The Willing Suspension of Disbelief

Dinosaurs are everywhere. They are in museums of course. But everywhere else too. Toys, T-shirts, coffee cups, cartoons, everywhere. And since the release of Jurassic Park thirty years ago, generations have grown up with high expectations for how dinosaurs look, move, sound. Which equates to production costs that science centres cannot meet. And yet, there is new dinosaurs discoveries being made all the time that make for great science exhibitions. There’s great content. And a constant, down the generations dinosaurs are aways popular. There’s a great market for dinosaurs. The British Broadcasting Corporation came to us with a problem. The BBC has a property called Walking with Dinosaurs first launched as a tv show in the 1990s,. After the success of the tv show, the BBC had next created a successful large-scale staged event show called Walking with Dinosaurs: The Arena Spectacular. Based on these past successes, we were tasked with coming up with a more compact idea, for a travelling exhibit format – 700 square meters – knowing how crowded the market had become with dinosaur content. Our first step was to workshop what could be the BBC take on dinosaurs, different from the ‘rip your head off’ dinosaurs of Jurassic Park. Putting the guest in the centre We looked for a hook, to hang a design around. And it was right there in front of us – the title Walking with Dinosaurs. Walking is what the BBC had promised but not yet delivered. Watching TV you can’t walk with dinosaurs. Watching a stage show you can’t walk with dinosaurs. But in a travelling exhibit, here we could live up to the promise, provided guests were warmed up to a willing suspension of disbelief. Exhibitions are powerful because the way they can put the guest in the centre of the space and the centre of the story, in the way other media cannot. The team started by thinking about how little we needed need to build, since guests can fill in the blanks with imagination. We decided early to focus the cost of animatronics on just the tail and the head of the brontosaurus, putting the guest right under the swishing tail. But appreciating that our guests will already know the form of the brontosaurus. Framing Content as Storytelling In the developed concept, guests are welcomed to an active Base Camp outfitted with a field lab for training in the skills required for what they think will be an archeological expedition. Once outfitted and trained, guests are taken in groups – surprise ! – back in time to encounter living dinosaurs. Sounds, smells, movement, and touch heighten the experience. Different group encounter different dinosaurs. Some visits take place at night with a starry sky projected above and flashlights and lamps lighting the way through the expedition. Cultivating curiosity Science centres have immense advantage in their ability to cultivate curiosity. Because we deliver experiences that are social rather than individual, are large rather than small, are three-dimensional rather than screen-based, experience design delivers ‘big wow’ moments that are not easily ignored. And do foster curiosity. Science content is important. But strategically, as experience designers, what we are really focus on is furthering curiosity more so than communicating content. Call to Action What’s the biggest resource in our experience design tool kit? Is it the latest technology, borrowing animatronics for the theme park sector? or design innovations? No. No the biggest resource we have is the intelligence of our guests, their imagination, their discernment. Think of guests – young and old – as partners in the creation of an experience. The locus of a great experience is not actually the gallery; it is in the hearts and minds of the guests. That’s where the curiosity is unleashed, that is where the memories are forged, that is where misinformation is combated.