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WHAT MUSEUMS CAN LEARN FROM THEME PARKS IN THE ART OF INTERACTIVE, IMMERSIVE ENTERTAINMENT
by Keith Miller
At the College Park Aviation Museum in Maryland, an animatronic Wilbur Wright comes alive to explain the principles of flight to onlookers. At the California Science Center in Los Angeles, a replicated earthquake rattles underneath guests’ shaking legs. At the Heineken Experience museum in Amsterdam, visitors become beer as they are “brewed, bottled, and shipped” in a simulator.
These things are happening at museums? What happened to the old artifact-in-a-display-case method? Well, the tourism landscape is rapidly changing, as potential visitors now have many more options for their leisure time. As a result, many museums and science centers have adapted by providing increasingly immersive experiences that rival what used to typically be reserved only for theme parks.
“Back in the 1930s, if a family had time to do something together, they could sit home and listen to the radio, or go to a black-and-white movie, or what else?” asks Bob Rogers, founder and chairman of BRC Imagination Arts in Burbank, California, which has done extensive design work for museums like the Abraham Lincoln Museum in Springfield, Missouri, and the new Heineken Experience. “Well, they could go to a museum. But now, look at all of the other options people have!”
However, it’s not just a matter of guests having more choices—they also expect more. “People are much more tech savvy and more intuitive, and they’re looking for a similar level of activity and interaction at a museum as they experience on the Internet or when playing a Wii,” explains Jim Levesque, president of LEC Worldwide in Long Beach, California, which provided master planning and exhibit design to the new Science Discovery Center in Manila, Philippines.
“Unless you’re showing an audience an artifact that is incredibly interesting and overwhelming, you have to fully engage them before your message can even get across,” adds Phil Lindsey, vice president of exhibits and business development at The Health Museum of Houston, who sees these interactive and entertainment elements as crucial. “A series of static items without context won’t engage people anymore.”
 It is this reality that’s so crucial, according to Rogers: “The earmark of a 20th-century museum is a collection of stuff with labels. But if you don’t know the history of those objects, then there’s nothing there for you. So museums that ‘get it’ understand that the story associated with the objects is where their place is. The significance of objects has to be explained so they become messengers.”
The Discovery Museum and Planetarium in Bridgeport, Connecticut, was one of the first museums to come to this realization, and changed its approach accordingly. “Our audience grew up with interactive everything,” says Linda Malkin, the museum’s executive director. “So when they go to museums, they’re looking for interaction; even schools are becoming more interactive and entertaining. When we switched to an interactive model in the early ’90s, it was unusual then, but it’s becoming more common now.”
Initially, Malkin says her museum featured hands-off art galleries and hands-on science galleries. However, the handson exhibits became so popular, the museum decided to narrow its focus and make those its specialty.
Why Museums Hesitate
Despite these aforementioned success stories, many museums are reluctant to incorporate interactivity and entertainment into their exhibitions. “There may be institutions with significant collections that want to be seen as more serious,” notes Malkin, “and for them, this change can be uncomfortable. But if people aren’t paying attention to what you’re doing, then you’re not accomplishing anything, so the museum has to be marketable.”
 Ruth Rentschler, director of the Arts and Entertainment Management Program at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia, and author of the book “Museum Marketing: Competing in the Global Marketplace,” has spent a lot of time researching the dynamics of making museums more marketable. “In interviews I’ve been doing, one curator said to me, ‘We don’t believe all that marketing stuff,’ while the marketing director told me that it took five years for her to be able to mention the word ‘brand’ in her marketing strategy for the museum. So both ‘marketing’ and ‘money’ have been dirty words in museums for some time. That’s changing, but tensions remain [between curators and marketing managers]. Incorporating exhibitions that are entertaining or interactive may sometimes be part of that tension.”
 Rentschler says some museums are making interactivity and entertainment work for them. “They use modern technology to engage children and adults,” she notes, “or they use modern themes that capture the imagination on topical issues.”
Though BRC’s Rogers is a proponent of museums integrating more interactivity into their displays, he sounds a note of caution: “They cannot abandon their educational mission to attract people, and they must not lie to become entertaining—they must get the history and the science right.”
Lindsey agrees: “Audiences aren’t dumb, and they expect a museum to be museum like. Don’t let the technologies drive what you’re doing; let the content of what you’re doing and the design accomplish that, and use the technology as a tool.”
Highly Interactive Without High Cost
For museums on a tight budget, technology can seemingly carry a high price. “I think some of their hesitation is a fear of the cost involved,” observes Levesque. “When they look at theme parks, they know the cost of those attractions. There’s probably a lot of confusion on their part of what they can achieve.
