New, New Museums

by Dean Weldon
President/CEO
Academy Studios
Novato, CA

The payoff of providing a rich mix of visitor activities is the improved ability to address the multiple intelligences and learning styles of our audiences. By appropriately mapping content and collections to different modes of activities, we can provide visitors with multiple ways of accessing and experiencing the content we hope to deliver.

Museums are in motion. In order to flourish and, in some cases, survive in the new millennia, museums across the nation are looking at ways to make themselves more relevant and accessible to their communities. City planners see museums as integral elements that can help renew or maintain the vitality of a city, offering cultural attractions that draw local visitors and tourists. These factors are the impetus behind the current wave of renovation, expansion and construction of museum facilities, science centers, children's museums and aquariums. In order to be effective, however, these facilities need to embrace new and more engaging ways of interpreting their collections to the visiting public who are now much more media-savvy than ever before.

Across the globe, museum administrators, developers and designers are looking to define what this "new" and more engaging approach to interpretation should be. Jargon continually gets tossed throughout the industry such as "interactivity," "multi-sensory," "contemporary," "unique," sometimes simply the word "new." Academy Studios, which designs and builds new museum projects, often finds itself wondering, "What is this new approach?"

Our design staff discussed this question in a recent in-house workshop. Following are the results:

• Architecture and Interior Design: The potential benefits of exhibitions appropriately integrated with the architectural space they occupy have not yet been fully realized. Opportunities exist to make better use of the public space within museums to address visitor experience objectives. Additionally, there are ways to employ both the exterior and interior architectural expression of the facility to evoke, complement and reinforce the desired effect of exhibition environments as well as to dazzle, surprise and delight the visitor.

• Content First: By re-conceptualizing what we do as interpretive developers and designers as experience-based rather than object- or exhibit-based design, we can more effectively direct our creative energies towards what the visitor will be doing, thinking and feeling rather than towards stylistic issues. By first defining engaging activities for the visitor and then secondly designing the infrastructure to support those activities,we can ensure we will provide truly functional, provocative and educational experiences for our visitors.

• The payoff of providing a rich mix of visitor activities is the improved ability to address the multiple intelligences and learning styles of our audiences. By appropriately mapping content and collections to different modes of activities, we can provide visitors with multiple ways of accessing and experiencing the content we hope to deliver.

• The power of well-crafted storytelling is obvious to most of us but somehow it is still missing or unfulfilled in most exhibition efforts. Not only do we need to allocate more talent and effort to creating and implementing powerful and provocative story lines, we need to explore alternative ways to organize and structure content. While it is tempting from a clarity stand point to structure our content delivery in a strictly linear fashion, this often does not lead to compelling storytelling. Furthermore, such linear treatment fails to keep up with the sophistication of our audience and lacks the many intellectual intersections offered by more network-like story lines. These intellectual intersections can be touchstone moments for visitors where they can make new connections between what they already know and what is new to them.

• Immersion Experiences: Over the years we have seen a transformation from stand-alone or small diorama-like exhibits to more "immersive environments." These are thematic environments that envelope the visitor in a three-dimensional setting, transporting them to a different time and place or even scale.
  
  What is just now being explored are "performing" experiences that take the physically immersive experience and not only add ambient or localized audio, audio/visual and olfactory sensations, but induce subtle or dramatic changes in the environment.
  If these are some of the things visitors are beginning to expect from a thematic experience then what is the next step? One possibility is that appropriately abstracted environments can successfully convey the same impressions as literal settings but do so in a much more artful and provocative way. By abstracted we mean environments using the power of suggestion, metaphor, and perhaps theater where the visitor stitches together the final picture in their imagination. Think of a very well done art installation. This is often more fun for the visitor and less costly for the museum. Additionally, abstracted environments permit the use of media or artifacts in ways that might otherwise seem incongruent with a more literal setting. This permits overlaying interactive information display systems upon a natural or historic environment.

• Exhibition Graphics and Text: The legibility and aesthetic look of interpretive graphics (signage) has come a long way in the last 20-years. What lies ahead is increased integration of flat graphics and a host of tactile, audio and olfactory discovery experiences for the visitor. Also ahead are exhibitions that employ increased aesthetic integration between 2-D graphics and 3-D exhibitry where you will see fewer exhibitions with the familiar rectangular panel peppering the walls, columns and exhibit cabinetry. As seen in the new architecture of Times Square in New York City, architecture itself becomes a surface for transforming colorful graphic presentations, either static or electronic!

• Technology: We are also seeing the birth of "intelligent exhibits." These are familiar forms of exhibit media that employ micro-processing and telecommunications that allow the exhibitry to recognize the number of visitors present, where they are, what they are doing and even what their specific interests or questions might be. In this way exhibit environments can tailor their performance to the number, location and movements of visitors present. Information display systems may reconfigure themselves to deliver content with a different twist or even alternative story line. As the cost of this technology continues to drop the possibilities boggle the mind.

• The Call to Action Area: After all the hard work involved in creating dynamic learning experiences that inspire visitors and
  pique their interest, museums must offer access to further learning. Suggestions for what visitors can do to make the world a better place, to become better stewards of the environment and/or more informed voters should be offered at the end of an exhibit. This area needs to be created in an up-beat way and include fun family activities.

• The Take Away: All modern exhibitions culminate the visitor's experience at the museum by leading them through the museum gift shop. The current shopping experience is seen as a continuation of the learning process. Additionally, the "edge" includes interactive games, learning devices that can be used while going through the exhibition, and continued-learning, home-based games to help prepare for the next museum visit.
  
  Cultural attractions (museums) as non-profit organizations have special challenges and opportunities as they strive for the new, new museum. As they promote life-long learning attracting new members, museums develop "devotees" to their subject matter -- some of which makes the membership antithetical to change or the new anything. The membership loves what the museum has or the way it always looked and they do not want to see the museum change.
  
  Additionally, major new museums or significant renovations using the above-stated approaches can be very expensive for the non-profit organization. The costs can be from several million dollars to tens of millions of dollars depending on the complexity of the intended finished exhibition and its overall size. A typical new museum exhibition with average complexity costs $400 per square foot plus design fees and facilities upgrade costs. At this kind of price a new exhibition cannot easily be changed-out every three years like the latest retail stores or corporate headquarters.
  
  The new, new museum exhibition must last 10 years (note -- this is one-half to one-fourth the previous lifespan requirement of museum exhibitions -- ah, the information age). But even a 10-year lifespan for the new, new museum experience demands the exhibition design not be too trendy (easily unfashionable); it must be durable because the new museums attract millions of visitors annually; it demands that every thing work -- no broken interactives; and it demands that aspects of the experience be easily updateable. eb