ABSTRACT
Nearly six years ago, I met and team-taught a communication design workshop with Chan Screven, a behavioral psychologist who is involved with visitor studies in the context of museum exhibition design.1 Chan introduced me to quick and adaptive prototyping and user observation. We used the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago as our site for fieldwork as we critiqued existing exhibits through watching visitor behavior and designing interventions to improve the attraction, interest and retention of exhibit information and experience. Until my work with Chan, I, like so many designers, worked in a technical and aesthetic vacuum, the standards of which were dictated by client budget and the professional norms of design organizations who tended to applaud what was “new,” exotic or avant-garde. In that context, I could not tell whether what I designed communicated to its audience. The performance of what I designed was conflated with marketing strategies, the cost of competitive items, advertising agendas, and other non-design initiatives. There was no way to really know whether the message I had developed got through to its audience and altered understanding or behavior.
