PHIL: If only museums had this many guests. (Sips chamomile tea.)
MONIQUE: Museums don’t have guests.
PHIL: What?
MONIQUE: (Sips Americano.) They have visitors.

The starting pistol fires. The 4x100 relay race is on. Each runner runs, then hands a baton to their next teammate. For the team to finish, each runner must finish. If any runner is delayed, that delays the team. If anyone fails with an injury, the team fails. The team is interdependent.

Ah, the humble Post-it. Classic yellow, light pink, pale blue. Never has there been an office supply icon so treasured, yet so reviled. A staple of low-budget interactive experiences for a generation, museum teams either love or hate these little squares.

We imagine our visitors moving through our exhibitions in the exact experiential order we devise. But visitors that follow every step of our sequence … don’t exist. Even if our experience were a one-way people-mover chute, a visitor can still get distracted, or not care.

Which is more important? A. Space for what we exhibit. B. Space for our visitors. The retail researcher Paco Underhill became famous a generation ago when he identified the “butt-brush factor”, where shoppers browsing narrow aisles brush one another from behind.

Oxford economist Bent Flyvbjerg is an expert on failure. His new book “How Big Things Get Done” is at the top of my pile — partly because his research included “16,000 skyscrapers, airports, museums, concert halls, nuclear reactors, and hydroelectric dams across 136 countries”.

There are two tricks that are so good, they work every time. So good, they work on experts who know the trick. This is one of those. This works even if the budget is low. Even if you just did it last time, or in the same room. Even if the subject doesn’t fit.

Religion. Politics. Gender. Discuss. Controversial topics are part of the museum mission. And they attract public interest. But divisive themes can also cause bad PR, and jeopardize the mission. How can an exhibition court controversy with less risk?

Reader C.L. wrote in, asking about that time Phil & Monique tried to outdo each other with increasingly bad ideas for touchscreens. Phil won with “Touch the screen to hear messages from each donor.” The question was, why was that the worst idea?

FADE IN:
INT. MUSEUM CONFERENCE - GRAB-AND-GO CAFE - DAY
PHIL: My client’s exhibition of rare letters isn’t working, and I’m supposed to tell them how to fix it!
MONIQUE: Not working?

An exhibition is for many people: the community, the staff, the donors, the visitors … I could go on. But sometimes the needs of these groups can conflict. You are not shocked by this, oui? When that happens, ask: “Whose exhibition is it”?

Our visitors are surrounded by media that is better-funded and better-produced than anything we will ever do. In a fair fight, we lose. Make it unfair. Capitalize on what makes exhibition media unique — it’s exhibition media.

There are two audience groups that exhibitions should almost never target. Both are a waste of your limited resources. At one end of the spectrum: believers, who already get it and come regardless. At the other end: skeptics, who refuse to listen and won’t come.

A. Whenever possible, use a unique organizing principle. It creates a unique exhibition automatically. B. For all other times, there is LATCH. Richard Saul Wurman, co-founder of TED, popularized LATCH in the 90s: Location, Alphabet, Time, Category, Hierarchy.

Setting: Regional museum conference. Characters: Monique, exhibition developer at her second museum. Wise beyond her years. Phil, veteran independent museum consultant. Anxiety-prone. Our scene opens at the hotel grab-and-go.

Exhibition planning meeting running low on bold ideas? Here‘s a simple trick: as a thought exercise, ask some “disaster questions”. What if you could only exhibit one thing? What if your budget got cut in half? What if you only had half the time?

Fuzzy little words get projects in trouble. I once saw a major exhibition in a year-long tailspin because people assumed different definitions for “script” in a contract. Saying “you are responsible for the script” is like saying “you are responsible for the building”. Yeah? Which part?

Let’s imagine two exhibition experiences, which I will now invent at random: 1. A giant, 10 foot tall, 20 foot wide, high resolution, interactive media wall. 2. A giant, 10 foot tall, 20 foot wide red chain-link fence.

A “canon” is list of influential classics that make a field what it is. Literature has Joyce and Morrison, classical has Beethoven and Chopin, jazz has Miles and Billie. Let’s look at the canon of exhibition project components.

Visitors don’t already have our historic landscape. They don’t already have our landmark building. They don’t already have our rare collection. But they might already have the same media technology we’re planning if we’re not thoughtful.