This past Spring Semester, students in the FIT Graduate Exhibition & Experience Design program worked in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History (New York).
The highly experiential exhibition OurSenses delves into how our brains work with sensory organs to shape our perceptions. The goal of the exhibition was to explain these concepts in a fun and engaging way that a wide range of people could easily understand. The gallery space was transformed into a winding series of individual rooms, providing 10 different gallery spaces to design.
Sketching is always my first impulse, writing a distant second. Sketching is a means of thinking visually—on the page—and thoughts are generated as I watch a sketch unfold. The first mark is defining, raising many new opportunities for making the next mark, and new possibilities materialize while others fall by the wayside. The drawing process is a conversation between my imagination and the page, mediated by my hand, and that dialogue challenges me to respond.
The future is now! Environmental graphic designers are currently incorporating mobile web and media in projects from urban wayfinding to museums to institutions. This course will focus on how designers can incorporate mobile media into their projects including pricing, planning, designing, and managing implementation.
2012 Insight Award Honoree; Senior Vice President of Exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History
David Harvey is an interpretive exhibition designer whose passion is creating compelling museum experiences for the public. As SVP of Exhibition, directing a team of more than 60, his most recent exhibitions at AMNH include Poison, Pterosaurs, Creatures of Light, Brain: The Inside Story, Traveling the Silk Road, and Mythic Creatures.
Holmes Wood (London) has been appointed to work on the new Visitor Mapping Strategy for the American Museum of Natural History in New York. This is the design firm’s first project for a major American museum.
In this comprehensive exhibition, natural specimens paired with cultural objects offer visitors a global view of the many aspects of pearls, the mollusks that produce them, and the cultures that have long prized them. Circular alcoves, grouped around a central core, each explore a particular theme, such as marine pearls or pearls in history. Visitors can move from the center in any direction to build information, layer by layer, like the form of a pearl itself.
The goal of this exhibition is simple yet incredibly ambitious: to give visitors a sense of Einstein's revolutionary ideas. Einstein described phenomena – travel close to the speed of light, time as the fourth dimension – that cannot be represented accurately as three-dimensional exhibit elements. These concepts, however, can be explained through text, graphics, and media. Typography, color, and line drawings link and harmonize different sections.