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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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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.

Sometimes in the early stages of a design project, an unfortunate physical similarity goes unnoticed until someone coins an unforgettable phase that captures it. I’ve seen perfectly lovely design concepts rejected because of this peculiar phenomenon.
Fortunately in this case, the citizens of Metz, France, seem to like the fact that their new museum, the [...]

Just in: first look by architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne in the LA Times – with images and commentary – of Frank Gehry’s design for the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC. First reaction: very un-Gehry, so to speak, which in this case is a good thing. (The space shown in the model above is immediately off [...]

In the New York Times today, a review by resident architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff calls Jean Nouvel’s new design for the National Museum of Qatar his “most overtly poetic act of cultural synthesis yet.” From the early images, I’m inclined to agree. Several of us were raving about it today, wondering why no one [...]

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 [...]