ExhibiTricks: The Museum Exhibit Design Blog: Despite the "best-laid plans" for our museum and exhibit projects, things often do go awry. Whether it happens during the initial stages of value engineering (often providing neither "value" nor "engineering") or just before the opening of a new building or exhibition, the harsh realities of schedules and budgets often squeeze our hopes and dreams like a vise.
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I was hoping that this article would have more to say, but I do think that the idea of splitting tasks into their importance is legitimately important in nearly all forms. I think that for every deadline in a creative process, it is good to think about what has to be done for that point, what it would be nice to have gotten done by that point, and what can be pushed off until later. In theater, almost everything has to be done by opening night, but there are a lot of examples of this at earlier deadlines. When a lighting plot is due a lighting designer has to have a lighting plot and it would be nice to have some sense of where he wants cues, but they can wait until later to figure out exactly what each look will be. When a lighting designer enters tech they know where they want at least most of their cues and it would be great to know what each look is going to look like, although that can also be figured out during the tech process.
While certainly brief, I do think that this article makes a really good point about the importance of identifying priority tasks. Firstly, I am also incredibly intrigued by the whole concept of an entire blog dedicated to a museum exhibit design. I had no idea there was so much to know (or blog) about developing and producing a museum exhibit. Back to the article, something I’ve definitely been told a million times in my general life is to just “priortize things” when I’m busy with a lot of tasks, which on its own is not really the most helpful statement. I think that the way the article explains the concept by providing three (or more) specific categories for things to be sorted into is a far better way to organize a plan of attack for tasks. This is a strategy that is pretty helpful for general school/homework/life stuff, but in theatre, it tends to not work as well because of what a major deadline opening night is, as opposed to what opening night means for a museum exhibit.
This article did a very good job of breaking down the process of planning events down to its barest bones. I think that it’s helpful in that it makes the process very widely applicable, and easy to understand for those unfamiliar with event planning, but I do wish it had gone a bit more in depth. That being said, as a stage manager, something that really stuck out to me was that I was doing a lot of this subconsciously. You just sort of get used to thinking in this mindset, sometimes without really understanding what it is that you are saying or doing. It was interesting to take a step back and examine a process that had become so second nature that I am not sure that I would ever have been able to share it as advice, as it is so natural to me that I forget it’s not learned behavior.
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