Jonathan Alger

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

I do think about other things besides the Cooper-Hewitt. I just don’t blog about them, apparently. The Cooper-Hewitt’s recently-opened Triennial exhibit, “Why Design Now?” has me, well, thinking. My favorite project thus far, for a dozen reasons: the “Posterwall for the 21st Century” installation at the Graphic Design Museum in the Netherlands.
Created by design group [...]

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

A great little video of the Dieter Rams exhibit at the Design Museum in London, narrated by museum director Deyan Sudjic. Just lovely. (To me, design exhibits and exhibit design are sort of the same thing, somehow.)
Via Coolhunting.

PLOT Magazine continues to publish some of the best examples of new exhibition design and museum planning from Europe. In Vienna, the historical exhibit Battle for the City is filled with uncommon design ideas, from the nuanced to the wonderfully new (above, a surprisingly fresh treatment for exhibit walls). Unlike the printed magazine, PLOT’s web [...]

A bumper crop: 57 new developments (1-13 March). (Previous list. All past lists.)

Congo hopes a new museum can heal a nation’s scars.
McSweeney’s imagines museum work: “Natural Museum of History Interoffice Smackdown.”
Smart museum idea in here somewhere: brilliant IKEA subway display in Paris.
Mixed Reactions to News of Dale Chihuly Museum Planned for Base of Space Needle.
Swiss [...]

Artist-illustrator Lisa Congdon’s charmingly obsessive A Collection a Day 2010 blog intends to post a daily photograph of a different little collection of items owned by the artist. One suspects Ms. Congdon must have a lot of closets. Above: vintage flash cards. Via Swiss Miss.

My fellow designer parents know that all the well-designed, expensive, eco-friendly, perfectly color-coded Scandinavian brain toys in the world can’t hold a candle to any plastic toy that’s loud and blinks. But perhaps MoMA’s new Shape Lab, an interactive space for children that opened last month, can give us all a helping hand. (It’s rumored [...]

There were 32 new developments:

In multimedia exhibition, Asian Art Museum captures Shanghai’s vibrancy, present and past.
Vital 5 Productions’ Portland Art Museum Unauthorized Tour.
Museum of Advertising Icons opens 2010 (follow Mr. Bubble).
Museum Attendance Rises Despite (due to?) Recession. 40% are up “significantly,” esp. science museums.
New exhibit: the art of DreamWorks (Madagascar, Monsters vs. Aliens, Shrek).
African Burial [...]

Accessibility is deeply engrained into the exhibit design community, typically focused on visitors with trouble seeing or moving. But the situation is nuanced and counter-intuitive. For example, most visually-impaired visitors can’t read braille. And blindness is just one among many disabilities. Which ones do we plan for? Which do we leave out?
One universally-overlooked disability is [...]

20 new developments:

Chatroulette, the bizarre new video social web craze.
“How It Is”, the iPHone app version of the Miroslaw Balka exhibit at Tate Modern: intriguing, but hard to “use”.
Design Competition for the Freedom and Unity Memorial in Berlin.
Museum of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences put on indefinite hold.
Conference in Ireland: “Exhibitions-from Ideas [...]

Following up on that last post, here is a video of “Recode,” the open-source logo by Karsten Schmidt for the V&A’s “Decode” digital arts exhibit. More on this on the Decode website.