Keeping Audiences’ Needs Central When Creating a New Exhibition for a Science Center

Experience Design Research
Written By Cathy Sigmond

Client: Exhibition Design Firm | Location: Western United States

 
 

We led strategic front-end and formative evaluations to help a design firm keep audiences’ needs at the center of their fast-paced exhibition development process.

OVERVIEW

From 2023-2024, we teamed up with an exhibition design firm tasked with reenvisioning a new exhibition for a science center in the Western United States. The design firm wanted to make sure that target audiences' needs were not just considered, but authentically woven into the entire exhibition development process. They brought us in as strategists and thought partners to seamlessly integrate audience-focused evaluation into their fast-paced exhibition development timeline.

APPROACH

We led two rounds of evaluation to make sure target audiences’ voices were heard at critical moments during design.  

Front-end evaluation at 35% design development focused on understanding audiences’ baseline knowledge of and experiences with core exhibition topics. We recruited three different local audiences—educators, older adults, and family caregivers—and led six virtual focus groups (two with each audience) to gauge their starting points with these topics and reactions to early exhibition concepts.  

Formative evaluation at 65% design development took the form of hands-on prototyping at the science center, again with multiple audiences, ranging from K-12 students and teachers to older adults to intergenerational family groups. Through interviews, we gauged their reactions to the exhibition’s messaging as well as a large hands-on interactive exhibit that would become a central part of the new exhibition.  

Along the way, we led collaborative reflections to help the design firm and science center collaboratively identify challenges and opportunities to address.

CLIENT TAKEAWAYS

The exhibition focuses on a topic that has scientific and cultural importance locally, regionally, and globally. Through front-end evaluation, we identified the different (and sometimes conflicting) ways that audiences think about the exhibition’s core topics and identified potential gaps in their understanding that the new exhibition can fill. Formative evaluation helped the design firm identify ways it could clarify messaging and improve usability in key exhibits. 

Overall, this process allowed both the design firm and science center to not only seed relationships with local audiences, but think strategically about how to keep audiences’ needs central to their process.

Cathy Sigmond

Cathy brings many years of experience in education and experience design to her role as Head of Strategy at Kera Collective. 

Having previously worked in a variety of educational settings, Cathy is driven by her constant fascination and delight at how people make discoveries about the familiar and the unfamiliar. 

Cathy loves helping to shape experiences that spark curiosity and make a difference in people’s lives. She particularly enjoys the rapid, iterative nature of design-based research and the deep insights that come from qualitative research, especially on projects exploring interactions with the digital and built environments. 

Cathy shares her passion for experience design research widely and regularly guest lectures for graduate programs, including the Fashion Institute of Technology’s Exhibition and Experience Design Program and the Pratt Institute’s School of Information. Cathy served as the co-chair of the Museum Computer Network’s Human-Centered Design special interest group from 2018-2021.

Outside of work, you can usually find Cathy playing soccer, thrifting, or making her way through her large cookbook collection. 

Cathy’s favorite museum experiences are immersive; she will always vividly remember walking through the giant heart at the Franklin Institute, being surrounded by birds at the Peabody Essex Museum, and hearing centuries-old instruments come to life at the Museum of Musical Instruments. 

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