By: Anna Musun-Miller and Shasta Bray, Co-Contributors
At the Wild Center, an interactive science museum in Tupper Lake, New York, the story centers on how people and nature thrive in the Adirondacks. Executive Director Stephanie Ratcliffe recently sat on a Blue Ribbon Panel for one of Canopy’s clients, and something she said piqued Director of Planning Anna Musun-Miller’s interest: not everything makes a good exhibit. Anna sat down with Stephanie to further explore that idea. Here Stephanie shares her insight on the iterative process of deciding what content works in the context of an exhibit and what content to let go, featuring examples from The Wild Center’s new Climate Solutions exhibit.
Tell me a bit about your approach to exhibit development at the Wild Center.
We’re a small natural history museum with fewer than 40 full-time staff members, and we don’t have an exhibit department. So we have many educators that contribute, and we hired a couple of people to work on the Climate Solutions exhibit specifically.
I cut my teeth at the Brooklyn Children’s Museum and then worked at a science center, places that were very disciplined in that if you had an idea and couldn’t make it work as an interactive, it wasn’t going to make it into the exhibit. When you set those ground rules, you need to be able to let some content go that doesn’t work as an interactive.
How do you know if something will work as an interactive?
There’s really no substitute for a robust, iterative prototyping process. When you mock something up and go out and test it, you immediately learn whether it works. An exhibit isn’t about you and your ideas. It’s about trusting the visitor. They’re bringing so much to the table in terms of interest, motivation, and desire. You embrace that prototyping process because you know you need to have the top-down and bottom-up perspectives come together to be successful. You have to be willing to be humbled and accept that you’ll make a lot of mistakes and test a lot of interactives that don’t work.
So you’re saying that exhibit development is about understanding your visitors and communicating in a way that really gets through to them. It’s really an act of service.
Right, and not all content translates well through an exhibit. When you’re in a free-choice setting like The Wild Center, visitors ping-pong around the space. You have to keep in mind that no one is going to read everything from beginning to end. You start to think about the whole exhibit in terms of spaces that are just a little bigger than the human body and consider what you can achieve in each space before the visitor ping-pongs to a different part of the exhibit. An interactive can only be a nugget of a core truth or one piece of a bigger story. If it’s a complex concept or a story that needs to be told from beginning to end, then that’s better suited to a movie or a short video.
Can you share an example of a concept that you think doesn’t translate well through an exhibit?
One area in our Climate Solutions exhibit that I don’t think was very successful was a set of exhibits that attempted to communicate the notion of climate solution accelerators. Most were about large shifts in systems like electrification of transportation, increased corporate responsibility and accountability, and the power of grassroots organizing, local laws, and voting. They were all high-level concepts, and even though we had a little prop to entice visitors to come over and see what we had to say, I just don’t feel that it was exhibitable. There was a lot of experimentation, and we couldn’t find a physical metaphor for how moving many small things makes the bigger part of the system move faster. In the end, there was really no way to communicate the set of ideas in a visceral way. The set of exhibits ended up being a device just to trick people into reading a long label. In retrospect, since it’s a very important idea, we could have made space for a short video. There are some concepts that, because of the nature of their complexity and how you have to unpack them in a sequential way, just don’t work as interactives. Editing is as important as creating.
Next week we’ll share Part Two of this interview where Stephanie explains how she selected the Climate Solutions exhibit content; her evaluation of highlighting individual action vs. collective action; and advice for others starting the exhibit development process.
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Photo courtesy of the Wild Center.
