Services & Expertise

>Experience Design

Designing Peak Experiences

A Peak Experience is like a learning lightening bolt. It leaves the visitor equal-parts entertained and enlightened while stimulating new perspectives. These transformational experiences can be catalyzed more effectively by keeping four principles in mind. They should be thought-provoking, participatory, inclusive of multiple perspectives, and make emotional connections.

Read my blog post on “7 Reasons Museums Should Share More Experiences, Less Information.” 

Immersive Learning

Crafting an immersive experience for visitors allows them to live briefly in another world - to explore that world driven by curiosity, to make decisions, and to empathize with its inhabitants. Immersion is powerful tool, both intellectually and emotionally. These techniques can build critical thinking skills, inspire awe-struck wonder, and help visitors learn about themselves in meaningful ways. Immersion can be achieved using many tools: live role-playing, participatory theatre, physical space design, audio-scapes, and Virtual Reality technology. But the real magic is not just in the technique, it's in the structure and purpose of the design. 

>Big Picture Thinking

Getting to the Heart of the Matter:
Content Development Around Essential Questions

Thought-provoking questions lie at the heart of all human curiosity. How should we limit personal freedom? Which species deserves to be saved? But oftentimes, when these questions evolve into programs or exhibits, they are transformed into static, encyclopedic answers. What if we honored the pursuit of the question, more than the answers? Designing educational activities and exhibits around a big "essential" question can frame content in a way that helps learners think beyond shallow facts, to curiosity-provoking concepts. This technique also helps museum staff to be "masters of exclusion," pruning content that takes away from the true focus of an experience. Creating truly compelling questions is an art form that takes some analysis and practice. 

Interpretive Planning and Unlocking Relevancy

Connecting museum content to people's current-day lives is imperative if institutions want to remain viable in the 21st Century. But relevancy isn't about being trendy. It's about framing unfamiliar concepts in ways that matter to people and using engagement techniques that excite today's audiences.  

Through interpretive planning, I help museums to:

• Create a new transformative brand of visitor experience

• Embrace experiential and participatory learning; reduce the volume of information displayed

• Utilize essential questions in place of themes, big ideas, and main messages (where appropriate)

• Connect with and involve community members in the process

• Think beyond learning goals to: foster empathy, manage and identify emotions, examine ethics, learn about ourselves etc.

• Include stories of marginalized groups that have been previously ignored

• Become more purposeful and selective in choosing objects to display

• Examine boundary pushing-questions about their organizational culture
  

>Educator Skill Building

Educator Training on Engagement Techniques

A visitor's experience is only as good as the educators with whom they interact. Today it's more important than ever for educators to invite visitor participation in constructive ways, to master the art of dialogue facilitation, to inspire imagination through storytelling, and to genuinely listen to their guests. I facilitate workshops that can be tailored to institutional need, but sessions can include best practices for tackling sensitive topics, building tours around thematic questions, using museum theatre, and other engagement techniques that invite participation and deeper thinking.

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