Fall 2008 - Winter 2009

Besides full-time work at BBI Engineering, French class and AutoCAD, I worked a little freelance exhibit development for Jessica Brainard, writing some exhibit design narratives for the Lindsay Wildlife Museum. It feels GREAT to be thinking about and writing about visitor interaction. (Specifying and installing AV equipment, drafting contracts and project management only tickles my brain so far.) The project will undoubtedly move very slowly or not at all depending on the way the economy goes in the next year but I have enjoyed working with Jessica.

And for BBI I've been specking and pricing AV equipment for Maya Lin's installation Missing which will install at the California Academy of Sciences. Very cool stuff for Maya Lin although again, funding is slowing the process down. Working with her has been very interesting and involves LCD displays outside and tamper proof glass. I've been focused on doing the outdoor testing so we can make the best assessment of what to do to fight reflections, stay within her budget and honor the aesthetic of the design: Tough stuff but interesting.

And I'm the closer for all the work BBI did to open California Academy of Sciences. The punch list is shrinking and we've almost made the full transition into Warranty Stage...

IT'S OPEN!

Finally, here are some pictures of the work that I did this past summer: Fish IDs in the Water Planet are by far the most dramatic and the most useful, as far as improving the visitor experience. And there's plenty of folks watching videos.
My favorite?
Honestly, it not the AV work at all. (Yawn.) It's the animals and the humans looking at them that I find most interesting. It's been fascinating to observe the visitors as they interact with the space and how they make use of the the interactives vs. live exhibits around them.

WELCOME!

This is my first attempt to highlight the interactive design and museum management work that I've done since 1995. It's taken me a few late nights since my day job happens to be installing the new California Academy of Sciences which will open to the public in two weeks. I'll update the photos soon now that the first floor is nearly complete and our Fish IDs are installed in the aquarium!

Exhibit Development: Activating All Spaces I

It's a challenge to look back on seven years of work at Zeum and pick the top exhibit development projects. I'll start with:

Make-And-Takes

There's no greater compliment or sign of success than a family leaving your museum with products from their experience. Seeing a kid leaving with a built structure, a kite, a shirt, a mask, and walking up the street and onto public transit with Zeum stuff that they created inspires positive word-of-mouth. What started with paper flowers, mosaics and shrinky-dinks turned into city models, kites, spin-art frisbees, cars, pens, masks, puppets and clay figures. These low-tech creative experiences offer a great balance to the technical tools of video and sound production and clay animation. Visitor bags include the DVDs of digital creations but also the finer, traditional arts. Designing these hands-on experiences to be mass-produced (approx. 300 units/day), visitor-led and cost effective while being unique and high quality is a challenge I enjoyed very much. Lots of prototypes through weekend workshops with visitors and staff helped moral and led to some wonderful inventions.

Exhibit Development: Activating All Spaces II

Music Video Production
2001 - 2007
When I started, the second floor of Zeum featured an impressive looking, totally custom interactive studio. Unfortunately, it needed a minimum of 3 staff to run, it couldn't be engaged fully unless you had a minimum group size of 10 people and it was so much on the cusp of new technology that it crashed frequently, ruining people's experiences, after they had waited 30 minutes for a group to gather. To boot, they couldn't really engage too creatively because the scripts were canned and they had very little input or choice of media to create. The idea for Music Video Production came from a very good friend and colleague, Janell Flores. I can't take credit for the idea but I can take credit for the design of the space, the choice of technology to use, and how we developed the experience beyond a karaoke cd and VHS tape.

Solutions to highlight: All visitors, regardless of age or number can participate and activate the space. Music can be provided in all languages and can fit certain themes Music video production was an easy leap to make where visitors created their own music tracks and then performed them on stage. Class field trips could adapt the music video concept to teach writing, group leadership, collaboration, and public speaking, not to mention discussions about style, genre, and the power of images and music. The experience could be provided by one staff member although two was optimum. So it was effective and cost efficient. Take home videos were a big hit and encouraged repeat visitors.

Exhibit Development: Activating All Spaces III

Special FX
2002 - 2007

Green Screen for 5 and under:
Many families visited Zeum with younger and older children. If a child is too young for the production studios, there was very little available to engage them in video production. Early on, Zeum was limited by studio spaces run by staff where the visitor couldn't just wonder and engage creatively on their own. Special FX began as a way to introduce green screen FX to the very young and put the creative tool 100% in the hands of the visitor. It was a green bench, a monitor, and three buttons. It would count down and then record you for 30 seconds and play your short movie back, compositing your image onto various backgrounds. You could fly in clouds, surf or run through fire. Eventually, the addition of a slide structure allowed for the effect of falling, flying or hiding (if you cover yourself in green cloth.) These are simple, short, visitor run experiences that provide a successful video making experience to kids with short attention spans and adults wanting a simple activity. Eventually, responding to visitor requests, we added the ability to buy a still photo of your movie. These are available in the Zeum store which was a nice opportunity to get people to the retail store if they weren't already curious to check it out. The photo printing was so-so on the success scale. See below.

