skip to main |
skip to sidebar
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.
Music Video Production
2001 - 2007When 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.
Special FX
2002 - 2007Green 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.
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.
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!
