Spatial Design
Monday morning came around and I felt like a little kid again… excited to go on a field trip to learn at the museum.
We got shown around the museum, getting a first peek at some of the exhibits before the museum was open. We got a behind the scenes tour of the offices and storage, in house fabrication lab and print shop, and so much more. Our tour guide had been working for the museum for over 25 years and absolutely loved her job.
The team, made up of 2d and 3d designers, project managers, a production team, and an in-house craftsman, worked to create interesting, thought provoking exhibits at the forefront of technology. This is not an easy task when your trying to design experiences for an audience of all ages, all heights, and all sizes.
Exhibits are fluid and change as time goes on. For all exhibit designers, studying the way an exhibit was previously set up, looking at what worked and didn’t work, and finding solutions to flow, communication, or design can help them improve the overall experience. Exhibit design is not only about graphics, but it’s about typography, hierarchy, layout, set creation, flow, interaction, lighting, mood, and most importantly, education. So you see, there’s a lot of moving parts. Museum designers have the hard job of designing the entire museum experience — from the parking lot and way-finding, to ticketing, atrium, and exhibit design — from the most macro to the most micro interaction. Don’t try to re-invent the wheel and prototype.
With so many moving parts, it was incredibly important that designers effectively use their time, prototyping, testing, and validating their designs along the way. This ultimately saves the entire team, and the museum, time, money, and a large headache. The team at the Museum of Nature and Science planned excessive amounts of time for prototyping, knowing that time would get crunched and inevitably something would go wrong. Then they prototype until money or time runs out — whichever comes first.
Keeping up with technology is a battle for even the most high tech, well-funded museums in the country. Technology and it’s capabilities are ever-changing, many times untested and therefore unstable. For designers, it’s a struggle to stay on top of the most up-to-date technologies because continually redesigning experiences requires both time and money — sometimes you have one and not the other, or visa-versa. So, many times sets are a few years behind — say using Java instead of HTML5 or using a first generation Kinect device. But designers are continually finding ways to add technological interactivity into exhibits to help people learn in creative ways — from projections, touch screens, and infrared cameras, to personalized experiences with RFID, multi-sensory and interactive exhibits, and devices that measure your brainwaves. Technology and interactivity is helping tell better stories in a more life-like, mind-blowing manner, which evoke emotional responses in everyone.
So, what’s it like to work as a museum exhibit designer? To me, it seems like your job is to intrigue people, to help guide people to question existence and where we come from, and to provide an experience that not only appeals to a 3-year-old, but a 90-year-old. Your job is to take visual design off the computer and onto the wall. Your job is to make things as close to real as you can. Museum designers have the incredible power to teach thousands of years of information in a very visual, understandable, and informed way, shaping the lives and knowledge of our youth and our adults alike.
