ABSTRACT
Exhibition design, sometimes called exhibit design, is the conceptualizing, planning, and creating of exhibitions—built, spatial environments that communicate with audiences moving through them. As a field of practice, exhibition design has only recently begun gaining definition and standards. Meanwhile, it is flourishing worldwide, as exposition attendance soars, retail environments reinvent themselves, and cultural institutions increasingly appeal to tourism and promote themselves as centers of entertainment, as well as education. Bringing together a constellation of disciplines, exhibitions are designed by teams working through a phased process that translates a script into an immersive experience. Audiences engaging with the experiences interpret them through interactions with their elements, including their architecture, colors, lighting, graphics, artifacts, and media. Design teams continually develop understandings of their audiences as they plan and arrange exhibitions’ elements in context. As exhibition design expands in the beginning of the twenty-first century, it turns up new challenges, but as with all design fields, exhibition design views challenges as opportunities.
