Exhibitions are like other forms:
All follow certain given norms.
Seldom do we hide special secret layers,
Though visitors like to be game players. …

What’s the very first question we should ask? Should we start designing … by designing? Liza Rawson (Head of Exhibition, Liberty Science Center) joins Jonathan Alger (Managing Partner, C&G Partners) to discuss why we should “Start With ‘Who’s It For?’”. …

Exhibitions, like movies, are primarily visual. You can watch good movies with the sound off. Some films have no words at all. But you can’t have a movie with the reverse: only words. Exhibitions are the same. Let’s test that. Which of these would you rather visit? …

We want our spaces to be dynamic. Flexible. Adaptable. Changing. Always current. Sounds … so right. Is it? How adaptable should our projects be? Do we pay for changeability we don’t need? What’s the hidden cost of unused flexibility? …

If you’ve been around here a minute, you know the L.A.T.C.H. framework for the five ways of organizing any information. To brush up, those are Location, Alphabetical, Time, Categorical, and Hierarchical (aka continuum). But are we missing one? …

Every movie has a music soundtrack, or “score”. And every video game. And every Broadway show. And every streaming series, dance performance, cooking show, and circus. So why don’t more of our exhibitions have one? …

Sometimes it seems like the world wants us all to make vanilla exhibitions. It seems to demand that we make them unoriginal, overstuffed, long-winded, tech for tech’s sake, and generic. But is that what the world wants? Or just what it seems to want? …

Time for some visual inspiration. Awareness art, or protest art, is art that exists primarily to draw attention to an issue, or to object to a situation. I’m obsessed, because many exhibition planning and design projects have awareness-building as the main point. …

How can color have … a temperature? The term means the warmth or coolness of white light from a source, measured in “kelvins”, or “K”. But there’s more than just “warm” or “cool” white. There’s a whole, er, spectrum. …

Exhibition and experience projects are like any custom process of making. We want a way to see representations of the final thing — before it’s final. Enter mockups, prototypes and first articles. But these terms often get confused. Let’s fix that. …

Regulars here know the “streakers, strollers, scholars” framework. It helps tailor experiences to different attention spans. Turns out, other industries have similar mental models. Here are some from UX you might find useful. (In my studio we make websites too.) …

Here's a quick way to gut-check whether an experiential idea is going to work — before you commit time and money to developing it. Take any idea being considered, put it in the blank in the following sentence, and say that sentence out loud: …

Inspiration first. / If you inspire them first, / You can educate. // It will never work / In the other direction. / Not in exhibits. // We can’t say, “Now learn!” / We must woo the audience. / Immerse them first. Quick. // Example: a show / About haiku poetry …

Cultural projects should be data-driven — but which *kind* of data?What’s the difference between the “big data” we all know — and “thick data”? Which is more important? (Hint: trick question.) What does cell phone data have to do with sculpture gardens? ….

Massimo the exhibition designer walks into Best Buy. “Can I help you?” asks a clerk. “Yes! I have just moved. I need a new TV,” Massimo replies. “Aha! We have a special on this one here! It’s 10 feet wide, 2 feet tall — and curved!” boasts the clerk. …

In this week’s podcast on “How to Build a Museum” with David Greenbaum, we heard that “over time, OpEx will eventually outstrip the CapEx of a new museum building.” Maybe this made you think: “Interesting.” Or maybe it made you think: “What?” …

What if there were only five important things to remember when you build a museum? What if the most important one of them all — had nothing to do with architecture? Which costs more in the end: building the museum, or operating the building? …

Tech, of various flavors, is one of the most asked-for topics in MtM reader surveys, from interactives to media experiences. So it’s no surprise that many of those flavors showed up in today’s list. I’m especially glad that #10 made it! …

Today, the Top Ten most popular posts related to content, as determined by web traffic at makingthemuseum.com, where every daily post gets gathered. (This time, the #1 spot came as no surprise. I didn’t expect #2, but Phil & Monique fans might have.) …

Thank you! Thanks to your reading, your comments, and your feedback, Making the Museum (the newsletter) just turned … [drum roll] … 1. A year ago, the first email went out. And it wouldn’t be an anniversary if we didn’t do some Top Ten lists …