Museum Exhibit Developer for PhDs

Scenario

You are an exhibit developer at the Washingtonian Institution, a large museum with a variety of divisions including science & technology, natural history, art, and the history of different regions of the world. You have been asked to start planning an exhibit that, as luck would have it, is directly related to your graduate field of study. This new exhibit is going to be the first in the new series—“Deep Impacts of Deep Thought”—that is focused on helping high school students appreciate the real world impacts of research. 

Your task is going to be to develop an exhibit that will help high school students understand some of the influence, the impacts, or the insights provided by your field of graduate study on some aspect of contemporary society. The form could vary quite a bit depending on the nature of your field of graduate study, so be creative. The main purpose is to help an audience of high school students understand why research matters, no matter how remote or abstract it might seem. If, for instance, you study early 17th century Spanish politics, you might focus on how the expulsion of Spanish Muslims and connections to contemporary debates about immigration and religious discrimination.

Task 1 - Outline the Major Steps

FIdentify what you think are the four most important steps necessary to make this exhibit a reality (#2 of the process). These steps could include actions such as coordinating the exhibit space, promoting the exhibit, assessing its effectiveness, gathering items or resources for the exhibit, or applying for grants to fund the exhibit. Be sure that each step is connected to and informed by the larger goal of helping your primary audience of high school students understand why research matters.

Task 2 - Plan for the Execution

For each of the four major steps in Task 1, identify the five most important actions for executing each step (#3 of the process). These should be discrete actions that advance the major task. 

Think through a museum exhibit and imagine the kinds of steps necessary to implement it. What needs to happen? Who needs to be involved? What kinds of skills or expertise are necessary? As with the previous step, be sure that your steps are connected to, or informed by, your larger goal.

Task 3 - Create a Timeline

Now take your list of 20 steps and start to organize them into a timeline (#4 of the process). For help with the structure and duration of a timeline, you can view the sample timeline on page 5 of the Exhibit Planning Tool by AASLH (American Association for State and Local History). Think about the order in which these will be undertaken. What needs to happen first? How long do you imagine that it would take to accomplish these steps effectively? 

Note that many exhibits, even small ones, take months to plan and implement so be sure to give yourself plenty of time to accomplish the parts of the process that you’ve identified. Are there any major gaps that start to appear? What tasks or steps might you need to add in to implement your project.

Task 4 - Identify Items and Generate Labels

Now that you’ve done some preliminary planning for your exhibit, you can populate it with a few items and generate labels. Pick 2-4 resources (physical objects, pictures, paintings, etc.) that you think would fit well with the exhibit that you’ve laid out above and generate items labels for these resources that contribute to the goals of your exhibit and are appropriate for your audience.

To get some help with generating labels and understanding what makes for an effective one, check out the label panel guidance and past winners of the American Alliance of Museum Excellence in Exhibition Label Writing Competition (the pdfs for each year contain guidance, winners, and information about their evaluation).