BioQuest Woods: Designing a Large-scale, Outdoor, Aesthetic Science-learning Exhibition

Visitors to the Museum of Life and Science (MLS) in Durham can now explore acres of new exhibition space, called BioQuest Woods. To get to BioQuest Woods, visitors walk outside and away from the Museum building a quarter of a mile, passing Loblolly Park, the Farmyard, the trail to the Butterfly House, and Grayson's Cafe. Upon approaching BioQuest Woods, they encounter a fork in the trail where they can choose to enter one of two exhibition areas: Catch the Wind or Explore the Wild. On the backside of either exhibition area, people can choose to take a full loop (which is a total of a half-mile) through the whole of BioQuest Woods, or they can spend time in just one of the two thematic areas. A large map showing the layout of the whole exhibition landscape guides visitors in making their decision. Over the last ten years of the project, Inverness Research Associates has had the privilege of working with MLS staff, as both the formative and summative evaluators of BioQuest Woods. As part of our work, we have been documenting the development process since the inception of this project. This paper summarizes what we learned, and aims to provide insight into the unique design challenges of BioQuest Woods and how the MLS addressed those challenges. The audience for this paper is the MLS, the NSF and anyone in the field of informal science education who may be interested in embarking on a similar endeavor.