On the Road with Rock and Soul

This article reports on a study conducted for an exhibition team at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History (NMAH). As part of the planning process for a major exhibition, we studied visitors at a small preview exhibition, The Social Roots of Rock and Soul. Personal interviews, including a tape-recorded portion in front of the Rock and Soul display about the images and the themes, were conducted at four venues of the Smithsonian's 150th Anniversary traveling exhibition, America's Smithsonian (Los Angeles, Kansas City, St. Paul, and Houston). The most significant finding from visitor responses is strong regional differences. The study also showed that visitors responded to the images and storyline differently, depending on whether the material was presented through video or panels.     

Diversity and the Museum of London

Increasingly, some — but not all — urban history museums are facing the challenges of reaching out to and serving growingly diversified populations. Described here is the Museum of London's The Peopling of London, which recognizes the history and contributions of immigrant communities and their descendants. Planning for the exhibition required an about face from the museum's traditional in-house method of exhibition development — involving members of minority communities. Both the planning process and the resulting exhibition serve as a model for consideration and possibly emulation as urban history museums look at the growing diversification of the populations they serve.     

Communication and Persuasion in a Didactic Exhibition: The Power of Maps Study

This article describes a study of The Power of Maps, an exhibition presented in 1992 at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, in New York City. The study compared the result of surveys administered to visitors at the Cooper-Hewitt as they entered and exited the exhibition with a control group of surveys administered to visitors at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, who had not seen The Power of Maps exhibition. It was found that visitors who were surveyed as they entered the exhibition were closer in agreement with the message of the exhibition than the control group. It was also found that visitors surveyed upon exiting The Power of Maps exhibition were in closer agreement with the message of the exhibition than with visitors who were surveyed as they entered the exhibition. The study demonstrates that it is possible to document a change in visitors' conceptions about a topic as a result of hearing about or visiting an exhibition and reliably determine the degree to which exhibitions can influence visitors.     

Measuring Success in the “Congo Gorilla Forest” Conservation Exhibition

Abstract Most zoo visitors are primarily motivated by the joys of watching animals, which may preclude attention to major ecological issues that are the focus of research in biodiversity, habitats, and other matters pertaining to the survival of wild animals. The Wildlife Conservation Society exhibition Congo Gorilla Forest is a popular animal‐watching experience, but it also communicates considerable educational content, stimulating visitors' interest in and awareness of ecological relationships. This article reviews the phases of an evaluation process that assisted WCS staff in making decisions about exhibition design and interpretation; it discusses measurement challenges in assessing outcomes; and it uses key findings from the evaluation process to define and explain the interpretive success of the project. Success for this conservation exhibition is described in terms of achieving three educational goals while recognizing the diversity among audiences. The exhibition's effectiveness is attributed to understanding visitors' expectations and interests, creating an array of exhibit formats to engage people, and communicating conservation messages visually and experientially.     

Recognizing the Relationships between Interactivity,Story, and Message: Lessons Learned from the Summative Evaluation of the Human Plus Exhibition

Interactivity, message, and story are critical, interrelated components of most educational exhibition designs. In this article, we introduce an Interactivity Design Framework for guiding exhibition designers’ intentional inclusion of interactivity, story, and message in exhibition components. This framework emerges from selected findings from summative evaluation of the Human Plus exhibition, which took place at the New York Hall of Science in late 2013. The exhibition was designed to generate interest in engineering among pre‐adolescent girls. Recognizing the target group's interest in human relationships and narrative, the exhibition was designed to be engaging and interactive, driven by compelling narratives of how engineering had enhanced the lives of people with disabilities. Exhibits interwove interactivity and story to convey messages related to both engineering itself and how engineering can meet the needs of people with disabilities. Because of this dual focus, the exhibition evaluation revealed important findings about how, and under what conditions, story and interactivity function to convey message: they can work together or compete.     

科技馆内科技成就主题展览的策划与实践——以“礼赞共和国”展览为例

“礼赞共和国——庆祝新中国成立70周年科技成就科普展”是中国科技馆2019年精心策划打造的一个主题展览,是利用科技馆独特的科普展教形式和手段进行科技成就展示宣传的成功尝试。本文通梳理展览策展思路,剖析了该展览在选题、展览目标、内容规划、布展和展品设计等方面收获的经验,希望在“建设创新型国家和世界科技强国”国家战略背景下,为今后拓展科技馆展示科技成就的思路提供一些参考。     

Visitors' Role in an Exhibition Debate: Science in American Life

In the year after the exhibition Science in American Life opened at the National Museum of American History objections were raised by the exhibition's chief sponsor, the American Chemical Society, and by the American Physical Society. These critics argued that the exhibition gave the public a negative view of science. The Institutional Studies Office was asked to conduct a study to determine whether or not the exhibition was affecting visitors' views of science, and, if so, in what direction. Using an entrance/exit survey design, the study determined conclusively that the visiting public entered the exhibition with a very positive view of science and technology and that their views were reinforced and confirmed by the experience of Science in American Life, rather than changed in either a positive or negative direction.     

