Future Exhibitions

Peter Higgins starts his presentation.



He shows a venn diagram combining 'Destination', 'Physical' and 'Narrative'.

He says that as a consultants, people often think he does just the 'narrative' bit, but actually he's interested in the Physical and Destination issues too - how the building works, why people visit and come back, and so on. He says that exhibition designers need to know as much about the building as about the narrative content.

Clients always have different levels of expertise, he says.

He talks about a council which bought an artificial lake, and interesting environment, but didn't have a story to tell. So they looked for stories about the landscape that they could tell, and this was worked into the design of the physical building that was built to house the visitor centre. So this is an example of where the building was informed by the narrative.

Also within the building, they built an amphitheatre in order to cater for post-visit tours, as people initially would want to read a bit about the centre but to get out within the natural habitat as much as possible. So with the amphitheatre, the visitors were encouraged to come back after dark to watch shows in the amphitheatre.

In the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, they introduced a gallery where models could be hung, and re-hung fairly frequently, in order to encourage people to come back and as a dramatic introduction to the musuem.

They've also done some work on the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, which I couldn't quite write about quickly enough.

Understanding the visitors is very important, as is orientation and preparing visitors for the experience, eg within holding and queuing areas.

New Media - somehow we have to know how we are going to use future technology and so plan how it will interact with the building.

Lots of videos of interactive which are all very interesting but difficult to quickly describe.

Another dinosaur exhibit allows people to use a joystick to move a spotlight, uncovering hotspots which have curator-driven stories, however people feel that they are discovering the stories on their own terms, rather than being curator-driven.

New media has to be used in a way that is exceptional and different, he says, and has to actually mean something to people. You also have to keep the power of the real, and relate the new media to the objects in gallery, so that you're delivering an experience people can't get at home.

How do you evaluate interactive exhibits, when you can't evaluate it until it's aleady built, he asks. What you can do is to storyboard it and test those, he says, or test other prototypes.

He also mentions take-away content, which is something tangible and physical that they can take home.

What we're creating in visitor centres is experiences, he says, and we're all competiting with the likes of Alton Towers and Disney, and so it has to be engaging and real.

Someone asks about managing big visitor numbers and dwell time. He suggests that one technique is through passive engagement, whereby people can be satisfied by watching other people take part in the interactive. To do this, people watching have to be able to understand the process, and see it (no small screens!). You can provide the big experience on site, and then deliver any additional deep content for people to read at home, e.g via the web.