The Exhibiting Dilemma

In his memoir The Times of My Life and My Life with the “Times,” Max Frankel describes the moment in which he learned how readers actually read the newspaper. “I knew that we faced a cognitive crisis: Almost none of our readers read the paper the way we did, or the way we thought they did.” He goes on to describe the major findings of the study his marketing staff had produced: “No two readers read the paper the same way”; “Hardly any reader even looked at more than half the articles on Page One”; “Most readers ignored invitations to ‘continue’ an article past Page One”; “Only a few readers looked inside all four sections of the paper”; and “Readers thumbing through the paper stopped primarily for eye-catching elements like photos, maps, graphics, and headlines.” It was a pivotal moment in his education as editor of the New York Times.

Frankel’s epiphany provides an apt analogy for the continuing dilemma of exhibition design: Content is communicated in a format of free-choice learning to people who pick and choose what to engage—and what to learn and remember—according to personal criteria that are based on individual interests and background. In both cases the medium is a basic and fundamental way of communicating content; in both cases the medium employed is considered a core institutional competency; in both cases the outcome is somewhat unpredictable.

For museums, the fundamental challenge is to design exhibitions that have a clear and coherent intellectual intent while at the same time providing engaging individual experiences. But there are many potential barriers to the realization of this goal. Exhibitions are works of the imagination as well as a medium of communication, and like any creative work they require a coherence of vision and intent that reflects the mission of the museum creating them. But museum exhibitions are by nature collaborative ventures. They bring together knowledgeable and creative people with strong feelings and often differing opinions; the process of resolving the inevitable conflicts can destroy the best educational intent and the experiential integrity of the design. Layers of institutional review can easily pile on additional and often contradictory ideas and elements, making a hash of the best-intentioned and most tightly conceived exhibition.

Considerable pressure on the design process comes from the external environment as well. In contemporary society the individual consumer is the prize, and museums must compete with other leisure-time activities for her interest, time, and money. Many have responded with more audience-centered exhibitions. This is a good thing and long overdue; earlier generations of exhibitions were often inward-directed and designed with the visitor experience as an afterthought. But the process of designing more audience-focused exhibitions has added another layer of complexity to the exhibition design process: audience research. Trying to determine visitor interests and preferences can heighten the tension between institutional intent and the needs of prospective audiences as defined by the museum’s consultants. Too often the exhibition’s fundamental mission and purpose gets lost as the museum attempts to address the variety of interests and learning styles of a wide array of potential visitors.

The evolution of exhibition design into what is often referred to as “experience design” has created yet more complexity. While there are differing views as to what “experience design” really means, always at the root is the assumption that while the producer of the exhibition controls the design, the visitor will control the experience, and that this experience will most likely depend on a variety of high-tech and “high-touch” media to provide a larger “vocabulary” to connect museum to visitor. Many museums have attempted to learn from and compete with other “experiences,” such as theme parks, complex and interactive video games, and blogs. This has resulted in the production of increasingly expensive exhibitions. With the great increase in costs, there is a natural inclination to try to avoid mistakes by adding even more consultants and additional levels of testing and review—all designed to assure the unassurable, that the exhibition will address every expressed audience need and interest. The irony is that the cure is often worse than the disease.

Finally, the high long-term cost of maintaining and updating exhibitions remains a fundamental dilemma. Unlike film, or books, that can be put on the shelf and forgotten after they have served their purpose, or if they don’t work, the bad exhibition sticks around—too expensive to fix and too important to the museum’s menu of programs to remove without replacement by another expensive exhibition.

Museums of science and technology share all of these concerns with other kinds of museums while having an additional, and major, issue to deal with. While many ideas and concepts can be creatively transmitted through artifacts, much of science and technology is too small, too large, or too abstract to be successfully presented in a traditional exhibition format. Given that the history of science is not the history of scientific instruments and the history of technology is not the history of technological artifacts, exhibitions must be capable of stimulating conceptual exploration and learning. In such situations good exhibition design is essential if the final product is to present concepts and ideas in interesting and accessible ways.

Science and technology museums must also keep in mind the risk of using high levels of technology to explain technology. Rapid changes, especially in the area of electronics, combined with high costs have created a situation in which science and technology museums may become museums of themselves if they are not careful. The inevitably long lead times and the expense of such exhibitions create a time lag that is unacceptable to audiences—especially ones used to state-of-the-art electronic media. One commentator described the phenomenon as it related to his own family’s use of the local science and technology museum by saying, “my kids can do everything that the museum does on their desktop at home, and more importantly—they can do it anytime they want.”

