Changing the concept. A toolkit for exhibition designers who want to create new, sustainable and visitor-focused exhibitions.

Changing the concept. A toolkit for exhibition designers who want to create new, sustainable and visitor-focused exhibitions.

De Jonge, A.

Brezet, J.C. (mentor)
Zijlstra, J.J.M. (mentor)

Industrial Design Engineering

Design Engineering

2014-05-19

Ever since the first time that the term sustainable development has been used, the attention to approach design with the environment in mind has been growing and several sustainable design strategies have been developed. However, museums do not seem to follow these developments, especially when it comes to the design of (temporary) exhibitions. This master thesis focuses on analysing the possibilities for sustainable development within exhibition design and working out concepts based on these analyses. The research into exhibition design shows that the main aspects that make sustainable development difficult are; the wish to come up with an original design, the strict requirements from museums to protect objects, the lack of knowledge necessary to go for more sustainable solutions, no time or budget to research new solutions, the short lifetime of temporary exhibitions (approx. five months), the lack of an ‘end-of-life plan’ for exhibitions, no sustainability requirements in the exhibition design process and the a negative image of sustainable design within museum. Sustainable design methods like EcoDesign, Cradle to Cradle and Biomimicry were analysed, to see how they could be applied to exhibition design. As a result different focus areas can be formed, of which the most promising was selected, which was formulated as ‘Changing the concept: Rethinking the necessity of the current means that translate the story of the objects to a tangible temporary exhibition, in order to use fewer resources. As a result the experience of the visitors should be improved and the amount of visitors should stay at least the same’. The following steps included the development of several concepts; two were worked out further, a ‘Growing exhibition’ concept and a ‘Local Waste Stream exhibition’ concept. These concepts were applied in three existing exhibitions, to investigate how these concepts can be worked out for different exhibitions. This resulted in the conclusion that there is such a broad range of ways to ‘change the concept’ and that it is very difficult to show all of these in one exhibition design. As each exhibition has and should have very specific characteristics, many very useful solutions would be discarded when the end result of this project would be one design for a specific exhibition. This formed the decision to make a toolkit for exhibition designers who want to create new, sustainable and visitor-focused exhibitions. In this way all the valuable insights from the literature research and the research through design can be made accessible to the world of exhibition design, without losing the uniqueness that each exhibition should have. This toolkit was developed with the help of all the knowledge gained in the analysis and through the designs of multiple concepts for a range of exhibitions. The final design proposed in this thesis is the ‘Changing the Concept’ toolkit, an online toolkit for exhibition design teams. The toolkit takes a team through four different phases (Debriefing, Idea generation, Conceptualisation and Embodiment), in which they have to use a set of standard tools and where they can choose from a range of optional tools. The addition of optional tools to the toolkit answers to the wish of exhibition designers to be original in each new exhibition. The toolkit offers design teams the opportunity to share their knowledge and ideas online with each other, in order to inspire the whole exhibition design field to ‘change the concept’. This graduation project was executed for Ontwerpwerk, a The Hague-based design agency, which initiated the Living Lab ‘Green Museums’, which aims to develop innovative concepts for designing and realising sustainable museum exhibitions.

sustainable
exhibition design
tool

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:a6f2160a-684e-47b6-bcc1-dfe2a21db905

Campus only

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2014 De Jonge, A.