The massive exhibition gap

The main reason that I came back to writing is bad exhibitions. Why on Earth would I want to write about this?

Well, first because I am a museum nerd. I love them. And bad exhibitions give museums a bad rap. Second, because I think that there is a massive gap between the people who design an exhibition and those who attend one. Do they ever, ever wander into their own exhibitions as if they had never been there before and try to put on their observers’ shoes? I suspect they don’t. It is hard. I’m not playing it down for curators. But this missing link might be the key to improving these experiences, that, if done well, can be so damn cool.

For example, yesterday I went to the Moctezuma exhibition at the British Museum, in London. I have been trying to book tickets online for the past 2 weeks (since it opened, really) and the website kept telling me it was fully booked.

But yesterday, a friend decided to go there anyway, to hang out with her sister, and called me to say that there were tickets available, and that the lady at the door didn’t seem to have heard of "sold out" days.

So first thing: why does their website tell me one thing, and the door lady tells me another? Surely the one thing an exhibition website needs to do well is to sell tickets –it can’t go to the exhibition for you, right? But no. Not in this case.

I got the museum after a long commute on London's Sunday public transport. (You know what I am talking about if you live in London). I was tired and a bit hungry, so I had a small bite before we went in. At the door, I got myself an audio tour for 3 pounds, so I could make the most of it all.

We get inside and the first thing I see is a black wall with stencilled text, font size 14 – with so many people around it that I couldn’t read it. Up the steps to the main entrance, and again, I couldn’t even see what these people were looking at. Finally, I got closer to find... another wall full of text. And a map. Oh, and there was a tiny number with a headset icon around it, so I inferred that is where I could use my audio guide. Pressed one, and play, and… was hit by this really loud voice, in English (the only language available) with the weirdest fake Mexican accent that proceeded to read me the text that was on the wall. What? Yeah, I know! Audio guide? Or should I say, replacement for the visually impaired?

Bad start, but let’s move on. Next room, lots of pieces inside glass cases. Lots of papers and interesting-looking books, but I couldn’t tell what they were about - because the explanation was in this tiny little stencilled text on the bottom right, which one might just be able to read, if the person in front of you doesn’t have the bad habit of swaying, as if they were in playschool reading Winnie the Pooh.

To cut a very long and painful story short, it was hard. Hard to follow the flow, hard to understand the pieces, but most of all, it was hard to understand Montezuma’s world – which is all I went there for in the first place. Now, I know something about Aztecs because I studied their politics at university, but I walked out of that place with the impression I knew less then than before.

The exhibition didn’t have a story, or if it did, it didn’t tell it to me. It felt like a group of people had laid their hands on a bunch of interesting material and threw it together, without ever thinking that people like me, who wandered in not knowing much, would not particularly be interested in sharing a big illustrated book with hundreds of other people. Because that is what it felt like: a very annoying, shared reading experience. I was so concentrated on reading quickly, because the people behind me wanted to read the tiny text as well, that I barely paid attention to the pieces themselves. And the books, that looked so interesting... if only I could flick through the pages, see the cover… Thank you very much, I’d rather rent a DVD.

Anyway. This story is just one example of the classic design problem: the designers believe that the users are just like them, and the users think that they are the ones who are thick.

The gap. We are here. To fill it.