We’ve all been to the meeting that could have been an email. But you haven’t really lived until you’ve been to the exhibit that could have been a web page.
And there are a lot of them.
You arrive at a park visitor centre. Alongside the washrooms and the information desk, there’s a fun-looking introductory exhibit about the park’s geology, flora, fauna, and activities. You wander through and see text, images, and maybe a looping video. Then more text, more images, more video.
And it starts to dawn on you: you’re standing in a sanitized black box talking about the wonderful things that are out there—but you’re not out there. You’re in here. Looking at things you could have seen on the web before you came.
What’s wrong with this picture?
The Problem: Fabricated Experience
A good exhibit has always been more than two-dimensional media. Exhibits come from the museum world—and museums are repositories of material culture. They’re places built to collect and display meaningful things. Objects. Artworks. Artifacts. Biofacts. People go to museums to experience those things—often things from faraway places—and to learn about them through accompanying text and imagery.
An exhibit without things to exhibit isn’t an exhibit.
Many visitor centres don’t have any original objects at all (or the infrastructure to safely show them.) So they just talk about them instead. They talk about the rocks. They talk about the trails. They talk about the people who’ve lived there since time immemorial.
And it inspires the question: do we still need to gather people inside a black box to tell them about things that (a) are right outside the walls, and (b) could be communicated just as authentically online, during the dreaming and planning phase of a visit?
Show them something local and real. Or get them outside.
If all you’ve got to show them are text, images, and maybe video, your visitor centre exhibit is pretty weak sauce in this day and age. Honestly, just put it online.
I do believe visitor centres have a role in the modern visitor experience: they’re a welcoming, transitional space between the visitor’s world and the world of your park or historic site. Done well, they meet you halfway between your daily life (screens, work, verbal information, text, so much text…) and the outdoor adventure you’ve travelled to experience. They give context. They show what to look for. They help you stay safe, dress right, and respect the place you’re about to enter.
But in these days of ubiquitous digital content, they have to expand their vocabulary beyond text, images, and video. Because that’s what the web is for.
So what would make it worth being there, in person?
Authentic Experience
Authenticity. That’s what visitors have travelled for.
Can you show them something they can’t experience on a screen? Can you present meaningful objects that are original, authentic, local, and can’t be experienced elsewhere? Not pictures of the thing… the thing itself. The more I work in the world of exhibitions, the more I realize how valuable original objects are in this virtual world. Much more so than they were twenty-five years ago.
Another idea: can you crack open that black box—literally and figuratively—and use views to connect your story to what’s happening outside right now? Can you use windows as borrowed landscapes, turning the visitor’s attention to something happening in real time?
My Favourite Direction
My latest passion is to explode the welcome exhibit outside of the black box altogether and create a ”Park 101” self-guided welcome walk. This is an easily accessible introductory trail, starting from the visitor centre if possible, that uses text and imagery to introduce the site’s major themes while placing the visitor in situ. Want to talk about trail etiquette? How about doing it on a trail? Want to talk about boreal forests? Why not walk through one? Want to talk about frogs? Let us listen to them. Real ones.
Want to introduce the people who have lived here since time immemorial? Why not work with them to identify a significant place that visitors can see and experience appropriately?
Make the effort.
Two-dimensional visitor centre exhibits are easy to make. It’s not hard to fill a black box with text and pictures.
What’s harder—and infinitely more rewarding—is to connect that content to something original, local, and real.
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