No Bells, No Whistles: When Design and Content Marry Perfectly

Perhaps it's it's not surprising that a design museum would have good design.  It was lovely to visit the Cooper-Hewitt Museum a few weeks ago and discover an interactive exhibit that relied only on great design along with pencils and paper (plus stickers) to create a compelling visitor experience.  Yes, I got to try out their pen--but honestly, I enjoyed this more.

The goal of the exhibit was to engage visitors in thinking about how our creative efforts in design can help solve problems.  Incredibly clear, the exhibit began with a start here and then an overview of the process of visiting the exhibit.

 

 

Then it led you step-by-step through the design process, beginning with finding a value (interesting, right?  museums don't often talk about values as drivers of behavior).

Then you moved to a question. They were broad enough to encourage creative thinking, yet I began to see the constraints that encourage creativity being put into place.

You're asked to reflect on both question and value.

So far, it's been the incubation step in the creative process. We learn what the process  is, and we begin to gather information.  But the process still needs more information.  Because visitors might not be designers, we're given a hand, with a group of design tactics.  Will you use a stage, social media, a public bath or a police station to, say, increase access to healthy food?

 We're reminded that creative combining is a great way to find solutions.  That's why we're asked to pick two cards.  We've designed our solutions--but that's not the end.  We see real-live designers sharing their projects and we see other visitors sharing their solutions. A physician reminds us that "less is more" is often true in medicine as it is in architecture.

Finally, you get to place your project where you think, physically, where it belongs.  Does it work in a parking lot?  on a roof?  in a warehouse?  Helping to remind us that the city itself is a living laboratory for all kinds of creative experiments (as a rural dweller myself, it's the same thing with different vocabulary).

And although it seemed a bit of an afterthought, I loved this cartoon about successful and unsuccessful community design processes, a reminder that community engagement makes all things better.

Thanks Cooper Hewitt for providing us all with the reminder that pens and pencils combined with ideas are a place where creativity lives.  When it comes time to develop your next exhibit, consider all the alternatives.

PS  I did use the pen, but did not look up my saved works when I arrived home.

Visiting The Museum of Things

Do museums need objects?  Do we have too many objects?  How do you contextualize objects? What should we be collecting? or not collecting?  These are the kinds of questions that many of us wrestle with on an ongoing basis so it was an unexpected pleasure in April to visit the Museum of Things (Museum der Dinge) in Berlin that is unabashedly about things, in particular, the consumer culture of the 20th and 21st centuries.

My great colleague Katrin Hieke and I experienced some pure delight in exploring objects and puzzling over how the open storage was arranged.  Sometimes by decade, sometimes by color, sometimes by origin.  The crowded shelves actually encouraged us to look deeper, to dig into cases that attracted us.  And as always, with museum visits, what you bring with you matters:  Katrin grew up in East Germany (DDR) so her added context about some objects was great--and she appreciated the way objects from both the DDR and West Germany were sometimes displayed together.

One section of the exhibition was about branding, but then there were also those anonymous objects that we think of as no-brands:  rubber bands, paper clips and the like, encouraging us to think about why some things need branding and others do not.

The museum had some lovely, simple interactives.  First, their calendar of upcoming events was not a display on a screen or a bulletin board, but on these shelves, making the calendar an object in itself. In another location, you could adopt an object and help support its care (you can also do this on the website). The interactives valued pencil and a sense of hand, something too rarely valued in contemporary culture.

But the interactives (and the exhibitions as a whole) didn't shy away from encouraging us to think more deeply about all those things in our lives.  "How should we live?" asked a question on a magnet board.

Wouldn't it be great to take an object away with you from a museum?  At the Museum of Things, a vending machine outside the door gives you a tiny package with a small object, a bit of verse, and a sweet.  What could be better?  Even though it's clear that this museum is very carefully curated and designed, as befits a design-oriented museum, it provided a kind of joy for me that's all-too-rare my museum visits these days--the joy of discovery, surprise, and connection.

Authenticity is a Lie

Like anyone who works with historic houses, sooner or later, I find myself in conversations about authenticity.  How do we know how the furniture was arranged? What exactly was that color shown in a black and white photograph?  What did it smell like?  Sound like?  At different times of year?   As insiders, we know those questions and talk about them, as we strive for something that I've now come to believe is a fiction, yet something that our visitors believe is the real deal.  So yes, the "authenicity" that visitors think they are experiencing is often a lie.

Over and over again, I read in visitor surveys or hear visitors comment, "oh, it's just like it was back then,"  when it so clearly to me, seems like it isn't.  This blog post isn't meant in any way to dismiss the work of serious historians and curators who work to know more, all the time, about these inhabited spaces, but rather to suggest that we need to be clearer in owning up to what we know, and what we don't (nor any disrespect to the Seven Gables, pictured above in an early postcard).

