Become the aficionado

Recently, my brother-in-law gave me all of his father’s collection of home-made fruit and Southern grape wines. Hundreds of bottles under the house. He said he was a “wine snob” and there was “no way he was going to drink that stuff.”

As a hobbiest vintner with a muscadine vineyard of my own, there was no way I was going to turn down such a gift. Stay with me here: there’s a point to this.

When a guest walks through a museum, any museum, she comes away with the flavor of it, a taste of its content. The guest will compare this with other museums he’s been to and rank it accordingly. Maybe on a scale of 1 to 10, or “poor” to “excellent,” but often just on the overall impression, the flavor (or “finish”) left when he or she gets back in the car. They don’t know it — and I’d never tell them — but they are museum snobs.

There are as many variables to making even a mediocre museum palatable as there are influences in making wine. To truly appreciate and evaluate one bottle against another, — even two sitting on the shelf side-by-side — or one museum against another (even in the same market), a real aficionado has to deeply understand the influencers.

In wine, the grape or fruit you start with is a critical first step. Similarly, the type of museum, its subject foci and collections are important. Like a vineyard or orchard, it’s what makes that museum unique. From there, the variations grow: a board’s vision, a community’s needs, availability of staff talent, and access to new audiences. These are analogous to a museum’s “terroir,” its setting, its soil and atmosphere. Then, there are the variations museum management brings to the flavor, the vintner’s contribution. Decisions on funding priorities, which staff to hire, even maintenance and cleanliness standards all affect the product. Just as timing can make an average bottle of wine stellar, a museum that embraces its youthfulness and is allowed to mature gracefully can be a hidden treasure. Decision about whether to grow or to hold, how to steer the brand, how often to change up content (akin to turning that bottle down in the cellar!) all influence the final flavor guests “taste” at the end of a visit.

As a wine maker, I’ve learned to appreciate all of what has probably influenced the bottles in my cellar and on my table and embrace the differences. The knowledge greatly broadens the range of what I would classify as excellent and outstanding wines. So, too, excellent and outstanding museums.

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Social Endowments

You have to feel for the CEOs of small non-profits, always worrying about payroll, how they’re going to make the next utility payment, or how they’re going to keep the Board happy with steady growth and positive change on empty pockets and slack operational income.

CEOs of small non-profits and their poor finance directors come in every day dreading the checks they have to write and the priorities decisions they have to juggle. Income is never enough, so grants and fundraising are critical but so many grants won’t pay for operational expenses. Grantors seem to prefer to fund projects with short-term outcomes. After all, they have Boards of their own to keep happy.

One of the CEOs we work with recently expressed an interesting thought. He wished out loud that more grantors would set aside their egos and provide long-term socially responsible endowments. Specifically, he wished someone would underwrite putting solar panels on his roof. With net metering, he reasoned he could reduce his utility costs by half. It seems the electricity check each month was his thorn in the side and something as simple as solar would be the equivalent of a perpetual endowment. AND help the environment at the same time.

A strategically thinking grantor could double down on their “do-gooding” by adopting this approach. For example, payroll is perhaps the #1 expense for any small non-profit so they write grant requests that help pay for staff. Imagine the long-term community dialogue and future donor potential from grants that endow a rotating Chair of local scientists, historians, or educators. For some museums, securing a loan is their thorn, especially if their #1 asset may be the collections they can’t ethically leverage as collateral or an old building that a bank doesn’t want to inherit. A grantor who will lend their clout to guarantee a low-interest loan would be golden to a small non-profit. Other social endowments might include perpetual accounts to augment other operational costs, whether for (locally-grown) groceries for the cafeteria, guaranteed admission tickets for underserved families, or to augment employee incentives with a wellness program.

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Engaging the brain in science exhibits

(Reposted from January 18, 2012)

Our brain demands we follow certain rules and processes, developed over evolutionary time, to make sense of information and keep us from being eaten by lions or wolves.

Researchers tell us that the brain essentially processes and files new knowledge in three steps: focus, comparison, and building relationships. Museums report that on average, a visitor spends 46 seconds at an interactive exhibit before moving on. If so, in the first few engaging seconds, any exhibit we create should force focus and then hit the other two steps in order.

