How do we keep cultural projects from going off the rails, without sacrificing creativity? It’s not impossible. Media design expert Trent Oliver joins host Jonathan Alger on Making the Museum, the podcast, to discuss the Secrets of Creative Collaboration.

MONIQUE: That exhibition this morning felt like a $1 show. PHIL: Were we on the same tour? That felt like $5,000,000. MONIQUE: Exactly. [Eats blueberry.] PHIL: What? MONIQUE: You were thinking total cost. I was thinking cost per visitor.

Now here’s a crazy thought: an exhibition is a communication medium you can walk through. Unlike almost any other channel of communication, exhibitions are dimensional. And the audience is physically inside the channel. (Take that, Netflix.)

Let’s use a projector and make our content huge, on the wall of the lobby! — At night? — No, during the day! — But our lobby is all glass, and we’re in Arizona. — That doesn’t matter! — But our projector can’t compete with the big light bulb in the sky. — What big light bulb?

At the school track meet today, your event is a sprint, once around the track. You’ll use all your fuel to win. Halfway through, the coach yells surprising news: the event has been changed midway. It is now a marathon. Instead of half a lap, you have 26 miles to go.

Do exhibits really teach? Do they really present big stories well? Is personalization really a must? Are exhibits getting ... better? Matt Kirchman joins me to debate Six Provocative Questions. But buckle your seat belts — these are called provocative for a reason.

Aaaaargh! I am watching a budget train wreck happen to a cultural project team (not mine). And it was avoidable. It’s too late for my friends. But not for you. You seem nice. Take these tips — and use them.

Smart car shoppers consider both the cost of buying and the cost of maintaining. Why isn’t that a more standard step for our exhibitions?The average monthly payment on a new car is about $700 / month. Yow. But don’t forget gas, repairs, maintenance, tires, registration, fees, taxes, insurance, and depreciation.

The FIFA World Cup is huge. More than half the population of the entire world watches at least one game. Over a billion people watch the final. Hundreds of people work for years for each team. Yet despite that scale, that final soccer game has only one goal.

Mission-driven organizations are rarely in the tech business. But they get saddled with plenty of experiential media tech anyway. One day soon, we all know that sparkly new tech will misbehave. So how can we make our tech-heavy exhibitions less prone to failure?

Prototyping saves projects money and time, every time. But how do you do it right? Exhibition designer and prototyping expert Paul Orselli joins me on Making the Museum (the Podcast) to discuss his proven approach: Prototyping with ELVIS.

Visitors don’t come to visit the staff. But they do come for experiences the staff produces. In a sense, those are a sort of middle ground between staff and visitors. Imagine that visitors did come to visit the staff. No exhibits, no classes. Just people meeting.

Fact 1: Big exhibition projects have lots of workshops where teams have to talk through the whole project. The default order 95% of the time is “A-to-Z”: start with Gallery A, work your way to Gallery Z. Fact 2: You often don’t get through everything in a meeting.

In the three inaugural episodes of Making the Museum (the Podcast) I have some great guests to start things off.

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Making the Museum, the daily newsletter, is welcoming a brand new member of the family: Making the Museum, the podcast! Two episodes are live already, with more on the way every week. Listen in and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.

Caution: potential light-bulb moment below. Which method is more common for representing costs for major projects like museums?
A. Accurate representation. B. Strategic mis-representation. C. A mix of A and B.

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.