Here’s a fun activity if you visit lots of museums that are short on those: try to guess what year the gallery you are approaching opened by observing the exhibits from the threshold.  16:9 or 4:3?  1280×1024 or 800×600?  CRT or LCD?  ELO or Happ?  I can tell you what version of Photoshop you made your buttons with by the drop shadow alias.

Or, try playing by hot industry meme:  Visitor feedback station?  Additional info web kiosk?  Post-visit barcode website?  Gesture recognition interactive?  (It’s: year that meme was the darling of ASTC divided by the square root of the museum’s distance from the coast, for those curious.)

And speaking of versions of Photoshop, the only reason there exists software as powerful and intuitive and feature-rich as Photoshop is because it comes in versions, right?  Iterative development.  Release, test, improve, release, test, improve, release, etc.  Keep all of the good, add a pinch of better.  Debug.  Repeat.

Virtually all commercial software is developed on the iterative model.  Even most museum websites are built to be iterative. So, why are so few exhibits?

I get it.  You just barely finish your project on time and on budget.  Sometimes the be-tuxed CEO is toasting while the last trackball screws are quietly being tightened.  And then you, your colleagues, and your scarce resources are on to the next project, already in progress two weeks behind schedule.  Maybe you’ve kidded yourself that you’ll go back for a final round of tweaks.  Maybe you even had a team debrief where you wrote several of them on a dry erase board.  Or maybe you have matured beyond kidding yourself in this vain.

Simple, focused iterative exhibit releases are one of the most efficient, effective ways to make your museum suck less. Hang on, I’m bolding that.  There.

In this and an entry or so to follow I’d like to posit a few whys and hows of iterative exhibit development.  First a few whys:

HIGH BANG + LOW BUCK. Equals trouble for exhibits that suck.  Making an exhibit typically is a significant resource investment.  Coming back a few months later and making a few well-designed improvements is resource-trivial by comparison.  And yet can really make a huge difference in visitor experience.  This is building a house vs. installing a garage door opener.  It’s a gimme.

ENCOURAGE MEMBERSHIP AND RETURN VISITS AND VISITOR SATISFACTION. Oh yeah, it helps all kinds of pie charts.  Your members and return visitors notice when exhibits improve and expand.  And when they see this as routine, they’ll come back for that reason alone.  Check that visitor survey you commissioned from your last charlatan wunderblogger consultant.  I’ll bet you some variation of “Content not updated enough” was in your top three complaints.

GREATLY EXTEND YOUR GALLERY LIFE CYCLE. You don’t need iteration, you say, because your museum has its galleries on a three-year renovation cycle.  Two questions.  Do you really, honestly have all your galleries on a three-year cycle?  OK.  Fine.  Question two:  If I could wave a magic wand and turn that three-year cycle into a five-year cycle and make your galleries better and more relevant for five years than they used to be for three…  (if at the end of five years you could respectably sell them to another museum, when you used to have to pay to store them after three until you finally had the heart to throw them away…)  can you think of two worthwhile things you could do with all the money and man hours you’d save?

HOW DARE YOU NOT? Those are exhibits.  You’re open, aren’t you?  I paid to get in here.  Let me check my stub for the disclaimer that says “We are not responsible for our Civil WRITES! gallery sucking; it was a lot cooler back in 2003 when it opened.”

(In a subsequent post, I’ll share a few simple tips for effectively implementing exhibit iteration in your museum.  Probably.  And I swear I’m getting back to the gym this week.)