Please excuse any cross-postings.

I started teaching my Exhibits class this week and, as always, I gave the students a brief history of exhibits, borrowing heavily from Marjorie Schwarzer's chapter on "Twelve Influential Exhibits" in the AAM centennial book.  She lists Carl Akeley's dioramas, the coal mine at MSI, the Holocaust Museum, and others as exhibits that have had a broad impact on the field at large.

During the discussion afterward, one student asked if there were any examples of digital technology in exhibits that were also considered influential.  I thought of Science on a Sphere, which is popping up in several science centers, and the AMNH biodiversity hall which has a computerized ID system that has received a lot of attention.  But for the most part, no, and I came up with three reasons:

1) Digital technology simply hasn't been around long enough to for any individual application to impact the field in the same way that the Exploratorium model or Mathematica have;

2) Digital technology changes so rapidly that, even if there was something with the potential to create such an impact, it would be out of date in a few years; and

3) Exhibits have such long lead times, and tight budgets, that they cannot easily incorporate cutting-edge technology.  (I suppose that's a summary of points 1 & 2).

However, I have been wrong before, so I thought I'd put the question out there: have there been any exhibits whose use of digital technology has had a wide influence on the exhibit field?

Thanks,

Eugene Dillenburg
Exhibit Developer, Science Museum of Minnesota
Assistant Professor and "Scholar," Michigan State University

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