Energizing Designers’ Creative Process Through Evaluation: An Interview with Brenda Cowan
As an evaluator with extensive experience in exhibition evaluation, I’m passionate about the intersection of evaluation and experience design. Recently, I spoke with Brenda Cowan, Professor at the Fashion Institute of Technology (FIT), about this topic. Over the past two decades, Brenda has played a key role in shaping and growing FIT’s Exhibition and Experience Design Masters program, consistently emphasizing the importance of evaluation in training future designers. We discussed why she believes it’s crucial for emerging designers to understand how evaluation happens and how it supports their work. Enjoy these highlights from our conversation!
[The interview excerpts below have been edited for length and clarity.]
Falling in love with exhibits
Cathy: What's your professional background?
Brenda: I have a winding, somewhat unusual path. I began as a fine arts student and then got into art education, and from that I entered into graduate school in museum education and museum administration. Even though I thought I was destined to become an education director in a museum, I learned about exhibitions and did my final thesis work on crafting exhibition games and interactives, looking at how people learn and interact in specific ways. And I realized I wanted to do more than just teach in museum spaces and environments—I wanted to create them.
I found myself working at an exhibit design firm and ended up taking on other roles at children's museums. I had my own firm for a number of years to create and develop exhibitions, and I really got hooked on falling in love. And when I say that, I mean I got hooked on the type of experience that you have when you develop and design exhibitions—where you do a deep dive into content, into story, and you learn about the audience and have the opportunity to really fall in love with something like a salamander, or a piece of history, or whatever the case might be. I became an exhibits addict. I loved all of the different facets of exhibits, which is actually where evaluation comes in.
Tuning into the visitor experience
Cathy: How did you first become interested in evaluation?
Brenda: I was working on a project with the Brooklyn Children's Museum doing a joint exhibition project with the Brooklyn Botanic Garden that included front-end and formative evaluations. What was so awesome was that the evaluation project was treated as an educational opportunity for the exhibits team. As a museum educator who was working on the team developing the exhibition, I got to learn about all the different things that go into conducting an evaluation, from organizing focus groups to learning how interview scripts are developed. I was smitten. I thought this was the coolest thing in the whole world.
It was such a wonderful and meaningful way to think about exhibitions, to think about audiences and the visitor experience. And I learned so much about how to develop and design exhibitions that are really clued into how visitors have experiences, what makes them curious. So that's how I first got tuned into what evaluation even is and then the deeper purposes and how it's performed. And again, it was kind of part of that whole love affair that I was having with exhibitions and experiences and informal education. I was like, oh my god, there's another whole profession involved.
Answering the “so what” question
Cathy: How would you describe the relationship between evaluation and experience design? Where are there overlaps, and what does each profession bring uniquely to the table?
Brenda: Where to begin. I think some of the obvious overlaps take place in formative style thinking, the development of prototypes, testing out ideas, getting physical and thinking about space and the dynamics of people in space. I think it is really essential for an exhibit designer to be introduced to how to test designs when they are in the early stages, to understand how to adapt and iterate designs through engagement with testing groups.
Additionally, something that I think is considered less often—in a design classroom in particular—is front-end evaluation, which to me is an incredibly important way for a student of design to learn how to think, specifically when coming up with a main idea for an exhibition. They're crafting the story that's being told. They're thinking about curatorial aspects in terms of objects or even images or whatever those particular items might be. But are you hitting the mark? Are people going to really care about your message? It's one of the best questions that every designer, and anybody in our industry, should constantly be asking themselves when they're creating something. It's the “so what” question. And the best way to answer the “so what” question is to do evaluation. So that's the point of view that I teach my design students.
It’s all about audience
Cathy: Today you’re a Professor in the Exhibition and Experience Design MA program at FIT. Why is it important to you to include evaluation in your curriculum? What do emerging or budding experience designers stand to gain from learning about evaluation and the theory and techniques of audience studies?
Brenda: I think in big picture terms, emerging designers need to understand that it's the audience that matters, period. At the end of the day, it's all about the audience. It's all about determining if you have connected people with the story, with the ideas. Do they care? Is it something that's really driving and prompting further curiosity or passion?
To me, it just became so logical to include evaluation. When I started with the program, one of the first things I knew was that we needed to have a course that looked at exhibition development and evaluation together, to really think about evaluation as core to the development, and especially the early stages, of an exhibition process. Because, again, it enables a designer to think deeply about audience. Designers don't often get that opportunity. I wanted my students to have the opportunity to talk to people and to listen to people and to hear and to learn about humans. After all, how do we know what to design if we're not really talking about who we're designing for? That means that I need to introduce students to evaluation.
I find that when I have them do formative evaluations, and when we do small summative evaluation projects, the feedback is always so positive and they get very energized. It is a whole new way of thinking for them.
