Aliens in This World

I need to clarify something from the post below.
Proper museum exhibits don’t need booming multimedia or a zillion TV screens. Why? Because that’s confusing. (Also a waste of money.) Similarly, you don’t stuff every possible thing you can onto the wall or the display case, because that’s confusing. There were brief moments in time when people understood this. Unfortunately, most museums have been reorganized between then and now to be more confusing.

The theory of exhibit design is that you employ a good sense of arrangement and proportion, as well as trying to include something to interest every sort of person and a large number of things to interest everyone. You also think about varying eye levels, and varying angles of vision and sharpnesses of sight. Then you think about multimedia — can I use a video or audio clip to bring this alive? Every artifact and image and multimedia clip must be there for a reason. All the explanatory text should be just long enough, but not too long, and easily visible. Do your exhibits need to be explained in more than one language? Are there any hands-on things which can be provided to help people learn, and how can you make them cheap, reliable, and durable?

Finally, you think about pacing. A vast expanse of walls and halls is boring. You have to break it up a little  with other kinds of exhibits. You need to provide seats and restrooms at regular intervals. You need to think about exhibit security, visitor safety, access, and how to run through tours. Likewise, you should include humor and human things and things that children will enjoy. Finally, the museum as a whole should be such that you want to come back again and again to the same things — and yes, there should be small temporary exhibits constantly coming in and going out. (That’ll help you use some of those odd items back in the back rooms.)

This is not rocket science, but neither is it easy and simple. Good museum design is difficult to notice, because you are so engaged with the information in the exhibits that the exhibits themselves go unnoticed.

In the far past, most museums thought about getting their collections up on the wall. Today, most museums spend a lot of time thinking of themselves as amusement parks with the goal of making money, and they “de-accession” more than they probably should. These are both faulty attitudes, although there’s some truth to both.

A museum should try to make it as easy as possible to absorb new data, to learn, and to think. Everything else is secondary. If entertainment helps learning, then sure they should use it. But many museums are not at all good at being entertaining or making their “fun” stuff educational; they should stick to what they know and jettison the useless bells and whistles.

* Disclosure: I am not a museum exhibit designer, and graphics are not one of my skills. I once helped do some minor exhibit chores in the past at one of my summer jobs, and at my college work/study job. But mostly, I have just gone to a blue gazillion free museums on family trips, and been forced to hang around museums for hours waiting to be picked up from summer enrichment programs. After a while, even little kids start to have opinions about museum design.