There's a few issues that these visitor comments really raise for me.

First, the fact that somehow we, as museum/historic site people are often unwilling to acknowledge the complicated nature of historical practice. As a result, visitors get a shocking lack of complexity in thinking about history.  For instance, do I think 19th century historic houses in the Midwest had needle-pointed bell pulls to cover all of the electric light switches in each room?  Not for a minute. Did visitors think so?  Perhaps, because they were presented as part of the historical furnishings.

Second, our adherence to earlier furnishings efforts leaves out so many people in the story of domestic places. For instance, why are servants and enslaved people only, if at all, present in the kitchen and back spaces? Long ago, participants in the Museum Institute at Great Camp Sagamore were tasked with developing an interpretive interactive that could illustrate how this beautiful great camp in the Adirondack wilderness only ran because of the presence of servants.  One group came up with different colored footprints on the floor to represent servants and Vanderbilts and their guests. The servants' footprints came and went in a dizzying array, all through the course of the day, into a space generally interpreted as a space for the wealthy to relax.

Third, we're not all the same.  Spinning wheels, dresses thrown artfully on beds, children's toys arranged carefully and the fake apple in the kitchen bowl.  How can we get visitors to engage in learning when it feels all the same?  Wasn't anybody a slob in the 18th or 19th century? Weren't some people lovers of technology and others not?  (see Denis Sever House, London, below, for an alternative approaches to the slob question).

Third, can we really know?  And can imagination substitute for knowledge? In houses without specific documentation, we make guesses at what kinds of furnishings would be right, but can we ever really know?  Can we know, as we do in our own homes, the emotional temperature of a space? How it feels happy on a summer evening or Christmas, but a darker emotion on a gloomy November afternoon?  Would it change the way the house was furnished?  When I worked on interpretive planning with the Theodore Roosevelt Inaugural Site in Buffalo, the site where TR was sworn in as president, we experimented (and now made permanent) a changed breakfast table. From a formal setting, we changed it to a chair pushed out, rumpled newspapers, and a coffee cup--all, we hoped, a way of engaging visitors' imagination to wonder about the thoughts of a man completing breakfast as he just learns he's become president.  We learned that those changes helped visitors see TR as a person, rather than an abstraction.

As I'd been thinking about historic houses, I had the chance to see the exhibit Rooms:  Novel Living Concepts at the Milan XXI Triennale.  The exhibit began with an overview of Italian design in domestic spaces (above)  reinforcing the sense that the ideal is often what get's presented in history, Then I encountered an imaginative 11 rooms, designed by artists and architects, asking us conceptually to consider past, present and future. Would we think like a bear if we lived in a bear-shaped space? What do we think the future is?  What would life be like in one of these calm white rooms?  Where would the slobs keep their stuff in some of these places?

Wandering through these rooms, I wondered if we shouldn't be more willing to admit that our period rooms are artistic creations rather than exact recreations of history.  They are certainly expressions of self (and sometimes that self-identity that comes from ancestor veneration), of aesthetic taste and choices, and are designed to convey a message, oft-unspoken.  Relatedly, some recent conversations about historic houses and the nature of interpretation also sent me back to Patricia West's Domesticating History: The Political Origins of America's House Museums; well worth a read if you haven't already.

Rooms ended with a text label that said in part:

Talking about rooms inevitably brings feelings and emotions into play.  Our memories are linked with rooms, not easily described precisely by dint of being too personal.  The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard in The Poetics of Space believed that rooms remain with us, but not just in our memories: they are an assemblage of organic habits and can also lose their shape.

 What's the answer?  Greater transparency about our work, for sure.  And a commitment to experimentation as we find ways to uncover and convey deeper, more inclusive meaning in our interpretive work.

Your period rooms:  sometimes misshapen organic habits, filled with memories.

Border Crossing, Part 2

In this continuation of her earlier post on the crossing (or breaking) of museum borders, Andrea Jones takes a look at one border the museum world is often reluctant to cross:  who does what.

Educators Designing Exhibits

At the Accokeek Foundation (AF) we are a relatively small organization with a staff of educators, farmers, and other administrators that help us pay the bills and keep us afloat. We have no curators, trained historians, or scientists. In addition, we don’t have the budget to contract with an exhibit design firm to create the present-day exhibits that we needed for our Green History initiative. We had no choice but to cross the boundaries between educator and exhibit developer/designer.

