By: Anna Musun-Miller and Shasta Bray, Co-Contributors
Last week, Stephanie Ratcliffe of the Wild Center, an interactive science museum in Tupper Lake, New York, began sharing 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. This week we feature Part Two of the 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.
With the Climate Solutions exhibit specifically, how did you start to narrow down the content you would present?
It started with learning about our audience. We used the concept of the Six Americas from Yale’s research on climate change communication, where the Yale Program identified six different segments of the population that each have a unique perception of the issue. We wanted to find out how our audience fit into those categories, so we first polled the staff and then surveyed randomly selected segments of our audience.
What we found was that over 82% of our audience fell into the alarmed or concerned about climate change categories. Our goal with the exhibit was to move people to personal action. So we chose to work with that 82% as our target audience and focused our content on solutions rather than creating content to convince the other 18% that climate change was happening.
How then did you decide what solutions-based content to include?
Paul Hawken’s 2017 book Drawdown was the impetus for the exhibit. We knew we couldn’t talk about every possible solution so we looked for an overlap of what things were happening in our area and what things could be communicated well in an exhibit context. For example, we highlighted solutions like the local food movement and the conservation of natural spaces in our region instead of things like fixing the chemistry of refrigeration.
We knew that the exhibit had to be a story about people. The whole idea is that people are the core of the solution to climate change. When people think of climate, their minds go to some carbon-sucking machine that’s going to be invented by a scientist. The shift that needs to happen in society is that of our own mindsets and behaviors. What we try to do in the exhibit is show that things are already underway and that your neighbors are doing them to give a sense of hope and inspiration. We included a story about somebody who’s installing solar panels in our region, and another one on an engineer who’s making an efficient small-scale windmill, but the story wasn’t about the windmill; it was the person that was the story.
I think the design approach that really makes it work was mounting almost life-size portraits of the people alongside their stories. You walk in and see these people looking back at you, connecting with you eye-to-eye. You can sense this community of people moving towards the same goal, and just by walking into the exhibit, you’re a part of that group.
One of the big ideas was to say that you can’t do everything, but you can do something. You have your own skill set you can bring to the table to contribute to solving the problem. The idea was to have visitors consider their place in the climate movement based on their skills, whether it be photography, farming, or science. We don’t want to be in the “you should” business. It’s a self-directed action model.
The exhibit focuses on inspiring visitors to take individual action to contribute to a larger whole. What about collective action?
We profiled the Youth Climate Summits that we host, but we didn’t find a good way to encourage individual visitors to take collective action in the exhibit. I think that’s another concept that’s better suited to programming or video. At our Youth Climate Summits, groups of kids gather to learn about and discuss climate issues. They develop Climate Action Plans that they then work together to implement in their school or community. Sitting down with experts and each other to have conversations and create plans in real time is key. These young people are learning about collective action by working through their projects. I don’t think going through an exhibit alone would lead to the same kind of collective action.
What advice would you give to others who are just starting an exhibit development process?
It’s hard to be a good developer. You have to be humble and willing to let go of ideas that just don’t resonate with visitors during testing. I always think it’s literally a miracle when you’ve had an idea you’re passionate about, you created an interactive, you took another stab at it when the first prototype didn’t work, it actually gets built, and then you go into the hall months later and people are actually doing it. And then, you do a summative evaluation that shows the visitors actually understood the concept. With all the different interests and motivations visitors bring with them, I think if half the people get it, you’re doing excellent work.
To learn more about the Climate Solutions exhibit at the Wild Center, take a virtual tour.
If your organization is considering how your physical spaces should evolve over time to continue delivering on your mission, contact us. At Canopy, we partner with nationally and internationally recognized design firms to link long-range site and facility design with your specific strategic and business objectives.
