What Makes a Good Interactive Exhibit?

The kind of exhibits that we've found to be most successful seem to have a handful of common characteristics. Not all fit the mold, but these characteristics seem to be useful tools in working through creating exhibits, and in deciding whether what you have created is successful.

We work back and forth between the creation part and the evaluation part. We work out ideas using prototypes of the exhibit, and we can then test these prototypes by letting fellow staff members and real visitors use them and comment on them. Then it's back to the drawing board (glue gun?) to modify what we've done, and then we test it again.

Here, in a nutshell, are some common characteristics of good interactive exhibits. Keep this list and use it as you work on topics and exhibit ideas.

The exhibit is inviting

The exhibit needs to look interesting enough to invite someone to stop and spend some time with it. The topic should be interesting and the look of the exhibit should be inviting.

The navigation of the exhibit is understandable

This is probably the most difficult thing to get right, and is what we spend lots of time tinkering with. The user must be able to understand what they should do to get the exhibit to "work". If the navigation is not clear, then the visitor will, at best, think it is a confusing exhibit, and at worst, will think that they are stupid for not being able to figure it out.

The exhibit invites exploration

The exhibits we find most interesting and successful invite open-ended "messing about" with several possible outcomes. A great deal of learning takes place when visitors are allowed to discover things for themselves. If the exhibit has a "right" answer at the end, then there are two problems; there's a "right" answer, and there's an end.

The exhibit inspires interactions among visitors

An exhibit that is designed so that more than one person can interact with it and with each other is more successful than an exhibit that can be used by only one person at a time. One of the goals of this collaboration is to inspire family and peer interactions, and the exhibits can be created with that in mind.

The content of the exhibit is accurate

Sounds absurd, but it's common for an exhibit to simplify a concept to the point of presenting it incorrectly. This is a problem most when people try to present big complicated topics in an exhibit, and then discover that they need to simplify them.

The exhibit is accessible to people of varying ages and development

This is very tricky and very important. The best scenario is that the exhibit is interesting to a child, to a teenager, to an adult, to a developmentally-challenged pre-teen, to a... you get the idea. A really good exhibit can appeal to people with a wide variety of previous experiences, ages, ethnicity, etc.

A visitor can take something away

No, not handouts. Ideally a visitor walks away with something to think about. If we can relate the content of the exhibit to something in a visitor's own life, so much the better. Often a good exhibit doesn't actually impart any hard information, but instead lets the visitor make connections with other exhibits, other phenomena, (in our case) books, and past experiences. This can happen while the visitor is interacting with the exhibit, or it can happen two months later.

We find that an exhibit that uses real objects, or which demonstrates real phenomena, is far and away more interesting to interact with that an exhibit which uses a model, or a picture, or an explanation of a phenomena. In other words, if there's no way to have real objects and/or to be able to interact with real phenomena, then perhaps the exhibit idea is unsuitable for an exhibit. Not every idea makes a good exhibit; sometimes a concept is much better introduced in a programming component (something where a small group of visitors is lead by an explainer through an idea or activity), and sometimes a concept is better explained in a handout or brochure. It pays not to try to force an unsuitable idea into an exhibit; the idea suffers, and the exhibit will not be successful.