12 Steps of UX Design for a Museum Exhibition

May 2011

The research for and execution of an exhibition and symposium. An 18-month project completed while I was a student at Stanford.

Everyone has been bored in a museum at some point. Too many hours of staring at the wall makes your neck hurt. While this can be caused by poor curatorial decisions and an insular art community that doesn't mind when outsiders feel stupid, many exhibitions actually make a valiant attempt to engage visitors but fall short. It turns out, exhibitions that tell a good story and engage everyone from your mom to your ten-year-old neighbor are surprisingly difficult (and expensive!) to put together.

Fellow d.School student Michael Turri and I spent 18 months developing an exhibition of our own while students at Stanford. Because we didn't have any clue what we were doing and had to fumble our way through creating a student-run exhibition, I wanted to create a resource for anyone else out there crazy enough to attempt one. This page outlines the steps we took to produce a successful event on a shoestring budget.

Step 1: Find a topic you're passionate about

Designing an exhibition takes For. Ev. Er. Seriously. So you're going to be putting a lot of hours into learning about this topic and figuring out the best way to share that knowledge with others. Take some time to make sure you and everyone else involved with the project really like the materials you'll be showing and the story that goes along with them.

In our case, this was the easy part. Michael had an obsession knack for eBay bidding that had left him with unreasonable quantities of the Eames communication design pieces they created for IBM in the 1960s-70s -- posters, videos, books, and much more. We extended our research to visting John and Marilyn Neuhart to hear firsthand what it was like to work in the Eames Design Office. We were fascinated by the parallels between the work the Eameses did to de-mystify computers during the era of mainframe computing and the work tech companies do explaining their products - Google searches? DNA testing? - to audiences unfamiliar with their product.

Step 2: Run the Numbers

We created a proposal for our exhibition, and secured a $15,000 grand from SiCa, the Stanford Institute for Creativity and the Arts. When Michael met with Cara McCarty, Curatorial Director at the Cooper Hewitt (the Smithsonian's National Design Museum) to get advice, she just about laughed him out of the room when she heard how small our budget was. But fortunately, with her help as well as the support of Stanford's Cantor Arts Center and the IBM archives, we were able to stretch this funding to cover both our exhibition and one-day symposium.

What did we spend this money on? While we were lucky to have free places to hold the symposium and exhibition (being a student is the best!) we still had to pay for:

Food and drinks for the exhibition opening and the symposium
A/V support for the symposium
Foam core for displaying artifacts, some of it archival quality
Raw materials for the wooden display cases
Acrylic covers for the top (custom-made to spec)
Hanging system for photos (definitely a good investment!)
Printing posters and booklets
Vinyl lettering for the exhibition wall
Tickets for various museums to research exhibitions
Website domain and hosting
Airline tickets and hotels for speakers at the symposium
Speaker honoraria
A videographer

Step 3: Figure out the story you want to tell

Without a narrative to tie everything together, an exhibition can feel like it's just a lot of stuff in display cases. Given our location in Silicon Valley, it was important to us to make Eames X IBM relevant to our local audience, so we chose to tell the story of how the Eames work for IBM parallels the current-day work of designers in the technology industry. We titled the exhibit 'Eames X IBM: Communicating Technology', and focused on how design was used to introduce the general public to the complex new technology of computers.

Step 4: Needfind yourself some insights

We spent quite a bit of time stalking visitors at existing museums - SFMOMA, the DeYoung, theCalifornia Academy of Sciences and the Cantor Arts Center. After these observations and a few interviews, we had a number of insights into what was broken about the museum-going experience. Including:

Museums stink at storytelling.

People are great at storytelling.

People love to share their experiences.

Using these insights, we came up with something called a Point of View (POV), in the standard d.School form of [USER][NEED][INSIGHT]. Over the course of our 18 months we created a number of different points of view, each of which acted as a hypothesis we could prove or disprove with a round of prototyping. Here is an example of one of our POVs:

Visitors with only one hour to spend need new ways of navigating museums in order to feel confident that they’ve seen something great.

Step 5: Apply some science to your insights

Michael and I used a class at the Stanford Business School (GSB) as an excuse to look at the museum experience through the lens of positive psychology. Check out this post for a full description of that project.

Step 6: Recruit an A-team to make it happen

We put together an this video and showed it at a d.School recruiting event.