Exhibit Development: Activating All Spaces IV

Production Stage
2006 - 2007
Now it's key to mention here that technology is often faulty and the experiences I've described above are successful because they run well, are simple to troubleshoot, and relatively inexpensive to fix. It was the success of the interactives above that inspired a much more ambitious technical project, moving Zeum away from off-the-shelf hardware and software tools.

The Production Stage was developed in the Main Gallery to inspire visitors who were already familiar with clay animation, music videos, Special FX and costume making to bring all those skills together to make a movie. This could be as simple as performing a pre-existing script or going all out and writing something from scratch. It brands the Main Gallery as where you go to make a movie, the melting pot of all the skills that visitors develop in the various studios. It would also provide a great introduction to new visitors just walking in.

Solutions to Highlight:
Increased the capacity of the Main Gallery. More people would engage longer in the Main Gallery before moving to other areas.
Being able to save work and return to build a "body of work" has driven repeat visitors and deepened visitor's knowledge and confidence in creating their own content.
The flexibility of the technology puts all the creative control into the hands of the visitor. They become the expert, the Director.
It can engage a family of 4 or one child.
If staffing is unavailable in the Main Gallery, visitors can still engage in a creative activity. Although the experience is compromised the Production Stage does not have to close.

Prototype Features:
Visitor DVD Burn Station - Can a visitor burn their own dvd? YES but the technology is complicated and buggy. This is a stop-gap until online distribution is more feasible.
Field Trip controls - Can a Zeum Educator have greater controls over scripts, recordings and flow? YES but the technology is complicated and buggy.

Technological Pitfalls:
The Production Studio is a step away from the off-the-shelf solutions that a normal IT or tech savvy person can maintain. Using those tools in the Main Gallery as early prototypes helped define concept, test visitor interest, and design overall functionality of a custom system. As a custom hardware/software package, it delivers all the special features that were not available in the off-the- shelf solutions. However, as a custom hardware/software package it locks the museum into a maintenance relationship with very specific vendors and software specialists. That can be limiting and risky if the technology is too cutting edge.

Lessons Learned: It is critical to evaluate how do-able your concept is from a technical point of view. Getting multiple opinions from several programmers and developers will insure that the proposed project is not so far at the cutting edge of technology that you'll develop something that never works well consistently. If it can't be built and maintained by more than 3 vendors, consider it a high risk.

Exhibit Strategy: 4 Core Concepts, 9 Exhibit Spaces

I tend to worship the style of simplicity and straight forward, tell-it-like-it-is design. That's not to say I abhor sophistication. On the contrary, if you communicate clearly and simply through your design, a visitor's interaction will be deep and valuable which is in fact, sophisticated.

Zeum's mission is to foster creativity and innovation of all young people and that means their families too, a very broad audience to reach. The exhibit design strategy I developed was to dedicate each exhibit space to focus on one core activity: Animation, Video and Sound Production, Visual Arts and Performance. This allowed us to be very intentional about which areas to invest resources in first and to develop successful exhibits through prototyping over several years.

I should stop here to say that when I began working at Zeum in 2000, we had just celebrated a 2nd Anniversary. There was a very small staff of under twenty people, a 28,000 sq. foot facility, a lot of empty space and I was the only person in the Exhibits Department. We had a lot of work to do with under 200k. The core team of folks that I worked with was the Executive Director, the head of Visitor Services, IT, and the Education Manager. There were numerous Program Directors over the years however that position was very difficult to define and hire for; it burned people out like a five alarm fire.

Exhibit & Programming Stategy

While at Zeum, one major achievement was to clarify the museum's mission and insure that the exhibit experience provided tangible results of the mission's impact on the community.

