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Hello Mike,

I'm feeling a little bad that no one has given a response to your
query.  It's been a while since I've reared my ugly head. Many
discussions on this list have been putting me to sleep lately. I have no
patience for 'evolution' or 'semantics,'  but 'Prototyping Budgets'
caught my eye.

You're a pretty experienced guy, so I know, in your heart you know the
answer to this explicitly, if not intuitively.

Edison said that "genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration" and I
think something similar can be said for designing and building exhibits.
For me it seems that 90% of the work, and 90% of the money and roughly
90% of the time is spent trying to figure out if you can do, with the
final 10%, what you're trying to do in the first place.

It has been my experience that the 'finished' exhibit comes together in
a slap, after you have struggled through the material selections, the
subtleties of function and most importantly, deciding on just what the
heck you're really trying to do. This last bit is the essential
'whisper' of the prototyping process but is often ignored by people (by
me too, I admit) who insist on plowing forward. The prototype is saying,
'Hey, hellllooo, what you want to do won't work. But here are a few
doors which might lead to something that will...' The perseverance of
these hard working, though 'hard of hearing' exhibit developers  leads
to the plethora of well intentioned yet underachieving exhibits that are
just everywhere.

It should be noted that a healthy prototype process may lead to no
exhibit at all, or at least not to one that has any resemblance to what
was envisioned at the start. I don't know how to figure that percentage.
Since few exhibit developers could survive long streaks of nothing - and
something will have to built, it is a good idea to save a little of the
budget at the end to fix some of the problems that will inevitably arise
in the final thing that is created.

In a perfect world, there is no 'final' exhibit. The one that's on the
floor becomes the prototype for all the ones that follow. That has to be
the case or we would all go crazy. If it wasn't, then every science
center in the world would have a Cookbook  'Bernoulli Blower', 'Pipes of
Pan' or 'Catenary Arch. Most do, but every once in awhile you'll run
into a version that surprises. When you do, you can be sure that someone
nearby has very excellent hearing.


Joe R.
www.TheExhibitGuys.com




Mike Levad wrote:
> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related institutions.
> *****************************************************************************
>
> Hi all,
>
> I am really curious as to how much folks budget for prototyping their new
> exhibits.  Not just in percentage of the total budget but also in percentage
> of the total schedule.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mike
>
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