Furthermore, it has been difficult for many museums of science and technology to carve out unique identities for themselves. Unlike history museums that have a specific focus and content, or art museums that are generally defined by their collections, science and technology museums share many of the same areas of interest, the principles of gravity being pretty much the same in Hong Kong and New York and the technology of aerodynamics pretty much the same in Bangkok and Berlin. The result has been a move toward homogeneity in many of their exhibition products—what has worked well in one place should work in another. On the positive side, this has meant an improvement in the general level of exhibitions; the downside is that distinctions between individual museums have tended to diminish. For those of us who feel that the distinctiveness of an individual museum comes from its mission, and that its unique and distinctive brand identity grows directly out of that mission and is experienced in its exhibitions and activities, this lack of individuality among science and technology museums is troubling.

One of the best examples of an American science and technology museum that has carved out a distinctive brand, based on its mission, is the Exploratorium in San Francisco. From its founding, it has pioneered a fundamental programmatic and exhibition strategy that puts a high premium on stimulating curiosity and critical thinking through very provisional and improvisational exhibition environments. This strategy, growing directly out of the museum mission, has proven successful over a long time, and is accomplished at a reasonable cost. The experience at the Exploratorium is powerful, entertaining, educational, and distinctive, a reminder that shop-floor culture remains a compelling teaching and mentoring tool and that a focus on mission will deliver the brand. For its many audiences, a visit to the Exploratorium is both memorable and educationally valuable.

While the many problems inherent in designing successful exhibitions may seem daunting to those professionally involved, they remain generally below the radar of the museum visiting public. Museum exhibitions, and especially science and technology exhibitions, are, for the most part, well attended and well received. They are seen as both educational and engaging. From the visitor’s point of view it might be reasonable to ask “What’s the problem?” But the fact that our consumers are generally satisfied with museum exhibition products cannot be allowed to lull us into complacency. Like any professional endeavor, museum exhibition design must set standards of quality and expectation that are more rigorous than those of its public. We know that people come to museums expecting to have an enjoyable time and learn something in the process. They are willing to give the museum the benefit of the doubt when measuring their own expectations against what the museum has offered them. Thirty years ago, when I was chief of exhibition programs for what is now the National Museum of American History, I coined Skramstad’s First Law of Exhibits: A Smithsonian exhibition cannot fail. The Smithsonian had a strong and positive identity; it was seen as one of American’s premier museum enterprises. Whatever it did in the exhibition area must be good. This perception is changing, as visitors become more sophisticated consumers of museum exhibitions, but I remain surprised at what people will tolerate without a peep.

The key to setting higher standards for ourselves is a body of critical literature such as that which books, film, and art have long enjoyed—if “enjoyed” is the right word. The required candor for such a literature is difficult to develop when institutional reputations and the potential for future design work are at stake. But sooner or later the museum world is going to have to acknowledge its importance and impact, and feel comfortable enough to learn from the substantial body of mediocre and failed exhibitions that have littered the landscape of museums. Future museum visitors, as well as those donors whose money is at risk, will in the end thank us for it.

There are some heartening signs, such as SHOT’s Dibner Award for Excellence in Museum Exhibits, a significant and sought-after recognition. And scholarly journals in a variety of fields in which museum exhibitions play an important educational function have included exhibition reviews as an integral part of their responsibility. But it is not enough. Historians review history exhibits, art historians and critics review art exhibits, scientists review science exhibits. In almost every case such content experts are not fully competent to deal with the exhibition as a special and distinctive form of communication art. Perhaps the most heartening change has been the beginnings of a body of exhibition criticism by influential general publications with wide distribution. The most striking example of this is the work of Edward Rothstein at the New York Times. Rothstein’s reviews, which cover a wide range of exhibitions in history, art, science, and technology, are proving instrumental in laying the foundation of a more thoughtful and sophisticated critical literature of exhibitions.

It is in this context that David Dernie’s Exhibition Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006, 192 pp., $65) provides a provocative and helpful contribution to the fledgling critical literature of exhibition design. Dernie’s perspective is informed but not constrained by his background as both an architect and exhibition designer. For the reader, his inclination toward the difficult-to-penetrate language of the art world is sometimes daunting, and the historical background that informs his view of trends in contemporary exhibition design is mainly drawn from the world of art museums. But these biases do not detract from an understanding of his basic premise. He acknowledges that traditional categories of exhibition design are no longer adequate to define the field, and that exhibit making, from the personal collection of things arranged in a bedroom to the arrangement of products for sale on the shelves of a supermarket or boutique, is a fundamental tool for contextualizing or giving order to ideas and things. He also recognizes that in the professional design world, the barriers between museum design and commercial design have become so fuzzy and indistinct that they no longer have much relevance.

