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I've been wanting to jump into this conversation, but we just opened a new
science centre and I've been busy.

For most of my career, I worked for children's museums and science centres
that evaluated exhibits the way (I thought) everyone did it. I loved
working with evaluators but the briefness of their visits and the cognitive
goals we asked them to assess made our exhibits conservative. We focused on
having something that would earn a gold star in their report.

This project has been almost the exact inverse. We didn't work with outside
evaluators. We prototyped exhibits constantly--a half dozen or so new ones
every week for two years. I'd guess the exhibit developers spent as much
time each week prototyping as we'd spend in meetings on a really
meeting-heavy project. It was messier (literally and conceptually) but also
great. Since we had to think up so many potential exhibits, we were
motivated to try new things. Since we had to spend so much time with people
using them, we were motivated to be surprising, delightful, and compelling.


It wasn't all wonderful. I never got comfortable with making things, and
I'm sure we fooled ourselves about some of our ideas. We haven't been open
long enough to have a fair test of how the final exhibits work. But it was
enlightening to experience how different exhibit development and evaluation
could be.

Katherine Ziff
Exhibit Developer
Telus Spark - the new science centre
http://www.sparkscience.ca/





On Thu, Nov 3, 2011 at 9:46 AM, Ian Russell <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> ISEN-ASTC-L is a service of the Association of Science-Technology Centers
> Incorporated, a worldwide network of science museums and related
> institutions.
>
> *****************************************************************************
>
> This fascinating exchange reminds me of a conversation I had back in 1989
> with a very well-known exhibit evaluation expert from the USA. Around us
> were forty newly-built interactive science exhibits that I had been
> responsible for developing. The lady suddenly silenced me by asking about
> my
> formative evaluation methods. Like most people in Britain at that time, my
> experience with hands-on exhibits was recent. I'd read a little about the
> discipline of formative evaluation but knew practically nothing about it.
>
> I felt embarrassed and didn't know what to say.
>
> We'd designed and hand-made everything in a short timescale with little
> money. There had only been space to test a couple of the exhibits with real
> visitors before the launch. Lessons learned from carefully watching what
> happened had been incorporated into the rest of the designs. As each detail
> of the exhibits evolved, our small team had endlessly discussed how we
> thought people would behave and how they would respond. There had been a
> playful atmosphere in the workshop as we built what we ourselves liked, and
> what we reckoned the children we knew would find engaging and interesting.
> After the launch, we had spent some time watching our visitors, discussing
> what we noticed and making a few modifications and improvements to the
> exhibits.
>
> In reply to the American evaluation expert's question, I finally confessed,
> "Well, er, we didn't really DO any formative evaluation".
>
> "You must have done," she said briskly. "I can SEE that these exhibits have
> been formatively evaluated."
>
> Promoting public engagement with science
> through a contagious delight in phenomena
> *
> [log in to unmask] * http://www.interactives.co.uk
> *
> http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/ian-russell/0/636/305
> *
> Give people facts and you feed their minds for an hour.
> Awaken curiosity and they feed their own minds for a lifetime.
> *
> Ian Russell
>
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