Embedded Files
What is "the process"?
Why we have a process
Exhibition projects vary dramatically in scope. One project might involve a dozen people for three or four months. Another involves hundreds of people over three or four years. Some projects occupy nine square feet of floor space. Others will require nine thousand. One exhibition has a budget of less than a thousand dollars and is created, stem-to-stern, under this one roof. Another requires millions of dollars and involves the cooperation of a dozen museums from around the world.
Although this variation makes it difficult to create a process that works for all projects, the reason we’ve created this document has always been clear: an exhaustive process that provides guidelines for every step of a large project can be scaled down and adapted to organize our efforts for a smaller one. But a process that only addresses the issues that arise when creating smaller projects is of little help when you’re tackling much larger ones.
Notes about how the process is applied (rules vs guidelines, flexibility)
Process
Process
The very beginning. The Head of the Department works with the Planning Division and staff from other divisions to create a proposal that seeks approval to move forward on a project. That project might currently exist only as an idea in someone’s head, or as an exhibition topic that has been under consideration for years, or as a proposal from an outside scientist, artist, or community member. We might propose hosting an existing traveling exhibition from another museum, or adapting an exhibition for presentation at the Field Museum.
This phase can be brief—if, for example, we’re hosting an incoming exhibition that requires no additional content from the Field Museum—or it may take up to *00 months for large projects we are creating from scratch. In the Concept Development phase, Development begins background content research, Design begins investigating visitor flow and spatial opportunities, as well as formal constraints such as gallery location and size, environmental conditions, and electrical and data infrastructure. This is also the stage during which the Planning Division is coordinating with lending institutions, the organizers of traveling exhibitions we are installing, and host venues that will stage traveling exhibitions that we organize. The Concept Development phase concludes with a Scope of Work document that sets parameters that will frame the team’s work.
Design and Development is typically the longest of the 5 phases. At this point a core exhibition team is assigned to the project. The team begins with concepts and, through a series of work sessions, checkpoints, and milestone reviews, concludes with a set of deliverables that contain the specific information needed to physically create the exhibition. These include diagrams illustrating the sequence and scope of the different elements, object lists, an architecture for interpretive text, floor plans, media scripts, case layouts, conservation assessments, surfaces and finishes, loan agreements, vendor contracts, and dozens of other deliverables.
Of all 5 project phases, Design and Development involves the largest number of people, and requires the most coordination—between team members, divisions, departments, and organizations.
While the Production Division has been involved to various degrees in the previous three phases, phase 4 is where, for these staff members, the rubber meets the road. From this point forward the production team will be moving in a series of carefully orchestrated steps to bring to reality what has been, until now, nothing but words and images on a computer monitor. Following a carefully choreographed schedule, Production staff members fabricate, replicate, mount, build, program, and install every part of the Exhibition.
After the dust has settled and an exhibition has opened, most staff have little time to catch their breath: they are already, in fact, well into another project. However, after opening day the work is not done. Tasks in this phase include institution-wide and project team debriefing meetings, project archiving, and conducting summative evaluation. Permanent exhibitions will need details finalized for objects that will need to rotate out for conservation purposes. For traveling exhibitions that we create, there is an additional task: creating the installation manual. This is a detailed set of illustrated instructions designed to help our staff—and staff at the host venues who have booked our exhibition—install the new exhibition as safely and systematically as possible.
Report abuse