Dernie focuses the first major section of the book on what he sees as three basic approaches to exhibition design: narrative space, performative space, and simulated experience. In discussing each he provides an introductory essay and then uses detailed case studies to illustrate “best practices.” His case studies are informed by a broad, global perspective and are helpful in understanding more fully the reasoning behind his categories of approach. Inevitably, he has his favorites and this reviewer would like to have seen a bit more variety in the choice of designers, especially American practitioners. But all in all they serve the purpose well.

Narrative spaces, in Dernie’s categorization, are those that are organized around a story. The key elements of the story provide the structural spine for such spaces and allow for a great deal of flexibility in terms of differences of emphasis, levels of intensity, and the overall rhythms of the visitor experience, without falling into the linearity and potential chaos of the encyclopedic display. Having a strong narrative structure embedded in the exhibition design allows for the insertion of a number of stories within larger stories, or episodes within the overall story, that can yield a sense of surprise or a choice of experience of special interest. When the Henry Ford Museum was designing its Made in America exhibition in the early 1990s, our visitor research clearly showed that unless we could provide a strong dose of people stories to connect the visitor to the largely technological exhibition environment we intended to create, we could not expect nontechnologists even to enter the exhibition. Dernie writes that recent approaches to the design of narrative spaces have evolved into experience design, which emphasizes the importance of “messaging” and points of contact between the chosen narrative and the interests of the individual museum visitor. The point here is that any exhibition that wants to attract and engage a wider audience than subject-matter insiders must try very hard to develop frameworks that resonate with visitor interests. This is especially true in science and technology museums. For those not of a technological mindset, the lack of a story framework in which to place a concept or idea can be a serious barrier to getting the visitor’s attention and interest.

In performative spaces, Dernie argues, the intent is movement, encounter with new forms of shape, color, and sound, action and involvement rather than passive observation. Immersive environments, high-tech interactive displays, and techniques such as those often found in contemporary science and technology centers and children’s museums form the core of this approach. While many of the case studies Dernie uses to illustrate performative spaces are elaborate and complex, all stress the importance of physical interaction. Dernie argues that such spaces are especially appropriate for children, since they emphasize the connection between fun and exploratory learning. Performative spaces are spaces that, at their best, encourage the process of imagination and exploration without worrying too much about directing the outcome of the experience in the space. It has been my observation that most science and technology museums have a bias toward Dernie’s performative-space approach. The focus is on exhibition environments devoted to highly participatory activities that aim at understanding a scientific or technological idea or concept. The dilemma, of course, is that the activity itself may become the focus of the experience, with no larger outcome as a result. While the value of play in exhibitions is important, especially for museum experiences designed for the very young, it can become an easy excuse for not developing more interesting and imaginative ways of communicating important content.

Dernie’s third approach is simulated experience. He sees today’s high-tech and immersive simulations as a logical outgrowth of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century museum dioramas and camera obscura simulations that attempted to simulate experiences impossible to re-create in a more direct way. It is in this approach that museum and commercial environments come together most fully and the distinction between education and entertainment disappears. Dernie sees great opportunities in the creation of simulated experiences by museums, especially when combined with more traditional exhibition techniques. He writes that the success of such experiences “will depend on their creative distribution among real artifacts and the exhibition as a whole. Only with a thorough integration will this new audience understand the interdependence of the simulated and real worlds, and the worth of actual experience in an increasingly artificial lifestyle” (p. 77). While Dernie’s discussion of simulations includes a number of very high-technology media techniques, it needs to be said again and again that imagination, not state-of-the-art media, remains at the center of those performative and simulated experiences that have been most successful. One only has to think of Charles Eames’s wonderful film, Powers of Ten, and the Eames exhibition Mathematica, to find two examples of looking at complex ideas in ways that do not dumb them down but instead make them accessible to the nonscientist or nontechnologist while stimulating a curiosity and wonder that can only result in further thought and speculation.