At this event, Michael and I were able to add two journalists - Christina Farr and Priyanka Sharma - and law student Tony Lai to our team. They brought needed energy and bandwidth to the team, which we needed for the hard work of prototyping solutions during Stanford's spring quarter.

Step 7: Prototype a bunch of ideas & fail sooner rather than later

Our team started spending a tradition of "Prototype Fridays" at the Cantor Arts Center. Through this weekly exercise we discovered a number of insights (e.g. people want to use iPhones to learn more about art, but don't want to use iPads to watch videos, since that doesn't feel like they're engaging with the museum).

Tweeting at SFMOMA visitors

We sat at the SFMOMA cafe with a laptop, ready to answer visitors' tweets. This was a resounding failure. We realized taking out one's phone at a museum to tweet is taboo. We didn't give up on phones entirely; later prototypes found a more compelling ways for visitors to use smart phones in a museum.

Paper handouts

We made handouts to test whether our POV was correct - "Visitors with only one hour to spend need new ways of navigating museums in order to feel confident that they’ve seen something great." The included three mini tours: Head Curator's Favorites; Most Popular; and Most Overlooked. Handouts included a map and led visitors throughout the museum.

Paper prototype

These prototypes were well-received – we ended up doing a similar guide for our final exhibition. Shown is a visitor who followed the guide to an African Memory Board, the ancient equivalent of an iPhone.

Video Prototype

A set of videos we created with the head curator describing various pieces of art. It turns out that visitors don't like spending their time at museums looking at an iPad screen. As one visitor said: "if I wanted to look at a screen the whole time, I would have stayed at home."

Comments from visitors

Here we tried to get feedback from visitors and discovered that it is not effective to intercept people on their way out. Once people have made up their mind to leave, they're not interested in reflecting on their visit.

"App" prototype

Testing an "app": visitors took a photo of a sculpture. We then sent an SMS text with a "tidbit" of information about that piece. For example, a tidbit about this sculpture would be that all three men are identical, just posed at different angles. Visitors loved this interaction!

Interviewing visitors

It came in handy to have journalists on the team to help record the reactions of visitors.

Twitter prototype at SFMOMA

One of our initial prototypes tested whether people were interested in using Twitter while at a museum. We asked SFMOMA visitors to tweet @artmixer, handing out Post-its to remind them (left), and even left Post-its around the museum surreptitiously (right).

Step 8: Build like crazy

After dozens of prototypes, we had a good sense of what we wanted to do with our final exhibition. It then just came down to execution. Thanks to the generosity of John Edson at LUNAR, we had prime real estate in Downtown Palo Alto, CA.

Before

This is the lobby before we touched it.

Making stands

We didn't have the money to buy stands, so we had to create them ourselves.

Assembling stands

We created and assembled the stands ourselves, but paid a professional to build the acrylic covers needed to protect the pieces on display.

Museum layout tool

A lot of planning goes into the layout of the space and the order visitors will encounter the information. Below is the tool the Cantor Arts Center uses to plan their exhibitions.

Deciding on content

Here is Michael contemplating what photos we wanted to display for the IBM World's Fair Pavilion portion of the exhibition. We had hundreds of posters, magazines, books, photos and more to chose from, so it was quite a task to select the most important pieces to display. We narrowed in on what was important by adhering to our main story - design used to communicate new technologies - and just picked our favorite items when it came to making the final cut.

Step 9: Invite important (and relevant) people to participate

To kick off the exhibit's opening, we held an afternoon symposium to bring the content to life. We invited Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles Eames, David Kelley and the Alex Bochannek, head curator at the Computer History Museum, among other design and tech luminaries, to speak on everything from the Eames Design Office to running a leading design firm to curating an exhibition.

Step 10: When in doubt, make an app

Being in Silicon Valley, it would be crazy not to include an app as part of the exhibition. We worked with digital design firm BuzaMoto to create SpaceMixer, an app that allowed visitors to research more about a particular item during the exhibit, rather than waiting until they were home and doing a search on Google.

Step 11: Document the final event

Step 12: Reflect

Overall, it was an exhausting yet incredibly rewarding experience. Working as a product designer in Silicon Valley, I can only hope some of the Eames' insight into communicating new technologies rubbed off on me during the course of this experience.

Special thanks to: Richard Kosoglow for assistance in building, Patience Young and Kristen Olsen for their infinite patience, and everyone else who lent us their time along the way!