watch rather than enter the fray. Benumbed by the general Academy ambiance, I too just stood there watching the kids stomp bugs until it occurred to me that this couldn't be right. I went over and read a rather lengthy label on the wall of the bay that explained that the exhibit was about bug baiting. You were supposed to wait until a piece of food appeared on the forest floor (coconut shard, banana, etc.) and then wait quietly by it until bugs appeared and started to eat the food. The label continued with an explanation about the bug baiting that scientists do in the process of studying bugs. Talk about an exhibit gone wrong! Nobody was reading the explanation. The knee-jerk intuitive thing to do with the exhibit, which kids instantly seized upon, was stomping on and killing the bugs. None of the parents seemed to find any of this strange, despite the fact that the apparent message was: Go to the rainforest, spot something moving, and kill it. I can't figure out how they didn't catch this in beta testing the exhibit or in formative evaluation. http://exhibitfiles.org/california_academy_of_sciences http://exhibitfiles.org/california_academy_of_sciences Fri, 29 May 2009 06:21:01 -0700 Thanks for the detailed critique Andrea. I think you've opened an important discussion about how to best add interpretative support. Text is the worst way in my opinion, even when it is presented via "interactive" touch screens. Perhaps the Terror House has tried to infer too much with symbols and emotion but how should more information be presented? I read another review of Terror House that mentioned detailed text, explaining each room and copied onto paper, for visitors to take home. If visitors actually read the text that could be a very effective extended experience. Ubiquitous cell phones are an under utilized tool with great potential for more immediate interpretive support. In this way, recorded messages can easily be made available to visitors as they experience the museum. Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center recently used this technique to present the voice of Tara Donovan explaining each of her artworks via a separate phone number. http://exhibitfiles.org/the_terror_house http://exhibitfiles.org/the_terror_house