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 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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Count me in. From Artlog.com:
Starting today you can get a key to unlock NYC’s secret doors; at least all the interesting ones. Creative Time and the City of New York have collaborated with artist Paul Ramirez Jonas and created this summer’s coolest scavenger hunt. With Key to the City they have reinvented and democratized the [...]

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 [...]

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.
Via Core77.

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 [...]

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)

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

King Tut, or at least the exhibition of the same name, has come to Times Square. A recent review in the New York Times by Edward Rothstein explains that the show is raising money for Egyptian museums, and that doing so apparently means a more commercial focus than ever.
The New York show is hosted [...]

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.