UMA Conference October 22, 2009 - Green River, UT

If we accept people's tendency to learn what they want to learn when they wanted to learn it, as Frank Oppenheimer did with the Exploratorium, we discover what we create for the visitor may not always be how they end up using it. By accepting that notion, we need to accommodate the visitor's natural curiosity in our exhibit and program design.

As Thanksgiving Point Programming evolves through time, we are implementing an underlying pedagogy of family inquiry into all of our exhibitions, educational programs, and events to help meet our mission of hands-on discovery for all ages. Ideally the integration of these departments will takes us down a road where all that we create comes from the experiences and interactions of our visitors. In this session, we'll share stories, exhibits, and program ideas from our first year after implementing a new approach for developing exhibits and programs. We'll walk through our evolving prototyping process. Share stories about discoveries we've made by creating an exhibition hall where the public is directly connected to the development process and talk about the important role public events has played in helping us gain informal feedback from visitors with broad backgrounds-many of who may not be regular museum-goers.

Objectives:
• To engage in a discussion about engaging the visitor in the exhibition development process.
• To discuss the importance of collaboration between exhibition staff, education staff and the visitor.
• To share personal stories of our experiences after a year of implementing a new philosophy of perpetual prototyping.

• Session Presentation PDF