What if....part 3
from seed to question curation to exhibit design
The last two blog posts were about the seed of the idea for Project What If, and how we opened up the curation and decision making process for selecting questions to explore in exhibits. It all started with people and their questions, and so we then evolved our exhibit design process to include audiences in testing out and developing ideas around their questions too.
It meant setting up an efficient, forward moving flow between:
our teams and our creative partners generating ideas from the selected questions
the workshop exploration sessions with the question askers, to better understand the key things they were interested in or had been thinking about with their question
the iterations and outcomes from our prototype testing sessions with audiences
It took a lot of getting right, but it was worth it – we wouldn’t have been true to the project aims or to a human-centred design practice if we hadn’t worked so hard at bringing these strands of input together. It meant planning for more time than we were used to in the project schedule, for a meaningful iterative process to have space to breathe. These are the shifts in practice where the parallel and necessary economies of money and visitor numbers, and a currency of questions interact with useful friction. It’s what keeps you on your toes with a need maximum transparency, forward planning and total clarity on the values of the project.
building ideas
Another shift in our design process was to adopt a method of rapid idea generation, with training from Julie Bowen, a practitioner largely working in the US. It took us away from endless talking around tables, shall we try this idea or that one, where could it lead us, what could it look like….. to rapidly generating ideas through DOING. I think we probably all felt trepidation standing in front of a pile of card, pipes and miscellaneous science centre debris and being given ten minutes to build an exhibit that delivered a concept about human perception of time to an audience of 8 to 10 year olds. We repeated this sort of exercise over and over, until it became almost second nature to delve into a box of scrap to build on an idea we were discussing. It was transformative. I think we came up with exhibit ideas that wouldn’t have manifested just through talking, or going straight to the more robust prototyping stage in the workshop. Something about the requirement to make a physical thing, makes you think immediately more inventively and more intuitively about the user experience and connect it with human interaction with the concept.
Of course a ton of ideas were left in the rapid idea room, but in a way I think that was an important part of the new practice, to be less attached to ownership of ideas. And it opened up our thinking and allowed teams who were not specialist in exhibit design to participate alongside the expertise of our engineering and design thinkers.
there are no mistakes in prototyping
We’d tested exhibits out in a protoyping room, just off the main exhibition space before. But we’d never created a whole glass fronted prototyping lab with a rolling programme of exhibit idea testing. And we’d never put out ideas quite so early, still made of cardboard and tape and with so many open questions of our own. There was some concern about how well it would work, and how it would look to audiences. Like any museum or science centre, we had pride in producing well thought out, robust, exhibits, with a professional finish quality. In the economics of visitors paying for tickets for a high quality experience, there were questions about how exposing would it be to show them unfinished ideas. Essentially we were letting everyone in on what could be mistakes in motion. But there are no mistakes in prototyping, only questions and discoveries, iterations and new solutions. And sometimes we retired an idea when it simply wasn’t working. I’m glad that some exhibits fell off the list through prototype testing, it means audiences were really engaging and telling us when things didn’t make sense to them, and it means we were listening and willing to change.
In the same way that I have seen audiences respond more deeply to ideas in science when you invite them to participate in research in progress, rather than just telling people stuff at an end point of research, when we invited audience input into our exhibit design process at card and tape stage, and they knew their input was valuable, we observed deep conversations, leading to conceptual and contextual places we might not have even hoped for.
A few other things we learnt along the way:
• To allow ourselves to create exhibits that sat somewhere in between science centre interactive exhibits and art installations. We did this because the types of questions demanded a different treatment of the ideas at their heart.
• To hold space for audiences and us not knowing things while in the middle of the process. To revel in that wobbly knee feeling that happens when your brain is at the edge of understanding. Some of the art commissions and the in-between exhibits were exploring those questions that definitely have no fixed answer and needed to provide a starting point for people to FEEL something, in order to start THINKING something - about consciousness, or the nature of time – the sort of stuff where none of us will ever walk out of the door going, oh I’ve totally got the hang of the general theory of relativity. But we can enjoy the wonder of not knowing and find a playful and emotive way in to start thinking about it.
• We learnt to sit with the discomfort of an idea not working for way longer than we were used to. Some exhibit ideas were discarded after early prototyping with visitors. Others sat for months, perhaps nearly a year and then finally unlocked with time and persistence.
• Always allow more time. Actually the only mistake you can make in prototyping, is not making time for it at all.
The brilliant content team that carried the prototyping and testing have a great blog on all this here - this is very much their story to tell.
A What If question, before my final blog post on all this.
What If…..you invited input on a work in progress from your audiences or clients at an earlier stage than you usually do? Or, if you’re already a sharer, a scratch stage practitioner, what if….you could offer one piece of advice to anyone trying it for the first time?