What’s a trope? Trope (noun): In art or literature, something such as an idea, phrase, or image that is often used in a particular artist’s work, in a particular type of art, in the media, etc. Example: “Human-like robots are a classic trope of science fiction.” Tropes from exhibitions …

Uh oh. The new visitor experience project is running later than forecasted. Costs are higher than forecasted. There are more slip-ups than forecasted. People are saying it’s one of “those” projects. But wait. What if it’s not? …

Why have a strong organizing principle for my exhibition? Don’t visitors just go wherever they want? Yep. That’s why you need a strong organizing principle. Whatever principle you use — time, category, hierarchy, another LATCH type — no visitor will follow it like a duty …

Please never put your Mona Lisa in the lobby. You’ll be wasting one of your best opportunities. So where should we put it? Where do we put our iconic experience, that thing we’re known for? Sky’s the limit, really. But here’s an idea starter kit: …

Everybody is just … doing what they do. Which means you will definitely need to … do what you do.

Many tech trends in the museum world disappear as fast as they came. (Come back, spin browser!) But there is one I swore was going to die an early death years ago … and it never did. How did touch tables never die? Upon reflection, there might be good reasons …

Mille grazie to everyone who wrote in about Telling a Story with Things, this week’s piece on the Museum on Main Street (MOMS) definition of an exhibition. The question: Do all exhibitions “tell a story with things”? Reader MK wrote in about “real things” …

What one thing, or two — Ten? Sigh. — do you want your visitors to leave thinking? Your takeaways are the purpose of your project. And so, you are in one of three camps right now. Which? If you don’t know your main takeaways, you might be wasting 100% of your resources …

Do all exhibitions “tell a story with things”? Discuss. In my podcast interview with Carol Bossert, she mentions the excellent Museum on Main Street (MOMS) program of Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES) …

Make your voice heard. It takes 10 seconds. This new one-question survey is about which weekdays you want to get this newsletter. Backstory: MtM readers are now ready to switch to a less-than-every-weekday frequency. Great! But … which weekdays?

What if accessible design was for everybody, starting with … ourselves? How can a broader philosophy of access benefit every visitor? Phillip Tiongson (Potion) joins host Jonathan Alger (C&G Partners) to discuss the idea that “We Are All Temporarily Enabled” …

Should our target exhibition audience be people that agree with our position? Or that don’t? The answer will seem counterintuitive. If you are doing a project around a social or politicized issue, first break your audience into five groups …

Do we want our visitors to become … lost? A. No. B. Yes. C. Both. A word that can be its own opposite is called a contronym. The word “dust” can mean both “add fine particles” and “remove fine particles”. In museums, the word “lost” also has two opposite meanings …

Organizing content by location is a common approach in exhibitions. An ancient art show organized by region, a hall of fame organized by state, a World’s Fair organized by country. But that’s just the start. Here are seven more …

Large Language Models use massive amounts of pre-existing text to generate the text we ask them for. So they’re not so good at having new ideas. But all that pre-existing text was made by humans, which means certain questions can be revealing…

What is this thing we call a traveling exhibition? Carol Bossert (Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service / Smithsonian Affiliations) joins host Jonathan Alger (C&G Partners) to reveal the “8 Principles of Traveling Exhibitions”.

MONIQUE: A huge tech revolution is coming to the museum world, you know. PHIL: Maybe. MONIQUE: What do you mean? PHIL: I’m not sure which tech revolution you’re talking about. But in my time, there have been hundreds of tech revolutions …

One of the most common mistakes we make involves pupils. Not students. The other kind. We all love spaces with light walls. Light walls brighten a room, reduce artificial lighting, feel safer, seem modern. But they also make some things on display look awful …

What is cost control in a cultural project? Cost control is about controlling costs, up or down, in order to achieve your goal. That’s what it is. Here’s what it isn’t. Cost control isn’t trying to make all the elements in a project equally inexpensive…

The author Douglas Hofstadter is also a scholar of cognitive science, physics and comparative literature. Unsurprisingly, his books, like “Gödel, Escher, Bach” are mind-bending. So what does he have to do with making cultural projects better? …