In plain english:
1. Research. Know your audience. Know your mission. Design for both.
2. Make sure people understand what Zeum is and that they can find the front door.
3. Make sure they have a great time once they're inside. Make sure they'll want to come back.
4. Count how many people come back.
5. Count how many new people arrive.
6. Make kids happy = Makes parents happy = return visits = sustainable programs and exhibits = successful, growing institution
7. Manage your paperwork and your data
8. Make sure it's fun for all parties involved

ZEUM

Fall 2000, San Francisco. I started at Zeum. Here's a story about how important people are: A friend of mine in New York put me in touch with her mom who worked for the Haas Jr. Foundation. She and I met over coffee, chatted about what I was interested in doing and she recommended that I meet David Dial, the ED of Zeum. David responded to my cold call. It turned into a wonderful seven years for me working for Zeum. As a result, I always respond to cold calls and emails from the world OUT THERE. You never know who you'll meet.
Anyhow, Zeum. What an awesome place. I'm not just saying it because I helped to build it for seven years but because I continue to support it, along with many close friends and past colleagues. It's an incredibly supportive, fun, creative place. I'm so proud and inspired by Zeum. I am also equally thankful that I left to grow as a designer in new areas, for other institutions and businesses. I'll have to think about which exhibit to write about first...

Shape Perception: An Interactive Media Literacy Exhibit

1997 - 1998 New York, San Francisco. I have always been fascinated by media, how few people create it and yet, how everyone is impacted by it.

Shape Perception is one of seven interactive art installations about creativity, human beings and media (our creative poop.) I specifically wanted to design interactive installations that would explore this theme in the same tactical way that the Exploratorium explains scientific theories and laws. Marshall McLuhan is awesome but you can't really engage the masses with his books on media theory. It ain't Harry Potter. So, here's what I did:

In a totally random environment (public parks), people discover six identical silver blocks on tables, arranged in a circle. Next to each is a mallet and a chisel. Upon closer inspection, they see that the blocks are not exactly the same. They range in density: soft clay, wax, styrofoam, wood, cement and steel.

And someone begins. Someone has to pick at it. They can't resist. It's human nature. They pick their medium of choice and they create a mark. At first a very small, shy mark. They leave. Others come, see the mark, are inspired to create their own, do so, and then they leave. More come and do the same. That first mark shapes the perception of the next person and the next. The medium is no longer a block but something that develops into communication. Techniques appear and people are more sophisticated about what they decide to create. And eventually, by the end of the day, someone eventually decides to mix the media, creating a whole new medium.

People talk about "media" all the time. Rarely do they think of it as just the plural of "medium." Our written languages, music, radio, film, tv, the internet all developed like these six blocks and now we mix and match them, creating ridiculously complex forms of communication which in turn creates elitism which then motivates others to create new forms of media that will be more accessible to even more folks. It's cyclical. That's my take on what human beings do.

My interest in media literacy led me to the Just Think Foundation, a wonderful organization that shares the mission to foster understanding about media. I used my second show of Shape Perception in Union Square as a means to share information about their programs as well as promote the Artist Guild of San Francisco.

1st Exhibit: Glow Tent for Jump Start NYC

Spring 1996. Manhattan. Lower East Side. I got introduced to Jump Start, a very cool organization that aims to build literacy. They were planning a street festival and needed art installations for kids. I was busy designing interactive art installations about media literacy, slated for a fall opening. Why not design and build one about literacy and hang out with kids on 2nd Street for the day? And get paid.
Ta- Da! Glow Tent
Kids came over to check out this funky looking dome tent covered with tin-foil like material. To enter the tent, every kid needs to first decorate a foam core alphabet letter. There's stickers, markers, glue, etc. Eager to enter the tent, most children slapped on a couple stickers and got in line.
A young volunteer stood at the tent entrance and helped kids to exit and enter the tent, about 10 kids each time. BUT HEY, it's pitch black in the tent! So I'd quickly pass out flashlights, enough for each kid and soon someone would smartly point out that their alphabet letters were glowing. Indeed, to their delight, they had decorated them with glow-in-the-dark stuff. But that was nothing. I then pointed out that the ceiling of the tent was covered with letters and that if they turned on their flashlights and used them like small pens, tracing the shape of the letters, it was as if they were writing with light. And the tent floor was like an entire writing surface so they could write a message to their friends waiting outside. Thanks very much, please exit. Fun Fun FUN. We all had a blast and the Glow Tent appeared at two more festivals after that. It also got me into toy design but that's a different story.

A What?

An Interactive Exhibit Designer: I like to design and build things that grab people's attention and inspire them to play. My creations are often too big to be sold as toys so I call them exhibits and put them in festivals or museums for people to futz with and sometimes break. In the process, we both learn something. The visitor learns about what the exhibit was about and I learn to design and build better exhibits.

The Early Years

My sister and I made our design and performance debuts by transforming this 4' x 12' hallway into a puppet theater, including a ticketing and cashier system. Entry was mandatory and cost 10 cents. Sprinkle in a few magic shows (staring our pet rabbits), a few lego robots and a degree in Radio, TV, Film from Northwestern University and you've got an Interactive Exhibit Designer.