Find this session's presentations here.
No matter how passionate we are about them, some exhibits just don't work: maybe they miss their point, maybe they were mis-planned, or misplaced, maybe they were just mis-explained.
There are many reasons to why a given exhibit doesn't fulfill its objective: our youthful innocence, our pride in our convictions ("I am right!"), our trying too hard to improve them (and finally make them worse), the untouchable beauty of their design (or its ugliness), or more seriously, our confrontation with the neutrality of our exhibits (or the lack of it) .
Come and laugh at those who are humble enough to share their experiences - but also learn how to create better exhibits, or how to trash them when the time is right.
Facilitator
Session speakers
Owner & Managing Director
Schwaig bei Nuremberg
Germany
Long live the pureness!
When developing phenomena-based exhibits, we have to do it from a neutral stance. Sometimes we are tempted to tweak exhibits in order to meet the expectations of our target audiences, which is methodically incorrect and harms credibility of scientific communication.
Science Centre Consultant
Winterthur
Switzerland
It’s all about the visitor. How cultural blindness can turn a sure-fire winner into the exhibit nobody loves.
Consultant for Interactive Exhibits
Claudia Schleyer
Berlin
Germany
Educating the designers: only few have the chance to learn the “Golden Rules of Exhibit Design” on the job, like in a museum or at an exhibit building company. There are barely institutions that teach the crucial factors, that are important to make an exhibit successful instead of being ignored. One program example shows a compact approach to this tricky task.
Director/Principal
Elsa Bailey Consulting
San Francisco
United States
This presentation will offer a story about how an exhibition’s vision and goals can be diverted by unanticipated events and decisions. First we will identify the issues that arose with this exhibition development, and then share the steps taken to remediate and recover from the problematic rendition, toward a more effective version of this exhibition.
Director
Ian Russell Interactives
High Peak, Derbyshire
United Kingdom
The presentation will be about 'Exhibits that feature too much explanation and not enough exploration'
Digitalisation - Senior Consultant Digitalisation
Heilbronn
Germany
Should engineers develop exhibits? Absolutely – but not alone, or it gets ugly. “What hides in soil?” – Or how we learned that we pretty much always need different perspectives to make an exhibit work.
Interactive Exhibit Developer - Science Show Performer
Winterthur
Switzerland
Yes, sometimes visitors completely ignore exhibits and sometimes they do not: they abuse the exhibit without having the slightest idea what they were supposed to experience. We develop exhibits and we do believe they are the best ones. But we have no ideas how visitors actually will interact with them. And this is exciting.
Creative Director Interactive Exhibits
TRIAD
Berlin
Germany
To die in beauty: What happens when design and technology become
more important than goals and content.
Chief of Unicorn Division
Warsaw
Poland
Too big, too small, too elegant, too physics... I would present ten smart methods of becoming invisible - very practical tutorial for novice exhibits, providing them best practices of how to hide from visitors. Finally I would present special case of real invisibility and it's consequences.
Director
Bagsværd
Denmark
The beauty that turned into a beast!: The most beautiful exhibit I have ever experienced is “Crystal Growth”. Warm up the wax and observe under the microcope how the wax cools down into the most beautiful crystals. But the visitors: They did not understand how to perform the experiment. Embodied Cognition is our best friend: You want the visitor to make waves in a water tank. What to use? A handle? Or a foot pedal??