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Hi all - great discussion!

When I was at the Science Museum, London, we made an interesting discovery with our Science of Sport exhibition (one version has been touring the US via COSI Columbus).  It featured some larger enclosed exhibits that simulated sports to some degree - e.g. a soccer shooting game, or returning a tennis serve etc.  Only one person could use these, but the queue acted as an audience.  We even found that non-interacting visitors (like grandparents) were satisified with the spectator experience, especially when it was their child/grandchild's turn.  

The other important discovery was that scaling an exhibit up from a small table-top activity needn't increase the cost proportionately.  As a result, we tried a similar approach on other exhibits - one was in an energy exhibition for a commercial client, where we wanted visitors to select icons representing forms of energy in rapid succession.  Instead of a touch-screen or Happ-style buttons, we created large floor buttons that encouraged jumping.  The whole exhibit became a visual spectacle that drew people in and communicated to people who didn't necessarily want to take part (e.g. visual-learners).

I think this idea of making the exhibit user a "performer" along with space for an audience to naturally gather is what was going on at the better exhibits in the Millennium Dome (particularly in the "Play Zone").  Incidentally, while the Dome was being developed we were working on our own version of the "Race Machine" with people from St Andrews University (http://perception.st-and.ac.uk/) based on a psychology research programme.  Our solution to the queue issue with this exhibit was to speed up the interaction so that a satisfying result came after 60-90 seconds instead of 5-10 minutes from the Nancy Burson installation.  

I don't think there is "The Answer" to this.  We couldn't just fill our exhibitions with big, showpiece exhibits, but equally a centre full of 60 second encounters would feel very shallow.  We can probably manage the overall experience (if we want to) by careful selection of different techniques and careful planning of the layout.  Ultimately we are probably all going to find that slightly different solutions work in our own centres.

Regards

Andy
Life Science Centre
Newcastle, UK

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