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? …

There are three aging speeds to consider in every exhibition and experience project: Building Speed, Furniture Speed, and Technology Speed. 1. Building Speed: Good buildings age like an elephant. You shouldn’t need to replace one for 50 years …

Past podcast guest and friend of MtM Matt Kirchman teaches a principle called “first fish.” He picked it up planning aquarium experiences. If you have a lot of something visitors are excited to see, give them a taste of it as soon as they arrive …

Don’t know the term “LBE”? No worries. It’s probably something you make for a living anyway. “LBE” stands for “location based entertainment”. The term grew as the entertainment industry looked to sell intellectual property through physical space…

There is always that one surface in a space no one is sure what to do with. It’s not a primary location. And there isn’t any content still looking for a home. But we don’t want to leave it empty. What to do? Here’s a simple move that almost always works …

It’s a rare moment when a leading designer swaps jobs to lead a nonprofit member organization. Cybelle Jones (CEO of SEGD), joins host Jonathan Alger (C&G Partners) to discuss what she’s learned going “From Leading Designer to Leading a Nonprofit”.

MONIQUE: I am a developer who would rather be a developer, and I work with people from development, who get funding from developers in development to make developments. SVEN: Uh, what did that mean? PHIL: Don’t encourage her…

There are some weird coincidences in our field. Here’s one. Typical projectors (not short-throw) ideally get placed about as far from an image as 1.5 times the width of that image. Guess how far away from an image a person instinctively stands …

All of us at the table at our planning sessions have one thing in common: we’re not our visitors. But sometimes we act like the project is … for us. “I know it’s an exhibit about ferns, but I just personally hate green. Can we see a grey option?” …

There is a counterintuitive audio engineering rule about how to make something louder. It might sound crazy. But it’s true. To dial something up — don’t dial it up. Dial everything else down. This rule is especially true in certain kinds of physical spaces …

If a project is over budget, who does the cutting? What should you do with expensive suggestions? Host Jonathan Alger talks “Black Belt Cost Control Tips.” Along the way: the beauty of modularity, poker wisdom, and ideas that will save you a lot of time and money.

MONIQUE: Remember that time a famous violinist played a Stradivarius in the subway, thousands passed by, and almost nobody stopped? PHIL: Yeah, it was an experiment for an article about context and public taste. MONIQUE: Right! But …