A summary of the full arc from planning through maintenance, with a master checklist for museum teams and exhibition designers. The process is the same at 00K and at 0M — scale changes the effort, not the steps.
Over more than twenty-five years and forty museums, the process described in this series has proven to be consistent regardless of museum type, budget, geography, or subject matter. What changes is the scale of effort at each phase — a 500 square foot gallery refresh and a 20,000 square foot permanent exhibition follow the same steps, but the planning phase for the larger project takes months rather than days.
The most common failure mode in exhibition design is not a lack of creative talent or technical skill — it is a lack of process discipline. Skipping the project charter because the team knows each other well. Advancing to schematic design before the visitor objectives are written down. Beginning fabrication before design development is complete. Each shortcut saves days in the near term and costs weeks or months in rework.
The six phases described in this series are not bureaucratic overhead. They are the accumulated logic of what must happen before the next thing can happen correctly.
Each phase produces a set of documents and decisions that authorize the next phase to begin. No phase begins without the completion and approval of the phase before it.
Visitor profile, visitor objectives, project charter, numbering system, space survey, budget, schedule, ADA plan. The authorization to begin design comes from client sign-off on the project charter.
Exhibition script, spatial chunking, field research, style boards, conceptual design, schematic design, design development drawings, draft label copy. Three formal review milestones: conceptual, schematic, and design development approvals.
Working drawings, fabricator selection, shop drawing review, fabrication oversight, quality control reviews, pre-ship review, crating documentation. Exhibits leave the fabrication facility only after passing the pre-ship review.
Load in plan, delivery verification, installation sequence, stakeholder walk-throughs, punch list, soft opening. The public opening follows completion of all punch list items and the soft opening review.
Maintenance manual, as-built drawings, staff training, spare parts inventory, content update schedule, summative evaluation. An exhibition without a maintenance plan degrades from opening day.
Use this checklist at the beginning of each phase to confirm that all prerequisites from the previous phase are complete before proceeding. Checking a box is not a formality — it is confirmation that the work exists and has been approved.
The exhibition design process described in this series can be managed entirely by an experienced in-house team for institutions that have the staff capacity and project management depth. For institutions that do not — or for projects that exceed the scale or complexity of in-house experience — an exhibition design consultant provides the process discipline, design expertise, and vendor relationships that compress timelines and reduce risk.
What distinguishes an effective exhibition design consultant from an ineffective one is not design talent — it is the ability to manage the full process from planning through maintenance, to coordinate multiple vendors across a single timeline, and to keep the museum's visitor objectives at the center of every decision regardless of the pressures of budget, schedule, or stakeholder preference.
Museum Planning LLC has applied this process to more than forty museums over twenty-five years. The plans produced are designed to be built, not filed.
If your institution is planning a new exhibition — or evaluating an existing one — contact Mark Walhimer at Museum Planning LLC. mark@museumplanning.com · 415-794-5252 · museumplanning.com