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

8. 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

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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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.

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

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

17. 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.

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

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

20. “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

27. -- Dr. Carol Dweck, Stanford University

28. (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.