But, the absence of experts actually gave us more freedom – not less. I’ve been to numerous conference sessions and workshops (one given by our own Linda Norris!) touting the benefits of prototyping. Our exhibits are a step beyond prototyping in that they are never really that permanent. They are just in a continual state of tinkering. We learn as we go.

We were particularly proud of our DIY exhibit “Underspace: The Science of Soil.” We commandeered an old storage shed and turned it into an immersive space that made dirt look pretty darn cool.

When visitors pull back the curtain, they suddenly enter a portal to the underground.

As we tend to take for granted what’s in the soil beneath our feet, we wanted people’s journey underground to look magical. After all, there are more living organisms in a tablespoon of soil than people living on earth! That’s pretty fantastical. We wanted our visitors to have a new appreciation for soil because (and you may have never heard of this environmental problem) healthy topsoil is disappearing by the day, due to heavy use of fertilizers, commercial development, over-plowing, etc.

In our quest to bring a sense of wonder to soil we brought our best crafting skills to bear. We used cardboard, plastic bags, yarn, lots of fluorescent paint, and black lights to transform our little shed into the most groovy “soil rave” you could imagine. The black lights were also a great way to hide the fact that this exhibit was extremely low budget (total cost around $300).

“Underspace” in daylight – not so impressive

“Underspace” under blacklight – wow!

On one side, we represented the vibrant, diverse life within healthy soil. On the other we recreated unhealthy soil, due to human causes.

Organic matter (compost) is being broken down by bacteria and mycorrhizae on the healthy side.

To top it off, we enlisted the help of a sound designer friend (shouts out to the very generous Erik Spangler!) to make recordings of the soil on our site (along with other organic sounds) to create a soundscape for Underspace. I was surprised how much the piped-in sound helped to create a truly immersive space.

Unlike traditional exhibits, ours was created in about one month. The design process was a steep learning curve and the exhibit required continual adjustments after it opened. The first hurdle was the herculean task of translating the researched information about soil into a visible, 3D exhibit. How real should it be?

What about scale? How big should a rotting banana be compared to fungal mycorrhizae? We settled on a quasi-real notion of the underground world. We decided that exacting accuracy could take a back seat to stimulating interest. For example, if we didn’t make bacteria large enough to see, then we excluded a hugely important level of the ecosystem. We created these little round boxes to represent a zoomed-in perspective, but the scale was still not quite perfect.

Another thing about rushing – we didn’t adequately consult experts before transforming the research into a visual representation. One of our farmers (who is well-schooled in soil science) entered the exhibit and pointed out that our differences between healthy and unhealthy soil were too stark, too extreme. Our unhealthy side has zero bacterial life. “That would be impossible,” she said. “The bacteria activity would be lower, but not disappear completely.”

Polly Festa, farmer at Accokeek Foundation

In our quest for clarity (an educator’s tendency) we had created a contrast that was a bit too exaggerated. This was a good lesson. We may not have curators, but we do have farmers. We added bacteria to the unhealthy side and amended the text.

We learned to make better use of the expertise we had. This year, when we re-launch the exhibit, I’d like to consult with a soil scientist in our network. At the end of the day, we still have to make decisions about trade-offs and balances in the realism of our representation. But more voices will result in a fuller discussion and ultimately a more informed decision-making process.

On one final note, I would like to underscore the advantages we had in engaging the entire Programs Department in building this exhibit. Our part-time interpreters' contributions were a huge asset in exhibit development as well as in the actual construction. Not only did they lend their creativity but they became more invested and learned more content than if we had just planned a traditional training.

The process of creating the exhibit created a powerful learning experience for all those involved.

Granted, it’s not realistic to involve hundreds of people (the weekend visitors) in building something like this. I don’t think it’s scalable in that way. But I started to think of our young, part-time staff like a group of long-term visitors. After all, there are many of them that come and go on to bigger and better things. If we can involve them in projects like these and make a real impact on their perspectives, they could potentially take our lessons with them in their future careers.

There will always be a place for the high cost, slick-looking exhibit within the museum landscape. But I want to encourage small museums to take on projects such as this. Why do we have to look slick like the big guys? Sometimes the DIY aspect is exactly what is attractive to a visitor. It’s really about the ideas and the creativity you bring, not the dollars. Thinking across boundaries is something small museums are often forced to do by virtue of having small staffs and tight budgets. But perhaps we can think of these constraints as a strength – as permission to step outside of our comfort zones and defy categorization.

Boundary Crossing in Museums

In the first of two guest posts, Andrea Jones, Director of Programs and Visitor Engagement, Accokeek Foundation in Maryland reflects on what pushing out interpretive boundaries at a colonial farm to become more relevant and meaningful. Stay tuned for part 2!

