Recording the interactive exhibit development process
Designing and producing interactive exhibit is a complex process, involving many steps and variables. How do we keep a trace of this processs in order not to re-invent the wheel or repeat the same mistakes over and over?
How do we record learning objectives, scientific content, technical problems and their resolutions, materials, ergonomics, assembly drawings, user feedback, evaluation etc?
Are we bound to lose this information and know-how after the end of each temporary exhibition? How can we create a repository without having to physically store old exhibits?
Should we create "collections" of interactive exhibits? A database that lists successful exhibits, the reasons for their success, their evolution through time, their evaluation results?
Our three speakers will be considering these questions from different angles: exhibit development, evaluation, collection curation... Participants will get out out the session with concrete examples of methods or tools to improve their exhibit design process and start building a "memory" of the interactive exhibits they produce.
Facilitator
Exhibit developer and Curator
Session speakers
Thorsten from the Swiss Science Center Technorama is presenting their custom-made database and interface to document all repairs, changes and improvement proposals ever made for all exhibits. In the future this history will be supplemented with all documents associated with the exhibit. And he tackles the question how the experience, the possibilities of interactions and questions raised by using the exhibit can be documented. He suggests to build a video repository to collect all interactions at an exhibit that are not documented on the text plate.
Directrice des Editions et Transmédia - Digital director
Anne, from Science Museum, London, UK, will speak about how exhibit evaluation has entirely shaped the exhibit development process. She will develop on how formative evaluations are used in the development of future exhibitions and new interpretative platforms, and how this iterative process ultimately improves the exhibits. She will expend how the evaluation objectives are defined and assessed and how the decisions for change are made and moni
Owain Davies, from Techniquest, Cardiff, UK
Owain will speak about Techniquest’s experience as a creator of exhibits for others. This science centre has been making interactive exhibits for 30 years. Owain will discuss how this long heritage of exhibit building informs current practice. He will discuss how the collective memory of the field has shaped some of Techniquest’s most successful exhibits and discuss some of the key influences that continue to inform its work. He will also showcase examples of exhibits that take pre-existing concepts or known interactive solutions but developing them in a new way.
