Have you ever re-watched an old film you once loved for its special effects — only to find it didn't age well? The media and tech industries raise the bar on production values daily. Museums can’t keep up. How can we keep media content fresh longer? …

Warning: obsessively nerdy. Strolling through an exhibition recently (not designed by us, of course) I noticed … an error magnet. Argh! My nemesis. What’s an error magnet? It’s a minor creative idea likely to cause a major production error. …

How can we make digital experiences work for all visitors — whether kids or grandparents? When should you bring in a creative technologist? Why should you aim for the strong verbs? What is “sneaky attract mode”? How do you do paper prototyping? …

Every exhibition needs a credit panel. They cost almost nothing. Every additional name costs nothing. But the lasting goodwill can’t be bought. Nearly zero cost, potentially priceless outcome. How’s that for ROI? Oh, right, what’s a credit panel? …

Here's a quick win. There are many ways NOT to label a screen in an exhibition: NOT on the wall nearby. NOT above or below the screen. NOT running up the side of it. If the title is visible even when the screen is dark, the visitor will see it. So, why does that matter? …

When we develop our projects, we sometimes leave “maintenance” to others. Someday. Later. But if we don’t keep maintenance in mind, it will come back to haunt us financially. And there isn’t just one kind. There are 5. …

The name of this newsletter aside, many museum-style exhibitions happen in places that … aren’t museums. Regardless, all of the strategies we talk about here, and in the sister podcast to this newsletter, apply to a whole list of other kinds of venues. …

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 …