将博物馆展览策划做成一项文化创意活动 ——《博物馆展览策划:理念与实务》书评

展览是博物馆的核心工作之一,也是博物馆服务社会最普遍和最直接的途径。《博物馆展览策划:理念与实务》一书作者结合多年的博物馆理论研究和博物馆展览策划实践经验,直击当下我国博物馆展览策划的核心问题,对现代博物馆陈列展览策划所应遵循的理念、工作流程和工作规范进行了详细阐述,为当前及未来一段时期内我国博物馆的展览策划工作提出了极为具象的实践指南。     

Stanley Kubrick in the Museum: Post‐cinematic Conditions,Limitations, and Possibilities

This paper contextualizes the Stanley Kubrick exhibition, a worldwide exhibition tour program dedicated to showcasing the complete oeuvre of the filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, within ‘post‐cinematic’ conditions. Since the mid‐1990s, the formal and experiential components of the cinema in the 20th century have increasingly become displaced from the traditional apparatus and site and ‘relocated’ within new technological and institutional platforms, and museums have become one of those new sites for content consumption. The paper discusses both the limitations and possibilities of the exhibition as it is considered to represent the migration of cinema into the art museum context as one salient phenomenon of post‐cinematic conditions. The Kubrick exhibition is explored to uncover the underlying tensions of the ‘exhibition of cinema’ as a key trend of major international museums, between the movie theater as black box and the art museum's exhibition space as white cube. It considers the difference between these two institutional platforms and their conceptions of objecthood, artifact and the temporal economy of the viewing experience. The author argues that this event succeeds in realizing the possibilities for revivifying three constants of cinema: film auteur, cinematic apparatus, and intermediality. The ambivalence demonstrates that while the museum's exhibition of cinema inevitably removes some of its ontological essences, it also preserves and revivifies others.     

“Let's talk about sex”: visitor comments in Contraception: Uncovering the collection of Dame Margaret Sparrow

Contraception: Uncovering the collection of Dame Margaret Sparrow was an exhibition at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa which featured a participatory activity titled “Let's talk about sex” where visitors could answer the question: “If you could give your younger self one piece of advice about contraception, what would it be?” Over 2200 comments were written, inspiring an evaluation project. The resulting analysis provides insights into visitors’ attitudes, values, behaviours, experiences and concerns about contraception, sex, sexuality and sexual health in the early 21st century. The results also demonstrate the value and usefulness of visitor comments both as an exhibition experience and as data to complement formal evaluation methods. The paper also acknowledges the less successful aspects of the project.     

Bringing Leonardo to Life: Introducing Students to the Codex Leicester

As natural history museums are becoming more state-of-the-art, integrating computer technology and other interactive components into their exhibits, challenges arise as to how best incorporate these elements into the learning that occurs in a traditional museum setting. In October of 1996, the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) hosted the exhibition Leonardo's Codex Leicester: A Masterpiece of Science, which included interactive computer stations as well as ten working models designed specifically for the exhibition. This article explores the museum's approach to making use of these interactives in planning and implementing a school program for this exhibition. The program was experimental in its format, given the short run of this exhibition, as well as limited planning time. The purpose of this article is to determine what a museum can do to offer quality programs that reach as many students as possible when working under time constraints.     

Child‐centered Practice in Museums: Experiential Learning through Creative Play at the Ipswich Art Gallery

Over the past two decades, museums and galleries have significantly expanded the scope and diversity of programs and exhibitions offered to children, families and schools. Parents and teachers are increasingly interested in curated public play spaces for children in the early years (from birth to eight years old), and they actively search for accessibility, affordability and quality when planning young children's excursions. In 2013, the Ipswich Art Gallery (in Queensland, Australia) developed and presented Light Play, an interactive exhibition designed especially for children up to the age of eight. Light Play promoted the use of light as a creative material for making ephemeral art through collaborative play, experimentation and discovery‐based learning. As part of the exhibition, a formal research project was run as an integral component of Light Play. Our research documented the qualities that lead to successful creative play experiences for young children in art museums by examining three key aspects of the exhibition: the participants, the environment, and the program. This paper discusses the findings of that research, in relation to making financial and human resource investments in interactive and immersive exhibitions and play spaces for children in the early years.     

