Don’t Build the Bubble Diagram

Behold the bubble diagram: a simple planning tool anyone can create. It’s a top-down view of an exhibition, with blobby, bubbly shapes representing topics, zones, or experiences, arranged to show sequence, adjacency, importance, and relationships.

Fast to make, easy to revise. They reduce a complicated exhibition to its basic logic: this topic goes near this, this section comes before those, this area should be larger than that.

But sometimes, we believe our own bubble diagrams … a liiiiittle too much.

The trouble starts brewing when we take our diagram too literally, when each bubble directly becomes a zone or cluster in the finished experience without further consideration.

Why is that bad?

Because visitors don’t experience exhibitions from above. Only designers do that (ahem).

Visitors experience sightlines, lighting, entrances, display anchors, graphics, thresholds, crowds, and moments of attraction. Two exhibits can be six feet apart on a bubble diagram floor plan but feel completely unrelated. Two others can be thirty feet apart and feel connected.

A bubble diagram can help organize the exhibition initially. It cannot directly design the experience.

Experienced designers can often tell when someone “built the bubble diagram.” You can feel it when an idea made sense as colorful circles on a floor plan, but doesn’t work in real life.

Here’s the thing:

A bubble diagram is always useful. Use it as a starting point.

Just don’t build the bubble diagram.

Warmly,
Jonathan

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MtM Word of the Day
Bubble diagram. A preliminary hand-drawn or digital sketch, using simple circles or bubble shapes, to show potential spatial relationships between zones of an exhibition. Early in the process, a bubble diagram helps planners and designers evaluate different ways to organize content and visitor flow.