Creativity is often described as “thinking outside the box.” But have you ever contemplated just how arbitrary these boxes are? While teaching high school anthropology, I learned that the concept of race doesn’t even really exist, biologically.  (Mind = blown!) It’s all a spectrum of physical attributes that are categorized differently all over the world. Yet, from an early age I was conditioned to check the “Caucasian” box on every required form. Consequently, the cultural concept of race affected my identity in a profound way.

Lots of other boxes are arbitrary, too. And today’s society increasingly questions those definitions as more voices are heard. Are there more genders than just male and female? What is an American? Is Pluto a planet?

Boxes can be comforting and useful since they help us to understand the world around us, but they are also limiting. They don’t honor the complexity of life and the myriad possibilities that exist when boundaries are crossed.

Looking at categories as arbitrary human creations is a powerful way to shift your perspective and unlock creative new approaches to interpretation 

in museums.

Here are three boundaries [two in this post, one to come] we crossed at my museum (Accokeek Foundation) and how crossing them helped us to increase our relevancy and challenge our thinking.

First, what is Accokeek Foundation (AF)? AF is a partner of the National Park Service on Piscataway Park just south of Washington, D.C., in Maryland. We steward and interpret 200 acres of this park, including two farms. One of these farms, the National Colonial Farm, has used living history for over 40 years to interpret the lives and techniques of middling tobacco-growers in the colonial era. 

Using History to Teach Environmental Science

Along the east coast, where we are, you can’t throw a stone without hitting a butter churn or a spinning wheel. There is no shortage of historic farms to get your colonial fix. And frankly, the hey-day of this kind of interpretation seems to have passed. We decided it was time to look outside of the discipline of colonial history in its purest form. It was time for a remix.

One day a visiting mom said to her child, “See, aren’t we lucky we have electricity and cars, and all the things we have today?” I thought about what she said. Yes, life was definitely more convenient. But through the lens of environmentalism, all of the convenience has come at a great cost.

Coal burning plant with mining in front.  Photo:  Getty

What if the colonial era was a starting point for the story of the most challenging environmental issues today?

Instead of considering 1770 (our chosen interpretive year) as a time just before the American Revolution, what if we used this snapshot in time to look at family habits in an era when people were more directly connected to each environmental choice they made?

Today, water comes out of our bathroom sink – but from where? How much energy does it take?

"Hidden from view" water treatment plant     Where does water come from?

How does that compare to colonial times? The typical middling colonial family knew exactly how much energy (physical energy) it took to haul water from a nearby stream or well. They used it judiciously – approximately 4 gallons/day per person (according to our estimates). Today, each American uses between 80-100 gallons/day. That is a 2,000% increase in water use.

Most of us are completely disconnected to the “secret life of water” because of today’s complex infrastructure, urbanization, and increased job specialization. We don’t know how much energy is used in treatment plants and how little fresh water is readily available as the population swells and the climate changes.  By combining two disciplines, we can look at scientific issues with an eye towards understanding changes in human behavior through time.

In an initiative we call Green History, we rotate themes on the farm every 6- 8 weeks or so: Energy Conservation and Climate Change; Water Conservation; The Health of Soil; Food Waste; etc. Our first-person colonial interpreters invite visitors to join them in activities that act as conversation starters around the theme. For example, they help to carry water using a yoke to help our colonial family do laundry or water plants.

It’s hard work. But instead of leaving visitors with the shallow understanding that “life was hard back then,” we try to redirect that assumption to a bigger question:

“What is more important, convenience or conservation?

Can we have both?”

Colonial interpreters are trained to start dialogues designed to get visitors talking about this question, to help them draw comparisons between colonial life and their lives.

The interpretation is not designed to romanticize the past. Although colonial people used less water, they also did not have the benefit of current-day sanitation afforded by convenient water – sanitation that saves lives. It’s complex.

Seeing history through the lens of science has been a hugely impactful perspective-changer for our institution, as well as for me personally. But I’d be lying if I said it’s been easy to thread the needle, given that visitors expect a purely historical experience.

We work continually to try out different scripted conversation starters to help get visitors to think of themselves as current-day environmental decision-makers, while surrounded by the past. Part of the challenge is branding ourselves as an institution known for this kind of interpretation so that people are attracted to the experience because of its environmental conscience – rather than colonial history alone.

Time Traveling from Present to Past

The Colonial Era, as a specific category of history, was another boundary crossed. We wanted to completely erase that famous question that is often asked in history class: “What does this have to do with me?”

Each of our Green History themes includes a small hand-made exhibit that draws attention to a current-day environmental issue. This issue is then brought to life in the past on our colonial farm. Visitors usually encounter the current-day exhibit first, which provides a great way to frame their experience in 1770.

