Last month I attended a few workshops at the Build Boston conference. Presented by the Boston Society of Architects, Build Boston is primarily targeted to architects and those who work with architects; it is “the Northeast’s largest tradeshow and conference for the design and construction industry” so I was surprised and happy to find a few programs on this year’s schedule of interest to museum exhibit designers.
First, the tours. Options included a tour of Boston’s boutique hotels, tours of the MIT Media Lab, and a tour of the new Art of the Americas wing at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. A few of my coworkers got the behind-the-scenes sneak peak of the MFA (read Katelyn’s description); I instead attended a symposium called “Cultural Catalysts to Inclusive/ Socially Sustainable Design.” The MFA featured in my conference experience later when it was discussed at length during another symposium I attended, “Museums in the Digital Age.” I also stopped by the Build Boston PechaKucha, and attended the workshop, “Sustainability in Environmental Graphic Design.”
PechaKucha: PechaKucha Nights are events for designers to meet, network, and show their work. (Update: not just for designers anymore.) Presenters show 20 slides, for 20 seconds per slide. The slides automatically advance after 20 seconds, forcing presenters to stay on topic and talk fast. Highlights:
•Artforming, (link no longer available) with examples of their site-specific public art and architecture installations, which center around environment, emerging technologies, and the synthesis of art and science.
•Two Northeastern University students and their involvement in Freedom by Design. Freedom by Design, the AIAS’s (American Institute of Architecture Students) “community service program … uses the talents of architecture students to radically impact the lives of people in their community through modest design and construction solutions.”
•Saeed Arida and Saba Ghole, on the studio environment of NuVu (the Innovation School) in Kendall Square, Cambridge. NuVu is “a place of innovation where middle and high school students join together with experts from MIT and Harvard to create new views of the world.” It sounds like an incredible program.
Cultural Catalysts to Inclusive/Socially Sustainable Design: This symposium was sponsored by the Institute for Human Centered Design, an international education and design non-profit based in Boston that is “dedicated to enhancing the experience of people of all ages and abilities through excellence in design.”
•Dr. Shigeki Inoue from Hakuhodo Universal Design, a consulting and creative boutique in Tokyo that seeks to improve the lives and satisfaction of sei-katsu-sha (“living persons”) of differing needs and abilities. Dr. Inoue is researching “science in design”; specifically, creating a highly legible Japanese typeface. Dr. Inoue asked, “why do designers make designs that are difficult to read?” and spoke to how graphic design remains largely inaccessible for people who have low vision.
•Karin Bendixen is director of the consultancy Bexcom and founder and president of the Danish Design for All network. She writes about “Design for All” concepts, targeting architects, planners, designers, and politicians. She asked that we change our mindsets from designing for disabled individuals as a distinct segment of society to designing for society as though everyone has a disability — i.e. everything is accessible for everyone — and from “what design is” to “what design can do.” Bendixen encouraged us all to be better at promoting the messages of Universal Design: holistic design, sustainability, and design for all.
•Rachna Khare is Professor and Doctoral Research Coordinator at the School of Planning and Architecture in Bhopal, India. She lectures and writes about universal design in India. There are 70 million people with disabilities in India (5–6% of the population), and the majority live in rural areas. Most of the current accessibility efforts in India are “too Western” in their approach, according to Khare. Her goal is to make universal design an entrenched part of Indian culture.
•The new design director for the Visual Arts Division of the National Endowment for the Arts wrapped up the symposium. The NEA is an independent government agency and the largest national funder of the arts; it’s also a partner in Blue Star Museums, the program that offers free museum admission to military personnel and their families from Memorial Day through Labor Day. The agency is currently collecting datasets from all design disciplines, and is interested in strategic investment in design and connecting designers with businesses and federal organizations that are interested in design thinking. There are many funding opportunities, and grant money can be used to hire designers — design fees, preparing space for an exhibit, installation or de-installation of art, and community planning are eligible.
Museums in the Digital Age: Moderated by Aisha Densmore-Bey of the BSA’s Museum and Exhibit Design Committee, this symposium asks, “...even as daily life is reconfigured constantly by technology, museums retain their esteem as bastions of culture. In the face of an increasingly interactive world online, is a physical space still necessary to experience art?”
•Susan Leidy, Deputy Director of the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester, NH, asked, “What are museums currently thinking about and doing with media? Where does media fit in? Does original artwork still matter?” According to her, media and technology should only be used to further museums’ missions and museums should take care to stay true to those missions, whatever they might be: education, conservation, collecting, or something else. Original artwork does still matter … and so too do historical documents, artifacts, live animals, sight, sound, smell, touch. More than anything else, visitors want authenticity in a museum experience. They go to see real physical objects. Take home message: compromise authenticity for digital media at our peril.
•Peter Kuttner, President of Cambridge Seven Associates in Cambridge, MA, drew connections between two different-seeming types of museum/themed experiences: the art museum and the zoo. Both are primarily about authenticity and seeing something in-person. The tendency in these types of environments is to separate the media from the art/animals so as not to detract from the art/animals. Kuttner gave a few case studies of projects by Cambridge Seven to illustrate media used thoughtfully in an exhibit. Media technology allows you to quickly respond to current events if there’s a reason to do so. It’s also possible to “hide” the technology by integrating it into the experience of the exhibit space (or, to put it another way: to allow technology to inform but not dominate a space). Technology can encourage group activity and indepth learning, but has to be taken to a level beyond sitting at a monitor.
•Ann Beha of Ann Beha Architects in Boston spoke at length about the Museum of Fine Arts’s new Art of the Americas wing. (A project, she noted, that she did not work on but admires.) One of the MFA’s media highlights is its new website, which features a homepage that continually updates and changes as it rotates through photos of its exhibitions, and introduces “Buzz,” their foray into social media. Buzz brings together the MFA’s Twitter, flickr, YouTube, and Facebook accounts and is an intentional attempt to engage in a dialogue with its visitors and gather real time feedback on people’s experiences at the museum. Beha mentioned that the MFA was the first museum to post its entire collection online, in 1995, and has in many ways been an internet leader in the museum industry. All technology within the MFA helps to support the museum’s missions of collecting, stewardship, scholarship, engagement, enlightenment. There are study stations incorporated into the wayfinding in the corridors; easy-to-use multimedia guides that provide options for self-directed learning; touch screen stations that teach and engage visitors on a deeper level than that provided by the exhibition labeling alone; touch tables. Everything is integrated into the environment of the museum in a seamless way with “intense design sensibilities.” The physical architecture of the museum building becomes a blank canvas for media, and an opportunity to create public spaces that are full of life and possibilities.
Sustainability in Environmental Graphic Design: Discussed in this workshop were strategies for EGD sustainability including material selection, resource and waste management, energy and lighting efficiency, air and water quality, public education, and costs. I’ve been working on a list of websites and blogs that focus on sustainability, and you can explore them in this website’s sidebar to the right. (links no longer available)
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Post updated in January 2021 with minor text edits. Broken links have been replaced with archived URLs, courtesy of archive.org. This post was originally published at theexhibitdesigner.com on 17 January 2011.