After years of quietly enjoying my ever-growing collection of books on exhibit design, museum planning and interactive spaces, I have finally come up with a way to share my bookshelf with everyone. I hereby announce the Exhibit Designer’s Bookshelf (beta), courtesy of Shelfari.
Click the link at the very top of this page, or here, and enjoy. More fancy features to come, this is just a start.
Many thanks to Jessica Griscti, bibliographer extraordinaire, for helping to make this happen.
Suggestions? Missing books? Useful? Not useful? Comments open below.
If you can’t make it to Shanghai for Expo 2010, these three videos by the (accurately named) Shanghai Expo Timelapse Machine give a sense of the different kinds of pavilions on display. Germany: a deep, varied exhibition with a variety of completely different interactive zones in the interior:
Denmark, completely the opposite, with a beautifully designed building and little else to “do” (not that anything more is needed):
And finally, the hauntingly beautiful, award-winning UK pavilion, the “Seed Cathedral”:
It’s never easy to use the floor to communicate information in an exhibit, no matter what kind of glass floor, LED grid or temporary decals you try. First of all, things wear out when people step on them all day. But more importantly, if the exhibit is popular, the visitors themselves block the view.
This memorable floor tile installation, from the newly-opened Schindler’s Factory in Krakow, Poland (a branch of the Historical Museum there) works for several reasons:
it deliberately puts a offensive symbol underfoot so visitors can trample it
it uses a simple but powerful repeating pattern over the whole floor
visitors may not notice it right away: even better
cost of ownership: nearly zero, it is as low-tech as it gets
Frighteningly elegant. Read more in the New York Times. See a short video tour of the museum shortly before opening here.
Goooal! Three of the winning entries just announced in this year’s IDEA design awards were exhibit design projects. The judges might have had a case of World Cup fever: one of the projects hails from Brazil, the Museu do Futebol (The Soccer Museum); credited to designers Jair de Souza of Jair de Souza Design; Daniela Thomas and Felipe Tassara; and Mauro Munhoz and Leonel Kaz:
A great, simple video of what everyone involved in interactive installation projects knows, but sometimes can’t articulate. By the Environmental Health Clinic at NYU, led by Australia-born conceptual artist Natalie Jeremijenko. Don’t let the name confuse you, it is a provocative design studio camouflaged as a university health think-tank, also apparently sometimes called the “x Design Project”. You figure out the rest.
Liberally excerpted from the Vimeo blurb (see here for more of the blurb, which is great, and more videos, which are also great):
This video illustrates that if you hold constant the institutional context (in this case a contemporary museum), and the information presented (in this case the curatorial information); and you only vary the technological interface, you can reveal the Structures of Participation around the differing interfaces—same info, same context, but very different experience. Because of the tight coupling, it can be very difficult to make sense of what is actually changing as we change our socio-technical system. In the first case (a) the traditional public display of text on museum wall, which, because of the social convention of quiet-while-some-one-is-reading, you can be standing next to someone, but not talk to them and never hear anything of what they are thinking. Secondly, the technological shift we have all witnessed in contemporary museums as the curatorial information is presented as an audio tour, as a privatized audio environment via headset (or similar). This has the effect of synchronizing people temporally, but precludes local discussion–you can’t hear what anyone nearby is saying. In the third case the curatorial information is presented via a deliberately triggered (pull) small located speaker (the Located Sound Speaker or LSSn). This creates a shared audio context for a small group, momentarily synchronizing people spatially and temporally, and providing an opportunity for local comments and discussion.
More on the exploits of Ms. Jeremijenko in this article and YouTube video from GOOD Magazine.
In case you missed it, Robin Pogrebin’s Brooklyn Museum article in the New York Times yesterday (“Brooklyn Museum’s Populism Hasn’t Lured Crowds”), has created quite a stir. The article itself is very much worth reading, if you are someone interested in successful visitor experiences of whatever kind. Just don’t expect pat answers, the jury is still out. Perhaps indefinitely.
One of the better responses I’ve seen thus far has been from the most mysterious, anonymous, hardworking museum twitterer around, @museumnerd, who posted this reply.
A lovely video from the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum (post from Director Bill Moggridge’s “Bill’s Blog” here) showing the way they got a (teensy) Tata Nano off New York City streets and onto a display platform inside the museum. Despite snow.
Designing exhibits, I’ve always been inspired as much by installation art as any other discipline. Perhaps more. For example, this remarkable image, from a piece by Argentine-German artist Tomás Saraceno, has been haunting me lately:
In the spring Bonniers Konsthall presents a solo exhibition by the artist and architect Tomás Saraceno … In collaboration with spider researchers and astrophysicists, Tomás Saraceno has spent several years developing the 400 cubic metre installation that is exhibited at Bonniers Konsthall. … The gigantic spider’s web, especially made for the main gallery of Bonniers Konsthall, consists of elastic black rope which will span floor to ceiling.
I promise you my best 140 characters on accessibility, architecture, education, exhibit design, graphic design, installation art, interaction design, museums, online exhibits, philanthropy, technology, video, and wayfinding. www.twitter.com/jonathanalger
… an array of motor-assisted pendulums weaves through space emitting light and sound. The rhythm of the work evolves through chaos and returns to unison, producing a hypnotic and seductive performance that heightens the viewer’s awareness of the space and their relationship with it.
Inspiring! “Tidal Datums [adriensegalfurniture.blogspot.com] is a wooden table whose form is inspired by the formal language of data graphics. The table is intended to be a representation of analytic information through the medium of furniture. Data graphs were gathered from NOAA’s historic tide database, more specifically the measurements of tides at San Francisco Bay over a 4 week period, and then translated into tangible material.” – From the very excellent Infosthetics.
Want more infographics-as-wooden-sculptures images? See this page (links partway down).
A wall, a man, and a knife: the etched-leather installation art of Mark Evans. I don’t know about you, but for me this beats a ginormous touch-screen video wall any day. (That said, I wouldn’t want to be the cow.)
Narrative Space, a conference hosted by the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, starts today, despite the volcanic ash cloud. It is an “international conference exploring the interpretive potential of museum architecture and design.” (Sounds great, sad I can’t go!)
A new lamp for the home (and public spaces, methinks) conjures up sunny days on demand: “Reveal is a new type of ambient interior lighting. This product creates the impression of sunlight streaming through a window and onto an interior wall. A light breeze appears to move through trees in the cast image. The first edition, limited at 1000, are available now.”
Explorations of new developments in exhibit design, museum planning and interactive space by Jonathan Alger, co-founder of the design firm C&G Partners.