 “We work within a [museum’s] budget guidelines,” he says, “and part of what we did for the Manila Science Discovery Center was to use already-existing technologies and make them very interactive. It allows the science to be presented in an entertaining way for thousands of dollars, not millions.” (For example: Levesque uses special effects lighting on walls and floors instead of spending money to create new facades.)
Sally Corporation in Jacksonville, Florida, created “Body Battles” at the Adventure Science Center in Nashville, Tennessee, in which guests “battle it out” with lasers to save the body from disease. John Wood, Sally’s chairman and CEO, notes “Body Battles” was created from Sally’s interactive dark rides and says there’s enormous potential for such exhibits. “But museums have to pay attention to their guests and understand what those people want,” he says. “Every time we put an animatronic figure in a museum, it becomes one of their iconic displays.”
We can’t afford for museums to fail at this, according to Rogers: “What museums deliver to the public is too important to take a chance of being ignored. What are we doing even taking the chance of things like science being boring to our kids?”
FUNWORLD News Editor Keith Miller can be reached at kmiller@IAAPA.org.
‘Planet You 3-D’
 In July, The Health Museum of Houston opened “Planet You 3- D” in the museum’s 122-seat McGovern Theater, the only 4-D theater in Houston. “‘Planet You’ is about all of the little critters that live on you,” says Health’s Phil Lindsey.
The show was actually produced in-house by the museum. “We wanted to have the right tool for the right job, something creative, but with science that is solid,” Lindsey says, “so we decided to produce our own show. It provides us an avenue to show more science content in a new and fun way.”
He says “Planet You 3-D” works in both 3-D and 4-D theaters so museums with the more common 3-D platform could show it; the museum plans more such productions in the future. Lindsey notes, “One of the things we’re focusing on with these movies is trying to prove to our brethren—in the science museum community, in particular—that science doesn’t have to be boring.” www.mhms.org
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Heineken Experience: Brewing Up a Delicious Museum
 The recently opened Heineken Experience at the Heineken brewery in Amsterdam is a great example of an old museum that got a shot of much needed excitement that changed the entire operation. “It was missing one big thing before— you never saw beer being brewed and it wasn’t explained,” says Bob Rogers of BRC Imagination Arts, whose firm redesigned the 65,600-squarefoot museum in 2008. “Now, people actually see the beer being brewed, they can touch and taste the ingredients, they talk to a brew master, and then they go to the simulator.”
In the simulator theater, brewing is explained through special effects like heat, water sprays, and bubbles to make guests feel as if they are being brewed, bottled, and shipped. They then proceed to a beer-tasting bar where, as at a wine tasting, the finer elements of the drink’s taste are explained by bartenders as guests imbibe.
“We’ve been getting nothing but positive reactions,” says Hans Maris, manager of the Heineken Experience. “People keep saying they had no idea the museum would be like this. This experience also makes it more fun for the staff, which makes them better for the guests to [interact] with.”
IAAPA’s Euro Attractions Show, Sept. 30-Oct. 2, 2009, will be held in Amsterdam, and the Heineken Experience will be one of the show’s featured venues for education events, a tour, and the Thursday night networking event. Visit www.IAAPA.org/eas for details.
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What Museums See in IAAPA
 BRC’s Bob Rogers says he has the answer to the question on the minds of many museum operators: “They want to know, with all of these incredible choices people have in their leisure time, what do they have to do to get people to come, and where do they learn how to do it? IAAPA. IAAPA is about storytelling and putting it to use in attracting people; and it can all be done in ways that work for museums.”
Rogers says a growing number of museum professionals are coming to IAAPA to “raid” the idea inventory and see how they can transform it into something they can use. “Take Ripley’s, for example,” he explains. “Their gallery designs are really good. Museums don’t have to pay attention to their scholarship, but rather, to the ways in which the displays themselves are presented.”
IAAPA Attractions Expo is an ideal place for museums to go exploring, according to Phil Lindsey, vice president of exhibits and business development at The Health Museum of Houston. “Absolutely, if for no other reason than exposure to ideas,” he says. “There’s an entire guest-service, revenue-management, retail, food-service aspect of being a museum that goes above and beyond the content creation, and for which IAAPA provides value—a lot more tools and input than is available at museum conferences. We sometimes focus so much on the content, we forget we are an attraction.”
For more on what IAAPA Attractions Expo 2009 has to offer museum professionals this year in Las Vegas.
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