Open Exhibits Design Summit Summary

Open Exhibits held a Design Summit bringing together 30 professionals from the field to help guide future development. The Design Summit was convened in Corrales, New Mexico near the design studios of Ideum, the principal organization of Open Exhibits. It was held March 9th to 11th of 2011. Attendees came from large and small science centers, planetariums, zoos, local museums, and several other open source software initiatives. They were educators, evaluators, designers, researchers, software engineers, and museum professionals. Participants engaged in a combination of short presentations followed by open discussion, active design exercises, and demos of multitouch exhibits and motion-capture prototypes. This diverse group of professionals coalesced around a new and complex question that is challenging the exhibit design field: how can we utilize new physical computing technologies to create better exhibits to improve informal science learning? The secondary question of how to build a stronger and more active community of practice to better facilitate this outcome was also explored.