A table scattered with pictures, artifacts, books, and scribbles might look like an exhibition in the works, or it might look like it has a major problem: too broad a subject. Local history, modern design, and the natural world are topics, not ideas for an exhibition. They don’t yet explain what the exhibition communicates. Before you draft a floor plan or create graphic panels, narrow the subject enough to provide a guide for what to include and what to omit in terms of selection, text, and layout.
Start by composing a sentence to finish this thought: This exhibition demonstrates how… Rather than identifying a topic, the sentence should point to a relationship, a change, a curiosity, or a phenomenon. “This exhibition demonstrates local history” is too general. “This exhibition demonstrates how a riverside district transformed from a workshop area to an urban neighborhood” gives you something to work with. It suggests that particular photographs, maps, tools, interviews, and real estate records belong in the object list. It also suggests why other material gets left out.
Test the sentence against objects you hope to show. Lay out printed index cards or sticky notes on a table, each labeled with an object, photograph, quote, or artifact from your collection. Sort the items into three groups: keep, rethink, and remove. An object goes into keep if it reinforces the exhibition idea and adds something unique to the overall story. Items you rethink are interesting but are redundant, hard to explain, or only tangentially related to the main idea. Removing material can feel painful since all objects have a backstory, but a more focused selection results in a stronger exhibition organization.
Once you’ve established the main idea, find a storyline in the keep group. It is easier to see the point of an exhibition when the objects can be organized into a handful of connected sections. Those sections can follow a timeline, a geographic location, a transformation, a comparison, or a cause and effect. For an exhibition about a changing riverside district, one section could set the scene at the time of the workshops, a second could show the transition from a production zone to housing, and a third could explore what survived the change. The sequence can later be turned into an introduction, section headers, and way-finding. The story also keeps the viewer from encountering significant information as a revelation in the last few minutes of an exhibit.
Create a quick paper prototype before spending time on polished visuals. Spread out the cards into section groups and add temporary labels in readable text. Look at the exhibit from a distance to see if the concept can be communicated to a visitor without too many words. Notice if one section dominates the others, if multiple cards say the same thing, or if the most compelling card isn’t the first card the viewer sees. Take a picture, remove a card from a group that seems full, and compare the two results. You don’t want each section to be the same size, but you want every group to have enough room to develop its part of the story.
A strong concept can also help with logistics. It indicates which objects take priority, where labels need to clarify a story element, and where blank space can separate the different sections. It gives a purpose to the viewer’s experience and keeps you from filling a space with unrelated stops. Before you take measurements or start to plan the installation, reread the sentence you composed and consider the keep group. Will a visitor be able to describe the same message after seeing the exhibit, or do the objects tell a number of different messages at once?