A Morning at the Museum
We met outside last Monday on the morning of Halloween. We were all excited, not to show off our costumes, but to peak behind the curtain to learn how the Denver Art Museum makes magic.
Transporting someone to entirely an new place in time is extremely difficult, it’s never one thing or one detail, but the combination of all those details. Underneath the various exhibits of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science a whole workshop exists. Like Santa and his elves the staff at the museum make magic happen in a modest workshop of their own.
Without hours and hours of thought what we saw comes down to some paint, wood and plastic. But walking through the exhibit halls looking through the glass, you’re taken away from that moment in time and transported to whole new version of the world you may have never seen before.
Along with a number of permanent exhibits the natural history museum had a few traveling exhibits making their stop across the U.S. The thing I found interesting about the traveling exhibits was that each museum along its tour would iterate on the exhibits to fit the needs of each particular area. When it was time to move on to the next city, the exhibit designers would pay to adopt certain changes and additions they thought worthwhile.
For example they told us about the new Sherlock Holmes exhibit and how when it first opened at the museum the public didn’t understand what they were suppose to do or where they were suppose to go, or even that there was a mystery to be solved.
The museum’s solve to this problem was to add in over 10 signs to guide the experience. Coordinating with the original designers of the exhibits they liked the addition, but only wanted to purchase a single sign for the remainder of the tour.
Just like we found with our design sprint this past week, working in a team is hard. We learned about balancing different needs from different departments and when close enough is good enough. The group we spoke to talked about balancing the demands of the scientists a trying to instill wonder while keeping with a need for historical accuracy. For example, one of the senior multi-media specialist was creating an animation for the extinction of dinosaurs. In what seemed like a 2-seconds space view of earth he told us how he had spent hours working with scientist to get as historically close to what earth would have looked like in that time. He had no more time to spend on creating the earth and had to focus on the rest of the video. In this case the project manager made the final call and called it close enough to historically accurate.
What I took away from the description of this project is that any idea could stand to make a few changes and no idea is perfect. But at the core the experience should remain the same. Small iterations help make the experience more enjoyable for visitors but consistency of experience is also critical. Making too many changes can be just as damaging as not making any and sometimes you can call it good enough.