Dernie’s discussion of simulated experience will give many museum people pause. There is a strong philosophical argument to be made that in a world of increasing artificiality, the only real distinctiveness of museums lies in their focus on the world of real rather than simulated experience. And there is also a very practical argument to be made that to compete with the commercial sector in creating successful, immersive, simulated environments is just not feasible in the undercapitalized world of museums. If one looks at most museum productions in this category, they tend to be imaginatively second-rate and done on the cheap, and they quickly become out of date. Yet as the Eames exhibits and films demonstrate, imaginative and well-thought-out simulations can be amazingly powerful teaching tools. To this reviewer, Dernie’s three approaches make sense and provide a thoughtful and provocative set of categories worthy of serious discussion among those involved in creating museum exhibitions.

The remainder of Exhibition Design is devoted to an exploration of a variety of exhibition techniques: display, lighting, communication, color, and graphics. In this section Dernie is able to expand his comments on a wide array of examples of contemporary exhibition design in both the museum and commercial world. While this second part of the book does not have the conceptual interest of the discussion of exhibition design approaches, it is a thoughtful survey of contemporary exhibition design practice that will be useful to exhibition design professionals.

For this reviewer, one of the most interesting and important observations that Dernie offers in this study relates to the issue of branding in commercial-sector design and specifically exhibition design. Dernie sees exhibition design as an important component of creating and sustaining a strong and clear brand identity in the marketplace. Although he does not specifically mention them, some of the most effective examples of successful branding are the elaborate museums recently created by Mercedes-Benz, Audi, and BMW. Here, the message of technological excellence and quality is communicated and reinforced through the design. Dernie does not touch on brand identity as a key issue for museum exhibitions, and this reviewer wishes he had done so. It is surprising that more museums, especially science and technology museums, have not used the look and feel of their exhibitions’ environments as a strategy for branding the museum.

Interestingly, Dernie’s case studies and his descriptions of exhibitions provide a wonderful example of design intent versus the individual visitor’s experience. I read the case studies with great interest and found his critiques to be both insightful and thoughtful. Yet I have seen many of them firsthand and find that in a number of cases his descriptions of the exhibitions and my personal experience of them do not match. This strikes me as emblematic of the reality that even the best-conceived and -executed exhibitions will be experienced by the visitor through a personal lens of familiarity and interest.

Over the years, a lot of publications on exhibition design have passed over my desk, and few have found a place on the bookshelf. I find that since first drafting this review I have referred to Exhibition Design a number of times. It is thoughtfully provocative in its approach to exhibition design, and the case studies offer in themselves an interesting array of exhibitions and exhibition techniques. It is worthy of remaining on the bookshelf of anyone who wants to take exhibition design seriously.

While Exhibition Design and other such studies are helpful in understanding issues of the design intent of individual exhibitions and in providing critiques of exhibitions, they usually avoid remarking on the design process. That process remains a critical area for study and discussion. As museums struggle to better meet the needs of increasingly diverse users and yet remain true their individual missions, creating a process that results in a successful exhibition is a high institutional priority. To be sure, the process will be somewhat different in each institution, and perhaps even different for each exhibition. It appears that the most prevalent contemporary strategy for bringing exhibition design intentions together with individual visitor experience and expectations is to convene armies of specialists in areas such as informal learning, focus groups of every stripe, advisory teams of content specialists, marketers, and technical experts, and “exhibit developers” who shuttle among the other groups. And yet it is hard to say that the result has been more imaginative, more truly great exhibitions. And so here we are, back to the fundamental dilemma of how to create exhibitions that have a clarity of intent and focus and yet connect and engage with visitors who have a variety of motives for being in the exhibition, not to mention a variety of cultural and educational backgrounds.

This dilemma is much the same for every imaginative product, especially those requiring collaboration rather than individual vision and execution. If we look at the moviemaking process, which embodies many of the same issues as exhibition design, we can see that powerful collaborations involving huge amounts of money, talent, experience, and technical expertise often result in movies that are neither great films nor successful in the marketplace. If there is a sure-fire formula for greatness (or even goodness) in either medium it has not been discovered. At its very best the exhibition design process is what the exhibition designer Barbara Fahs Charles describes as a “good dance,” with the various collaborators bound together by a shared understanding of the exhibition purpose and their individual roles in the process. At its worst the process can become design by committee, where disagreements are resolved by splitting the difference, the mortal enemy of coherence and integrity.

This reviewer’s sense is that more candid studies and discussion of what makes for a “good dance” are very much in order. While surely there is no formula, it is possible to learn much from studies of processes that have worked and processes that have gone awry. With more books such as Dernie’s, a larger body of critical exhibition reviews, and more candid study of the exhibition design process and how it can be improved, the likelihood of substantially improving the level of quality and engagement of museum exhibitions is a real possibility.