PHIL: Sorry I’m late, I was on Zoom doing some painstorming. MONIQUE: You mean brainstorming. PHIL: What? No, I mean painstorming. MONIQUE: … PHIL: [Smiles] You’ve never heard of it! MONIQUE: What? Well, no, I mean … OK, I haven’t heard of it.

“People always ask me for a boat,” a designer friend once said to me. “I wish they would just ask for a way to get across the river.” We all get two types of requests. Type 1: A problem in search of a solution. Type 2: A solution in search of a problem.

Lots of cultural project teams come up with lots of great ideas, have no idea what it will all cost, and wait until some milestone down the road to get a price check from … somebody. Is it any surprise when the estimate comes back crazy high, and the budget axe comes out?

You might say your museum is a key voice in the fight for biodiversity. But if your visitors tell other people it’s boring, that’s what it is. You might say it’s the first art museum where visitors make the art. But if your visitors say all the interactives are broken, that’s what it is.

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.