Although it is best practice, a study may not be necessary. If you have a smallish budget (<50,000), hiring a contractor to do a formative study and summative analysis could eat up a lot of it. Also, if you want to make some quick changes, studies do stretch out an exhibit project's timeline.
If your intuition is telling you that you need to freshen your exhibits (for example, not many visitors spend time with them or you get complaints about them, or you are embarrassed by them) listen to it. Better yet, move ahead with some creative group brain-storming and prototyping to revamp one portion of your display. Good ideas are not necessarily complicated; for example, add drama with paint and light, they're cheap (especially if you are turning out some lights)!
Have a couple of fun meetings with a group of diverse minds and talk about the affective, cognitive, and experiential goals the museum has for the display (we want people to feel... we want people to think... we want people to do... ). If you are interpreting specific people or cultures, invite them to be part of the work. Laugh, get impassioned, entertain silly ideas. As a team you can determine the "big idea" you want your visitors to get from the display and then make sure all of your concepts support that big idea- like a big mind map with the "big idea" in the center. Not feeling confident about it? Ask some target visitors to be part of a focus group - ask them whether the "big idea" and the conceptual experiences you are envisioning satisfies what they want from a visit to your museum. If you respect what makes the immersive and social museum exhibit medium different from any other experience of the content you'll be more likely to find success. Also, visit other museums and apply their great ideas! We all learn from each other.
Sometimes a good start is to invest only a few hundred dollars to paint one of the case interiors a more complimentary/contemporary color for the artifacts that it houses, edit the artifacts to the best ones or into a better arrangement (unless you are massing for a reason, give them breathing room!), write short/hierarchal labels and have an experienced environmental graphic designer lay them out. Print cheap graphics on foam core to test and to iterate. Then prototype some simple hands on items such as touchable reproductions or sample materials (screw them to the case at kid hand level), flip books, talk-back areas with post-it notes, mystery boxes, table with games or models on it, or your own great idea! If you currently do not have hands-on or participatory exhibits, start adding them to see how your audience reacts and to see how you maintain them! Once you make the intuited changes to one display, step back and watch how visitors respond to it. Do you still feel a strong need to test your intuitions? Yes? Interview some visitors. No? Take notes and make adjustments. When you think you have learned what you can from the prototype, apply that knowledge (and all the spill-over ideas) to revamping the rest of the display.
Good luck, and have fun! This work is: the best.
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Rebecca Shreckengast
Director of Exhibit Experience
Carnegie Museum of Natural History
Pittsburgh PA
Original Message:
Sent: 12-02-2015 08:58 AM
From: Lisa Petitta
Subject: redesign of cases
I am looking for a little advise on updating my cases that hold the artifacts. They need new lighting and become more interactive. Should I get a study done first? Also I am located in Western PA does anyone have suggestions on who to call to get a study done?
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Lisa Petitta
historian
Pittsburgh PA
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