A curator pulls a key from her cardigan to unlock a dark, quiet storage room. She walks to drawer F138, opens it, and sees … a fork. Or does she? Experts like curators have, well, expertise. So they can think at a higher level, in abstractions and systems. They’ve done the reading. …

There is a song we sometimes sing in our exhibition and experience projects: We’re poor. Our projects are underfunded. We don’t have the money those “other” industries have. We’re always the ones that have to do a lot with a little. A common refrain. But is it true? …

Three podcast hosts join forces in a single show to discuss the latest in experience design. It’s a fast-paced three-way session covering half a dozen broad themes, and countless smaller ones. What are we hearing out there? Is the biggest trend of them all … empathy? 

It’s not an exhibition brainstorming meeting until someone yells out: Hey, what about a … hologram! Usually that’ll be a donor or a non-technical member of the development team, bless their souls. But nearly every “hologram” you will ever see isn’t one. …

What’s value engineering (“VE”)? You might learn it as a euphemism for cost cutting. Like “sanitation engineer” makes “garbage collector” less negative. Regardless, “negative” is a word that many might use to describe VE anyway. Why? …

What if there were a high-quality, peer-reviewed journal for the whole exhibition community? What if it featured the leading organizations, practitioners and ideas that shape the whole industry? What if back issues available for free to see online?

Test your new exhibition or experience idea fast — by filling in the blanks in the short script below. Imagine visitor services staff at the front desk saying exactly this to visitors. You’d be surprised how fast the results are obvious. Here’s the script: …

Long-term exhibitions almost always feature an element that got included because it was a hot trend. But is that element part of a long-term trend? Or a short-term one? Hard to know in advance. But dead trends aren’t limited to tech. And no trend is invulnerable. …

Lighting exhibitions of light-sensitive artifacts is hard. We do it wrong. Why it’s hard: For a valuable light-sensitive artifact to draw the eye and look important, it still has to appear as the brightest object, even though almost no light is allowed on it. …

Journalists write news articles according to what’s called the “inverted pyramid” of content priority, where the first sentence contains all the key information readers must know, and every paragraph thereafter fills in the details in decreasing order of importance. …

This might seem a little crazy. But stick with me. Spending is good. Exhibition and experience project budgets are meant to be spent. We acquired our budget to use it, to achieve a goal for our visitors. The more we spend, the more we get. …

Exhibitions don’t matter. Wait. Hear me out. Look, we all spend countless hours on schedules, budgets, narratives, design and getting something physical installed. We love that stuff. And we want to open on time, on budget, to rave reviews …

We all know déjà vu: that eerie, sudden feeling that a present moment is one we already lived through before. It’s such a common term in English that it may come as a surprise that déjà vu breaks down into two scientifically recognized sub-types …

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” …