According to a panel of experts smarter than me, one way is to start by asking the visitor a question. What do you want to know? How can we find out? What does it remind you of? At the root of each answer is a need to make sense of a problem or issue. Asking them, then, to compare the issue to something familiar forces the visitor to focus, but also recall information they already know, define parameters, and concentrate on two or more things at once.  To make sense of these comparisons, the brain is forced to establish relationships, which leads to developing concepts.  If “red” and “”yellow” are comparisons, “color” is the concept that develops. Concepts are not in this world (empirical). They are in our heads and are what differentiate us from that lion.

So, what are some practical tactics and applications of these ideas in exhibits? According to those same panel of experts:

— When we’re creating an exhibit, it’s not about cramming in the highest possible learning per square foot. People need “white space” as much in an exhibit as they do on the written or virtual page. That space gives people time to process.

— Slow people down; increase their linger time
— Provide a low buy-in threshold (low-hanging rewards), but let the visitor take the activity as high as it can go for them
— Honor existing social interactions between people (parents, co-workers, chaperones, docents, etc) who can help discuss comparisons and relationships. Also, allow for peripheral or group observation. Interaction with other people is key. There’s proof to the axiom that “all learning is social.”
— Create a collaborative, not competitive, environment
— Create experiences worth having and remembering: Stretch them and challenge them to learn something new.

— Learning is not terminal: we don’t stop learning at any time in our conscious lives. Think across generations!

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Weenies

(Reposted from November 11, 2011)

I ran into a new-to-me phrase for a tried-and-true concept that I thought interesting. The concept is the design technique of visually positioning key elements in an exhibit to tease the visitor along a prescribed and intended path of discovery. The “path” can be literal or figurative. The new-to-me phrase is “finding the weenie”. Maybe it refers to some obscure reference to the hotdog stand at the back of Coney Island or perhaps to the art of hunting for the prized hotdog morsel in a can of beenie weenies. Who knows?

I heard the phrase used by Disney Imagineers in a meeting a couple of weeks ago and I’m told it came from Walt himself. Apparently, “finding the weenie” has become design dogma to Imagineers (who are pros at using 3d space, proportion, sound, light, and motion) to encourage a visitor to be more open to learn. Sometimes that learning comes from methodically suspending disbelief, like in a Space Mountain Epcot ride. But the same techniques also can be used to deliberately lead visitors through a series of experiences in such a way that participants leave with their new knowledge already filed in historical, social, technical or political context. It’s analogue to a speaker stressing one word over other words…and then winking.

Visitors want closure and will make (intended or unintended) connections between unlike content depending on how that content is presented. Layering, ordering and accenting content helps them do that.

According to the Imagineers, a good floor plan, like a good graphic layout, should lead an inquiring mind where it wants to go anyway. Visitors WANT to find the weenie. They are looking for it farther ahead in their exhibit experience than we might think. They want to know what they’re going to see just around the corner and spend mental energy anticipating what is going to surprise or wow them at the end.  Maybe it’s that energy that is the catalyst to learning and retention.

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Science myths

(Reposted from August 29, 2011)

So, I was listening to this science program on public radio last weekend and the social scientist being interviewed mentioned that technology development has always preceded science discovery. Having missed that concept in my science classes, I went Web surfing to determine if conventional wisdom supports this concept. The short answer: obviously the two are related and there are many examples to argue cause and effect in either direction.

However, during my search I ran across an interesting article titled “Quizzing Students on the Myths of Science,” posted by the National Science Teachers Association at: science.nsta.org/enewsletter/2006-07/tst0411_58.pdf

In the article, the two authors, Eugene Chiapetta and Thomas Koballa, present a quiz of 12 questions designed to spark some introspection about how we’ve come to see the nature of science.  Take the test and see how you do on it!

What does this have to do with exhibits?  We make underlying assumptions based on what we learned or remember when we design an exhibit. In exhibits for science audiences or about science, we draw on what we think is “scientific.” How we write our text or scripts, the learning objectives of our interactives, even the choices of exhibit subjects, all depend on a personal understanding of words and concepts such as “theory,” objectivity,” “cause-and-effect” relationships and the “scientific method.” How you answer the questions and the “arguments” you use to defend your answers may give you some insight into why YOU think an exhibit is interesting…or why it would be interesting to a visitor or guest.

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