I just posted a case study about Jukebox Memories on the ExhibitFiles site. This computer-based exhibit is part of the Memory exhibition developed by the Exploratorium back in 1998. Jukebox Memories plays 120 #1 songs from 40 years of popular music spanning the dawn of rock and roll right through to the mid-1990s. The exhibit employs a simple question and answer format, asking the visitor which artist performed a particular song. While this activity engages most visitors, the exhibit is not about pop music trivia, it is about the memories that visitors associate with particular songs and eras.

I helped design and develop Jukebox Memories while working at the Exploratorium in the 90s. For that same exhibition, I helped develop another exhibit, A Memory Artist. The exhibition website is still up and is now, like the exhibit itself, nearly a decade old. You can check out the case study on the ExhibitFiles.

We’ve just completed a series of changes to the ExhibitFiles website including: improved “member contacts,” better commenting, and enhanced member profiles. It’s now possible to include blog feeds and flickr thumbnails in your profile. You can see mine here, or click below.

Along with improvements to profiles and commenting, a new search feature was developed. While the ExhibitFiles is only a couple of months old, there are already over 40 case studies and reviews and more than 200 members. Finding the right exhibit or a colleague’s profile was becoming increasingly difficult. The new search feature allows you to conduct a full-text search or you can click on a topic, institution, or individual in a case study or review to bring back results. For example, clicking an exhibit focus such as “Science” brings back the 15 records that share that focus.

We’re still fine tuning the search feature, but we hope this and other new features will help the ExhibitFiles continue to grow and make it even easier to use.

For the past year we’ve been working with the Association of Science - Technology Centers in desiging and developing the ExhibitFiles, a community site for exhibit designers. (The image here is from the CB Radio exhibition which opened in 1978 and is part of the ExhibitFiles).

The concept behind the site is simple, too often the exhibit and exhibition development process isn’t recorded for future designers and developers. As a community, we sometimes redesign the wheel as there is no central place for us to find out about the best (and the worst?) practices in exhibit development. This issue is becoming more urgent as many of the exhibit designers who were active in the 1970s and 1980s are beginning to retire. Over the years, important exhibition development information is lost or stored within a museum where it can’t be easily shared with the larger community.

The ExhibitFiles site will allow any designer or developer to create a profile and to author case studies and reviews about individual exhibits or whole exhibitions. The software is completely custom. We developed it using the Ruby on Rails programming framework. The site has lot’s of interactive features beyond just authoring including the ability to favorite items, commenting, and even a Flash-based “thumbnail maker.” We’ll be adding the site to our portfolio soon with more details. In the meantime, the ExhibitFiles development blog contains lots of information and discussions about the design process.

Along with ASTC, we worked with Independent Exhibits and a great group of advisors. The site is just getting started and we will adding more features–but in the meantime feel free to join up and contribute. We’ll see you in the ExhibitFiles.

There are some new items of interest on the ExhibitFiles development blog since my last post in early July. You’ll find the results of our Design Workshop held in Berkeley in June, a front-end study by Randi Korn & Associates, and a great post by Kathy McLean about the project which includes her article, We Still Need Criticism.

We’ve starting to get comments from the exhibit developer community, which is really helping the design process. The project itself is unusual in that we (as exhibit developers) are the primary audience too. Most of the projects that we develop are for the general public or targeted for a particular grade level, etc. The scale of the project is also unique, it is funded through a three-year NSF grant. It will be the first major application that we (Ideum) has developed with Ruby on Rails.

The site itself won’t be up until later this winter, but in the meantime we’re learning a lot through development process, and the blog is great way to share. While we’d love to take credit for this idea, we’ve been following another development blog; Bare Naked App, which has been sharing their process and progress building an application called “Amigo” since February.

The focus of ExhibitFiles is very different than Amigo which is “Bringing advertisers and newsletters together.” Another difference is that along with the development blog, we have a group of advisors who represent our core audience. However, like the folks building Amigo, we’re trying to be as responsive to the needs of our future members as possible. It’s hoped that our advisor’s participation along with a fairly transparent process (via the blog) will help guide the development of the ExhibitFiles. Stay tuned.

For the last six months we’ve been working on an NSF-sponsored project called ExhibitFiles. It’s a three-year project and our mission is to “create the infrastructure for an active online community of informal science exhibit practitioners, including shared records of exhibition descriptions as a core feature.”

Wendy Pollock from Association of Science-Technology Centers is the principal investigator and Kathy McLean from Independent Exhibitions is a co-PI. Ideum’s role is help design, and build the site which will launch this winter. We’re building it in Ruby on Rails.

For now, we’ve created a development blog for the project partners to post evaluation and design documents and to solicit feedback from our core contributors and others in the field. It just went up yesterday but we’ve already posted a few things that might be of interest. The Welcome message describes the ExhibitFiles project in more depth, a User Needs Assessment Summary provides information about the potential users of the site, and our own Competitive Analysis document explores some of the potential features of the ExhibitFiles website.

There’s a great quote that was used in the original proposal and has helped guide our thinking…

“Learning is least useful when it is private and hidden; it is most powerful when it becomes public and communal. Learning flourishes when we take what we think we know and offer it as community property among fellow learners so that it can be tested, examined, challenged, and improved…”
— Lee S. Shulman