The second phase of exhibition design creates the documents that communicate the story of the exhibition — in words first, then in space, then in drawings that a fabricator can build from.
Design is the phase most people picture when they think about exhibition work — the drawings, the renders, the style boards. But design without planning is guessing. The documents produced in this phase derive their authority from the objectives, visitor profile, and constraints established in Phase I.
The design phase moves through three distinct sub-phases: conceptual design, schematic design, and design development. Each produces a progressively more detailed set of documents, and each requires formal client review and approval before advancing. Skipping a review is how projects end up rebuilding finished exhibits on the installation floor.
The exhibition script answers one question: what is the story of this exhibition? It describes how the artifacts, artwork, or interactive elements act as characters in a narrative — what role each plays, how they relate to one another, and what the visitor should understand after experiencing the whole.
If you imagine the objects in the exhibition as characters in a play, the script describes their roles and the arc of the story. A natural history exhibition's script might organize fossils chronologically to tell an evolutionary story. A contemporary art exhibition's script might juxtapose works to create a tension that visitors resolve through their own interpretation.
The script is a written document, not drawings. It should be possible to read the exhibition script and understand the complete visitor experience without a single image. This discipline ensures that the story is coherent before spatial decisions make it expensive to change.
The exhibition script is not the same as label copy or panel text. The script describes the story arc and the role of each element. Label text is what visitors read on the wall. Both derive from the same story — but the script comes first and the labels come much later, typically in design development.
With the script in hand and a site survey of the exhibition space completed, the next step is to "chunk out" the space — to determine where each part of the story will be told. Use the script as a guide to create larger spatial zones for the more important or central areas of the exhibition, and smaller zones for supporting content.
The chunking process is the first moment when narrative becomes spatial. Each chunk should correspond to a discrete section of the script, have a clear entry and exit, and be legible as a distinct environment to a visitor who has not read any labels.
Each chunk of the floor plan should correspond to a section of the exhibition script. Draw the zones freehand first — proportion matters more than precision at this stage. Label each zone with its script section name.
The most important content in the script should occupy the largest and most prominent zones. Entry zones must orient visitors quickly. The climax of the narrative — if there is one — should occupy a spatially distinctive position.
For each zone, write a brief description of how it should "look and feel." These qualitative descriptions are the foundation for the style boards created in conceptual design. They also give the client a vocabulary for feedback that is more useful than "I like it" or "I don't like it."
Create a Venn diagram of the visitor path and the content. Where paths overlap, visitors will experience content from multiple story sections simultaneously — this can be intentional (layered narrative) or a problem (confusion). Identify and resolve conflicts at this stage.
Go on field trips. Visit places similar to the environments, time periods, or subjects the exhibition will represent. Document thoroughly — video, photographs, measurements, material samples, notes on light quality, acoustic character, and spatial scale.
For the Children's Museum of Indianapolis exhibition Take Me There: Egypt, the project team traveled to Egypt to visit the sites represented in the exhibition. They took measurements, photographs, and video at scale — documenting details that could not have been approximated from reference books or stock photography.
Field research also includes investigating new technologies and techniques. Are there interactive modalities, projection technologies, or material systems that have emerged since the last project? Field research is the phase where those questions are answered with evidence, not assumption.
Conceptual design is the phase where zones become environments and qualitative descriptions become visual directions. The deliverables of conceptual design are photo pages, style boards, and a revised Venn diagram of the visitor path.
Collect and assemble reference photographs that represent the visual direction for each zone of the exhibition. Photo pages are not mood boards — every image should be selected because it illustrates a specific design intention: a material, a spatial quality, a lighting condition, a color relationship.
A style board is a visual collage representation of the new exhibition — or of a specific zone within it. It combines the photo pages into a synthesized vision that communicates the overall sensory direction to the client. Style boards are the primary communication tool for client review at the conceptual stage.
Write a narrative walk-through of the exhibition from the visitor's perspective. Describe what the visitor sees, hears, smells, and touches as they move through each zone. This document bridges the script (story) and the drawings (space) — and it is the most useful document for identifying gaps in the narrative before committing to drawings.
Present photo pages, style boards, and the Venn diagram to the client. Record feedback in writing and confirm approval before proceeding. This is a formal milestone — not a casual conversation.
Schematic design translates the approved conceptual direction into drawings. The schematic design package assembles general museum information, exhibition objectives, the walk-through narrative, budget, schedule, schematic drawings, the exhibition narrative, the Venn diagram, and the style boards into a single presentation.
Schematic drawings are not construction documents — they communicate intent, scale, and relationship. They should be detailed enough to allow a cost estimate and specific enough to confirm that the design direction approved in conceptual design is being executed as understood.
Schematic design typically represents 40 to 320 hours of effort, depending on exhibition square footage — roughly ,000 to 0,000 in design fees. This range is wide because the process for a 500 sq ft gallery and a 20,000 sq ft permanent exhibition are genuinely different in scale, not just length.
Design development takes the approved schematic design and produces the section and elevation drawings of exhibits in the space. It is the phase where exhibit components are described in enough detail to begin soliciting fabrication bids — dimensions, materials, interactive mechanisms, AV specifications, and graphic content areas are all defined.
Content research is compiled into draft text during this phase. Descriptions of each exhibit and its interactives are written, reviewed with curators and content specialists, and incorporated into the drawing set. By the end of design development, the exhibition exists completely on paper — and the team should be able to build it from those documents without the designer present.
The script is a written document, not drawings. It should be possible to read the exhibition script and understand the complete visitor experience without a single image.
Mark Walhimer · Museum Planning LLC