Since most of these exhibits are staffed by an interpreter, the area becomes a center for questions that you can’t ask a first-person colonial character.

During our Food Waste theme, we created sight rare to most colonial farms – a bicycle rigged to a compost tumbler. The odd contraption was meant to draw people in to talk to our staff member about compost.

They could take a spin on the “Hot Rot” (as we called it) and also play a compost sorting game to win $2,200 in fake money (the cash value of the food wasted by the average American family of four each year).  

Visitors were then invited back to 1770, to help the Bolton family to do some fall food preservation. The living history interpreters on the farm taught visitors preservation methods that have been lost in recent generations (pickling, drying, repurposing apples into apple butter, etc.).

The characters also make efforts to communicate something deeper – the true value of food when you are the human who has grown it from seed. Wasting is not so easy when agricultural plants are precious and cared for over many months.

This past to present boundary crossing is an explicit way for our visitors to connect history to their lives. It gives a fuller picture of a specific current-day issue – that it didn’t just pop up out of nowhere. These problems are the product of many thousands of decisions made by everyday people over time.

It also becomes obvious how RECENT some our environmental problems are. Food waste has increased by 50% since the year I was born (1970!). The brevity of the problem actually gives me hope that the trajectory of this course can be altered. We want to pass on this feeling of hope and empowerment that the context of history provides. The future of history is not inevitable.

Label? What?

I'm in L'viv, Ukraine, for a month, so many posts to come from here (and if you want to see what this beautiful city looks like, you can follow me on Instagram). but first I'm trying to catch up on some other interesting things I've seen this year.  This post goes way back to January, to visits to the Dennis Severs House and to the Museum of London's Sherlock Holmes exhibit.   Both, in their ways, are works of the imagination--creative museums at work in ways that stimulate and challenge visitors.

If you haven't been to the Dennis Sever's House, it's not like any other historic house. You have to make a reservation, for the evening.  I walked down a cobbled street, knocked on the door, and a museum staffer steps outside with his Ipad in hand, welcomes me, and sends me into the house, asking for quiet.  No guided tour, no labels.  You are free to wander in silence, with just a few other visitors, through the rooms of this 18th century house, set up as if lived in by a family of silk weavers; lit by candles, surrounded by the debris and decay of everyday life.  But it's totally made up.  Dennis Sever was an artist. His goal, says the website,  "what you imagine...is his art."  No photos, not surprisingly, so the below is from their website.  But a picture really doesn't convey the sounds, the smell, the entire experience.  It really encouraged slowing down, taking your time, wondering.

But there are labels.  And that's part of what made it really interesting to me as a museum person. Here's just a few of them I scribbled down.

"Every object in this house should be seen as part of an arrangement.  Each array tells a story..." 

"What?  You're still looking at "things" instead of what things are doing?" 

"Make no mistake...in the house it is not what you see, but what you have only just missed, and are being asked to imagine."

What would happen if we wrote labels like that?  That we trusted our visitors to go for it, in terms of what they're thinking and feeling?  If we allowed their own imaginations rather than filling their heads with facts?  There's no touching in the house (and funny it seems like people don't try to) but it is a full immersion experience.  Severs has given visitors a great gift--his imagination stimulates ours. If you're in London, go!

On that same trip, I visited the Sherlock Holmes exhibit at the Museum of London.  Holmes, of course, is a great imaginative creation, who lives on in books, movies, and television (and yes, they did have Benedict Cumberbatch's coat on exhibit).   This wasn't the work of a single imagination, but rather I suspect a clear team effort--and one where a team somehow felt spurred on by each other.  I imagine a meeting where someone says, "Let's start the exhibit with a bookcase,"  and then someone else says, "Yes, and it can be a secret bookcase,"  and someone else says, "Yes, and visitors have to enter secretly," and some exhibit designer says, "sure!"

I loved the interplay of historical fact--the London of Conan Doyle's day, that he surrounded Holmes with, and the written words from the mysteries.  I loved that certain abstractions and talents of Holmes--observation and deduction, for instance, were explored through very clear installations of objects, some of them very everyday (shoes and eyeglasses, for instance).

And of course, although I didn't take one, I loved the nod to contemporary life at the final stop (and the Sherlock-shaped shortbread in the cafe)

My takeaways?  To remember that great, creative ideas sometimes come from individuals and sometimes from collective work; and to make space for both those in exhibit development; to always remember that many exhibits need a sense of humor; to understand the power of emotions; and to keep looking out for those inspiring exhibits.  What have you seen lately that inspired you?  What has brought you out of the abyss of boring exhibits?