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By Alan Joch

Once upon a time, the design of a museum or exhibition took a backseat to its content. Today, design is content, particularly when a museum’s mission is to convey information, rather than show objects. “There is a blurring of distinction between object, experience, and story. Visitors are interacting with ideas that have no physical presence,” says Deborah Sussman, principal of Sussman/Prejza & Company, exhibition consultants for the planned Museum of the African Diaspora in San Francisco, which will trace the dispersal of African peoples from the continent to other parts of the world.

For these projects, display technology has come to play a central role, and it has evolved to the point where its hardware can recede into the background so that visitors are not only immersed in content but can interact with it, as well. Two recent projects in Los Angeles and New York demonstrate different ways that designers are experimenting with these capabilities.

Small thinking, big ideas

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) taps the energy of artists to create experimental exhibitions in its Boone Children’s Gallery. The latest effort, a 10-month exhibition called nano that opened in December, highlights the work of scientists who explore the world at the submicron level. “Our challenge was to convey the nano-scaled world without creating a corny version of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,” says Bob Sain, director of the LACMA Lab, the research and development arm of the museum.

The revamped Sony Wonder Technology Lab features a display wall (right in photo) that refracts and reflects light outside the lab so that it’s visible to people in the adjacent atrium. Photography: © Scott Gries

Although the subject is at the cutting edge of scientific research, the museum wanted the exhibition’s technological underpinnings hidden from view. “The whole idea was to not have any keyboards or monitors that were visible,” says Victoria Vesna, a media artist who chairs the department of design’s media arts program at UCLA, and who led the creation of the show’s installations. “Instead, through a series of projectors and embedded sensors, the exhibits would come alive as people moved through the spaces.”

In conceiving nano, a core group of artists, architects, and nano scientists achieved a level of collaboration that “blurred, blended, and swirled together” their talents, Sain says. The architect, Johnston Marklee & Associates in Los Angeles, participated in the show’s first development meetings. “This gave us insight into how to conceptualize a very complex subject,” recalls firm principal Sharon Johnston, AIA. Her partner, Mark Lee, adds, “Rather than just listening to a client’s set of demands, we found we had to be quite assertive architecturally. We started presenting tangible ideas that the artists and the client could respond to,” he says.