美国科技博物馆展览开发中公众参与的研究及启示

展览开发是博物馆展览的基础问题,随着公众参与逐渐被提上研究议程,也促使我们去思考展览开发过程中如何引入公众参与。美国的科技博物馆展览开发已经建立了较为完善的公众参与体系:明确的参与者角色、系统的参与理念和阶段式的参与行为,已经获得了普遍的应用。借鉴美国博物馆的经验,我国博物馆展览的开发,应在构建展览评估体系的基础上,进一步了解和认识公众,拓展公众参与的方式,并不断寻求公众的声音。     

Building a Community-Based Identity at Anacostia Museum

A historian explores the construction of Anacostia Museum's identity from the 1960s to the present by examining the history of its exhibitions. Direct community accessibility was part of the museum's founding mission, but Smithsonian administration, museum staff, and community residents all seemed to have different ideas about the meaning of the “neighborhood museum” concept. Designated a “Smithsonian outpost,” and intended to draw African-American visitors to the Smithsonian museums on the Mall, the new museum's mission was instead shaped by community advisory groups to focus broadly on African-American history and culture. Staff efforts to “professionalize” and upgrade museum operations later threatened community access to the exhibition-development process, and most community/museum interaction was relegated to the program and outreach activities of the education department. The 1994 Black Mosaic exhibition provided an opportunity to devise new ways of integrating the perspectives of a changed community into the exhibition-development process.     

Learning From Kids: Connecting the Exhibition Process to the Audience

Abstract When the Chicago History Museum re‐opened its doors on September 30, 2006 after a 21‐month‐long renovation, the debut included a new interactive history gallery for families. The exhibition, Sensing Chicago, was designed primarily to appeal to and communicate effectively with eight‐ and nine‐year‐old children. Since this was a new target audience for the museum's exhibition program, the team followed a course for this project that departed from the museum's typical exhibition development. The process was informed by audience research that has broadened our understanding of how a collections‐based history museum that traditionally caters to adult audiences can create meaningful and memorable experiences for children. This article focuses on one aspect of the research, a three‐month concept‐testing phase conducted by in‐house staff, which provided the team with useful information that, in turn, impacted the development and design of the gallery.     

Science in American Life,National Identity,and the Science Wars: A Curators View

The simmering controversy over the Smithsonian's Science in American Life exhibition that led to the ensuing visitor study by the Institutional Studies Office is reexamined in terms of issues of American identity. A brief historical overview reveals that, for most of the twentieth century, the American scientific community received enthusiastic public support for its perceived service to national goals and ideals. In the past decade, however, after experiencing unexpected budget cuts to research, scientists have questioned the depth of that public support in what has become known as the Science Wars. Science in American Life was soon engulfed by that broader, often acrimonious debate about science and society which involved notions of pure and applied science. The role of American identity in the dispute over the exhibit is analyzed in terms of scientists' criticisms of three of the exhibition's case studies.     

Time to Listen

This article is a reflection on two aspects of the exhibition development process that are important but elusive. One is a habit of listening, and the other is the importance of allowing time for listening—to advisers, visitors, and other members of the exhibition team. The team that developed the touring exhibition Invention at Play used visitor research throughout the process of exhibition development to explore the links between the work of inventors and familiar human activities such as exploration, imagination, and play. The exhibition won an award of excellence at the AAM convention in Portland, Oregon in 2003. It was used as a case study on integrating accessibility into exhibition planning and design at an international conference, ADA Coordinators and Accessibility Managers in the Cultural Arts, sponsored by the Kennedy Center in 2002.     

The Models of Architeuthis

Models of the giant squid (Architeuthis spp.) are probably unique in natural history exhibition: they are representations of a giant living animal that has never been seen in a healthy state by a human being. Since its discovery in the mid-nineteenth century, the giant squid has remained one of the world's great zoological mysteries. In the attempt to introduce this fabulous creature, museums around the world have resorted to life-sized models. Yale teuthologist A.E. Verrill was responsible for the first such models in 1882; then Ward's Natural Science Establishment in Rochester, New York, manufactured and sold them. In this century, various museums (and one zoo) have made their own models of these ten-armed monsters of the deep. Their disparate attempts to re-create Architeuthis for the museum public represent one of the most intriguing case histories in the annals of museum exhibition.     

重大科技事件纪念日题材展览创作手记——以“东方红一号发射成功50周年科学家精神展”为例

“东方红一号”卫星发射成功,拉开了我国探索宇宙奥秘、和平利用太空的序幕。中国航天事业从无到有、从小到大,走出了一条具有鲜明中国特色的发展道路,孕育积淀了深厚博大的航天传统精神、“两弹一星”精神和载人航天精神。在重大科技事件、科学纪念日日益受到社会关注的当下,本文以“东方红一号发射成功50周年科学家精神展”为例,探讨在科技馆中弘扬科学家精神主题展览的策展机制、展览策划与布展创作。     

基于儿童认知发展特点的展览策划实践与反思——以金沙遗址博物馆儿童展览为例

本文以金沙遗址博物馆两个儿童展览为例,运用儿童认知发展理论分析探讨展览策划实践的成功与失败之处,提出儿童展览的内容和形式应结合目标观众群所处认知发展特点来设计,并借助环境—行为影响和支架式引导促进儿童的主动参与和融入学习,从而真正实现儿童展览策划的最终目的。