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.
“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 custom navigation system, part personal tour guide for the Museum’s world-famous halls. Providing turn-by-turn directions, AMNH Explorer takes visitors from the edge of the universe to the age of the dinosaurs. Choose from a variety of Museum-designed tours or create your own from a list of popular exhibits, specimens, or artifacts. AMNH Explorer also lets you share your adventures with friends and family by linking directly to your Facebook and Twitter profiles. Download AMNH Explorer now and start planning your next visit or use your iPhone® or iPod® touch to discover the Museum’s must-sees from anywhere in the world.
More from the New York Times here. Links to the entire media frenzy here.
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.
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 civic honor of bestowing keys to visiting dignitaries. … Ramirez Jonas’ Key to the City actually unlocks steel gates, padlocks, PO boxes, secret doors and secret compartments at over 20 sites throughout the five boroughs of NYC. The key will unlock:
– A secret door on the fifth floor of the Brooklyn Museum
- A box with limited admission buttons per day at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
- A do-it-yourself artist studio and gallery in the Point Community Development Corporation in the Bronx
- The churchyard that contains Hamilton’s tomb at Trinity Church
- A box at coat check with a preview of the Whitney Museum’s future
- A room in the Louis Armstrong House Museum not on the public tour
- A closet in the master bedroom on the 2nd floor of Gracie Mansion
- A garden maintained by the monks at the Staten Island Buddhist Vihara
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
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 colorblindness, even though it may be more common than any other: it may affect up to 10% of the population (mostly men). [Note: you can simulate what different hues look like with different types of colorblindness at Color Scheme Designer.]
Enter a new proposal from Portugal, Color Add, a concept for a system to tag color fields with monochromatic symbols for the colorblind. More after the break.
The “Design USA: Contemporary Innovation” exhibit is open at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, and the New York Times writes it “is less an exhibition than an extra-large design seminar in your head.” I’m not sure if the Times means that as a compliment, but I do like their slideshow. The exhibit features the winners of the National Design Award since it was founded in 2000 (I’m proud that my partners and I were Finalists for that award a few years back ourselves). Both the exhibit and the accompanying iPod tour were designed by Design Award recipients 2×4. From the review:
But the bulk of the exhibition takes place in the palm of your hand, on a specially programmed iPod Touch, the nonphone (but wireless-enabled) version of the iPhone. Apple has lent the museum a hundred of the devices in what is either a brilliant promotional move or — given the Cooper-Hewitt’s design-minded demographic — a case of pushing to the converted. They provide access to a wealth of interviews, slide shows and snippets of performances, all related to the 78 architects and designers represented in the show. Available free, this device sends the traditional audio guide the way of the one-horse buggy.
It also turns the museum into your own private rabbit hole. The guide may be coming soon to an art exhibition near you, where it could be a fatal distraction from the art on view. But it works seamlessly in a show that is design through and through.
For those of us who design experiences for differently-abled visitors, Braille can sometimes be a puzzle. What percentage of visitors are blind, versus partially-sighted? Of those, how many of those know Braille? And of those, how many would actually make use of Braille in an exhibit? A fascinating article in the New York Times today discusses the decline in Braille and the rise of audio techniques.
A report released last year by the National Federation of the Blind, an advocacy group with 50,000 members, said that less than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind Americans read Braille. Whereas roughly half of all blind children learned Braille in the 1950s, today that number is as low as 1 in 10, according to the report … Braille literacy has been waning for some time, even among the most intellectually capable, and the report has inspired a fervent movement to change the way blind people read.
Explorations of new developments in exhibit design, museum planning and interactive space by Jonathan Alger, co-founder of the design firm C&G Partners.
