We Are Not the Audience

This will either be totally obvious or really uncomfortable. (Or … both?)

We are not the audience.

See, we’ve read the books. Sat through the deep dives. Fiddled with the floor plan. For months. By opening day, nothing in the gallery surprises us. Which is precisely the problem.

Earlier, we discussed the curse of knowledge: once you know something, you can’t easily imagine not knowing it. Exhibition teams all suffer from this, structurally. We know too much. We forget what it feels like to encounter the material for the first time. And our subject matter experts have the same problem, times ten.

The narrative feels logical — to us.
The pacing feels appropriate — to us.
The floor plan seems clear — to us.

But “to us” is not the metric.

We’ve also talked about professional ignorance. Which is not incompetence. It’s a method. A deliberate attempt to preserve a novice mindset inside an expert team.

Visitor proxies. Formative evaluation. Prototype testing. Defending “dumb” questions.

These aren’t niceties. They’re safeguards.

Here’s the thing:

The exhibition could feel completely clear to the team … and completely opaque to the visitor.

We are the makers. And we aren’t making this for ourselves.

We are not the audience.

Warmly,
Jonathan

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MtM Word of the Day:
Rear projection, or RP. The projection of moving or still images onto a specially-made translucent screen from behind, not from in front. This completely hides the projector, preventing visitors near the screen from blocking the projected light. RP can also appear more magical.

NEW! The MtM Glossary of Museum Exhibitions (BETA)