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 [...]

Okay, there are brilliant audience-participation exhibit ideas – and then there are REALLY brilliant audience-participation exhibit ideas.

The sculpture is artist Hans Hemmert’s “German Panther”, 2007.

“It’s the new way to find your way at the American Museum of Natural History,” says the AMNH (and several hundred blogs) about their new iPhone app, appropriately named “Explorer:”

More from the Museum:
Chart your own course at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City with AMNH Explorer—a new app that is part [...]

Nearly as remarkable as the Shanghai 2010 World Expo: the Shanghai 2010 World Expo “Online Expo”. Nearly as remarkable as that (and entertainingly bizarre): the Shanghai 2010 World Expo “Online Expo” Official Preview Video:

“Ceaseless World Expo!”

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Are you as sick of your mouse as I am? Ever wonder why everyone in a two-handed species uses a one-handed interface? Via Swissmiss, the inventor of that Minority Report gesture-based computer interface demonstrates it in real time on the TED stage. “In five years, when you buy a computer, you will get this.” Brilliant.
(I’ll [...]

A happy coincidence: I was at the Miami Art Museum two weeks ago – just a few days after I wrote about the Saraceno installation image that was haunting me – and I stumbled on (and nearly into) Tomás Saraceno’s fantastic “Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spiders Web” (2008, [...]

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 [...]

Must-see: an enlightening and (very) information-packed discussion of social media and web strategy. By Sebastian Chan – charismatic director of apparently everything technological at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia – speaking at the Smithsonian (archived at the Smithsonian 2.0 video collection)

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A color-sensitive interactive billboard installation at Time Warner Center in New York. A clever interface between subject matter (an IBM campaign about smarter retail supply chains) and audience (retail shoppers at the most important end of that chain). But I can easily imagine other uses for this underlying idea in other public space applications.
(On a [...]

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!)
Full program (big PDF) here.

The remarkable site Artbabble won “Best Overall” honors in the Best of the Web competition last week at the Museums and the Web conference in Denver. Originally launched in April of last year by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and six partners, the site is has become “one of the premier destinations for art video [...]