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12. Interview Questionnaire

This appendix contains a standard set of questions and topics for discussion that guided the interviews with exhibit designers and developers.

Interview Questions for Exhibit Designers

1.

The Designer and the Design Process

(a): How did you become an exhibit designer?
(b): What educational background do you have? Training? Apprenticeship? Professional experience?
(c): What do you use to help you design (blueprints, storyboards, simulations, mock-ups/models?)
(d): What resources are available to help designers (textbooks, manuals, organizations)?
(e): How does the design process begin?
(f): What kinds of documentation are kept during design?
(g): What other exhibits have you designed? What other work do you do besides exhibit design?

2.

Designing

(a): How did you begin even to approach the design of the exhibit?
(b): What decisions were made first, and what was left until later?
(c): What were your design goals for the exhibit?
(d): Did you have constraints on space? A space budget? Fixed rooms?
(e): Who decided what was included and what was left out?
(f): Did you collaborate with other designers?
(g): Did you consult curators? Historians? Others?
(h): Did you study other exhibits? Have you designed similar exhibits in the past?
(i): Did you do any background research?

3.

The Exhibit and its Viewers

(a): Who were you desiging it for?
(b): Did you think in terms of ``telling a story'' as a viewer proceeded through?
(c): What experience is a viewer supposed to have in the exhibit?
(d): What elements were to be emphasized? How did you decide how much space each element received?
(e): What was a viewer to take away, or remember most, from the exhibit?
(f): How did you keep people from getting lost?
(g): What were the roles of annotative elements in the exhibit (signs, banners, maps)?
(h): Did you think about how long people might spend at different parts of the exhibit? How they move about within the exhibit space?
(i): Why did you order the rooms in a particular way?
(j): Within a smaller region (a room, a wall) why did you arrange things in a particular way? Specifically...
(k): Did the interaction between the many media types represented in the exhibit influence your design?

4.

Evaluation and Design Alternatives

(a): What were the best aspects of the exhibit? What worked really well?
(b): What do you wish you could have done, but couldn't because of time, money, space, etc.?
(c): What if you had another floor? A larger space? More items?
(d): Did you have to leave anything out?
(e): What didn't work so well? Would you have done anything differently, if doing it over again?

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