Saving time and money
Cathy: What do you wish more seasoned experience designers would keep in mind about evaluation and audience studies, or about working with evaluators?
Brenda: That it'll save them time and money. Honestly, you will solve so many problems before they even become problems. You will do a better job at creating a design that really resonates and matters to the visitor. It’s great if you have the time and the money to do a deep dive process with an evaluator, but it also doesn't have to be a long project. It can be done in a couple of months or weeks, and you can get so much information in an economic way that will enable you to really nail a great design and hit the mark in terms of creating something that is going to resonate and matter.
What I wish all designers thought automatically is: “How can we test this out? How can we do some front-end testing? How can we do some formative testing? How can we work with professional evaluators who are going to be able to really efficiently and effectively ask those right questions? How can we work with professional evaluators who are going to be able to look at the data and say, “I see this trend emerging. I can see it right in front of me when I'm looking across 20 different interview sheets and here's what people are telling us.” And that's the beauty of working with evaluation experts, is that they have a really good ear and a really good eye for looking at and collecting data. I wish everybody who was doing design work professionally automatically thought about evaluation in those ways.
Energizing the creative process
Cathy: And I would say that evaluators need to be mindful of and respect designers’ ongoing momentum and creative process that follows a nonlinear path, and try our best to do our work in a way that respects the time it takes to do evaluation systematically, but also not knowingly slow things down.
Brenda: You’re making me think of a conversation I had with an expert in creativity, Zorana Pringle, who is a leading researcher and scholar in the creative process and how it works. I'm thinking about how cool it is to have evaluation within the creative design process. Because what happens is that when you're kick-starting an idea, there's a lot of fear and anxiety—it's unknown. You don't know what the darn thing is going to look like for a while.
In terms of creative process, there are moments when designers can get really blocked. “Oh my God, what if this is terrible? What if this doesn't work? I've got some preliminary design thinking, but maybe it's no good.” You hit these moments of challenge. What a brilliant time to bring in an evaluator. Again, it doesn't have to be a big, giant thing that is a blockade in the process. But instead, what if you bring in a kind of stealth evaluation moment, get that injection of energy and of target audience perspectives. Let's bring in evaluation because that actually is going to energize the creative process. So in a way, I think that it's not like a blockade, but an injection of energy and reassurance.
Embracing relationships and connections
Cathy: In the future, how do you hope to see the fields of experience design and evaluation—and the relationships between experience designers and evaluators—evolve?
Brenda: I think that we need to understand that experience is not just a thing that a person walks into or engages with. If we're going to call ourselves experience designers, and if we're going to create experiences that people deeply engage with in one way or another, we need to understand the visitor aspect of that. We need to understand what that human connection actually is so that we can better define what an experience is.
An experience isn’t just “I went somewhere, I did something, or something happened to me”—that's a very flat way of thinking about experience design. It's not a transaction. We talk about creating “wow moments.” We talk about creating “aha moments.” We talk about creating immersive experiences that really transform people. To really define what that transformation is, we need to be able to get inside the heads of our visitors. We need to be able to hear about that heartfelt moment or ask them, what do you mean by that? What does transformation actually mean for the visitor? And the only way to do that is to ask and to listen and watch and to really, really learn.
So I hope that moving into the future, it becomes more and more logical for design firms and institutions that are creating experiences and spaces to embrace the idea of, “Okay, we're going to take a pause at this point in the process. We're going to touch base with our target visitors, and then we're going to take another pause at a later stage, and we're going to touch base with our target visitors again so that we can really see what we're doing and how it's working.”
About Brenda
Brenda Cowan is a Professor and former Chairperson of Graduate Exhibition & Experience Design at the SUNY/Fashion Institute of Technology where she teaches exhibition development and evaluation; object and museum studies; research methodologies and audience studies. Her background includes work for museums and design firms in the roles of interpreter, exhibition developer, education director, evaluator, and project manager. Brenda is a Fulbright Specialist in the disciplines of museums, objects and mental health. Her theory of Psychotherapeutic Object Dynamics has been presented for the American Alliance of Museums; Museums of Hope; MidAtlantic Association of Museums; Sweden’s National Museums of World Culture; CoMuseum, Athens, the Organization of Networks for Empathy, and the American Association of State and Local History Leadership Institute. Her publications include Museum Objects, Health and Healing (2019 Cowan et al) and Flourishing in Museums (Latham and Cowan 2024) both published by Routledge Taylor & Francis. Brenda’s recent work includes evaluating wellbeing and healing at the Museum of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Antiquities, Stockholm, with Syrian refugees and immigrants. She is currently co-host of Matters of Experience, a podcast about design and museum experiences.