Designing Memorable Learning Experiences: The Pragmatics of Creative Collaboration Claire Pillsbury, Program Director The Exploratorium

The “listen to your users” produces incoherent designs. The “ignore your users” can produce horror stories, – Donald Norman, Director of The Design Lab, UC San Diego

Effort Staff Time Project Launch Exhibit Opening Testing, solving problems, production Brainstorming, Drawings

Quickly resolve arrangement of components, labels, buttons Team working together Shared struggles, shared problem solving, shared victories Staff, materials, and tools to iterate graphics and exhibit Documentation Summarize findings and agreed upon next steps Quickly resolve arrangement of components, labels, buttons

part of exhibit development Visitors enjoy being part of exhibit development Visitors young and old are more than willing to try. They like the idea of seeing an exhibit being developed. They like that their opinions and ideas are listened to by Museum staff Often 3-5 visitors will quickly highlight something that was not obvious to experienced staff As a result of quick testing on the floor you can quickly see potential that affects design and visitor’s experience Because youth were trying to guess and help each other we set up two stations so they could work independently and compare results

often have a portfolio of exhibits and exhibit concepts Some are fairly straightforward to develop and go through a few revisions. Others take more time, more engineering and visitor testing. Always good to try to balance the less time intensive with these more time intensive pieces. And conversely – distribute the design and evaluation energies proportionately, not the same amount of time for each This geography based exhibit took a lot of time.

We always tested exhibit with labels and hand wrote notes on postits or taped in place to try different wording or placement

We hoped visitors would be able to transfer a distance from the globe to a scale on the table

We went through many many label changes and noticed that visitors wanted to work together so we moved the instructions to the front so they could “coach” each other.

Here you can see our retractable tape, and our three step visual instruction and scale

And the final exhibit with a small atlas of locations around the world they might want to look for on the globe

“For the great doesn’t happen through impulse alone, and is a succession of little things that are brought together. . . How does one get there? It’s working one’s way through an invisible iron wall that seems to stand between what one feels and what one can do. —Vincent van Gogh

-- Dr. Carol Dweck, Stanford University

(and writers, advisors, etc) Thanks to all the ingenious and growth mindset oriented visitor researchers and exhibit designers (and writers, advisors, etc) for their ingenuity and willingness in taking on the challenges of collaborating to create effective and memorable exhibitions.