By: Inas Essa
Science center or museum exhibits are an amazing means of demonstrating scientific ideas while providing visitors with a unique experience. Paying attention to every detail about them is crucial; from the design, through prototyping, to execution, and then maintenance.
How to Design a Successful and Interactive Exhibit?
1. Create a Visitor Persona and Identify a Specific Goal
You might have an outstanding idea and you try to represent it from your point of view in a way that suits your needs and concerns. However, designing an exhibition according to your taste and thoughts would not generate the desired outcomes; you should create a visitor persona and develop your exhibit content according to it.
That means you should aim to understand who your target visitors are and what they expect and want. You should not always do that from scratch; if you are a part of an established center/museum that already has demographic data of visitors, you can use them. If not, you can start by collecting these data from the surrounding area. Based on that, you can tailor your center/museum’s exhibit designs toward those personas.
To reap the best results, you should also have a clearly defined goal in mind about what you want your exhibit to achieve; the information you want to convey or the feeling you want to inspire. That is a necessary pre-design step and a way to measure the success of your exhibit afterward.
2. Tell a Story
The best way to engage visitors is to help them feel involved in the story you have developed to deliver your message. The art of center/museum exhibit storytelling involves a broad story with an overarching theme, besides short detailed stories about the pieces that fit within the larger framework of the display.
You can use signs, banners, interactive kiosks, and technology throughout the center/museum exhibit to tell those mini-stories. If the exhibit you intend to design is large, you can break it into smaller sections to make the information more digestible for your visitors, as they would feel a sense of completion by moving from one section to another.
3. Create Center/Museum Exhibit in a Chronological Manner
As you aim for the exhibition to walk visitors through the artifacts in an informative and interactive journey, it would be better to tell the story in a linear, chronological manner.
This timeline in which the sense of time and place is well-represented is important in every part of the display, especially when the exhibit is about history, inventions, or the evolution of the natural world.
It would also be helpful to use exhibit graphics, labels, signage, sounds, and interactive technology as visual cues to immerse visitors in the story you have created.
4. Use Graphic Design and Incorporate Gamification
You can use graphic design tools, such as signs, banners, and huge set pieces in two ways:
- to organize the traffic flow and guide visitors along their way;
- to turn your center/museum exhibition into a themed interactive environment within which participants would feel active and fully entertained.
To take interaction and fun to the next level, you can incorporate gamification, which would be great for kids and the entire family. You do not have to use high-tech games; low-tech options like a treasure hunt would work great as visitors can walk through artifacts and find them together. You can also consider high-tech, with clickable, interactive games on kiosks and digital displays.
5. Display Artifacts in Interesting Ways
This includes making sure that the items are easily visible and not crowded. You can bring small artifacts into view with good lighting and elevated platforms. Besides, you can add large graphics, hanging banners, or video screens next to them. While larger artifacts could be mounted to the wall or structure of your exhibit for a fresh perspective.
6. Consider the Universal Design Approach
Implementing Universal Design in your exhibition would make it easier for people with disabilities to freely explore the exhibition without too many obstacles. The obstacles we mean here are not only physical; you should aim to remove as many barriers as possible and engage visitors in a way that allows them to use as many senses as possible—visual learning, text, audio, touch, and more.
7. Write Exhibit Texts That Facilitate Family Learning
While exploring the exhibition, visitors do not only look for interesting artifacts and objects, they also look for the story told by each object manifested through the written text. This highlights the importance of writing good texts that visitors would love to read. If the text is relevant, this would help the parent reply to their children’s questions and satisfy their curiosity, beyond just describing artifacts by their history.
You can use short and long text to meet different goals; the short text's role is to attract parents’ attention immediately, help them think about answers to their children’s troubling question, and lead them to read the longer text. The longer text explains the story behind the exhibit, which could be written as a dialogue or an interesting story.
8. Think Like a Kid
An additional important tip to design a successful interactive exhibit is not to limit yourself to downsizing all the components and adding colors. Otherwise, you should start thinking like a child; what they like and dislike, what attracts them the most, and what irritates them, etc.
Center/museum exhibitions can be fun and meaningful for both designers and visitors as long as they are well-designed and well-displayed. This helps designers reach their goal of delivering knowledge, and visitors to absorb information interestingly and interactively.
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