February 2024 to Guillermo Fernández
From Beverly Serrell, Chicago, Illinois, USA baserrell@gmail.com serrellassociates.com
Author of Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, Third Edition (2024)
My favorite chapter is Future Challenges because it sums up a lot of what Guillermo’s main ideas are. While he doesn’t use the terms “big idea” or “prototyping”, he strongly recommends being focused and doing evaluation. In this way, our ideas agree and overlap nicely.
Guillermo’s emphasis on the object and phenomena as core importance and uniqueness to museum exhibits is also in common to our emphasis in Exhibit Labels on «start with what you can see/experience» in interpretive labels.
When he says there is a need for «deeper development of innovative resources to optimize the visit to a museum exhibition… and a detailed analysis of the complex dynamics of the visit as a process… and room to study and apply systems aimed at further optimizing the effectiveness of the visit…» I think he means Orientation. This is one of the ideas that also gets lost in the discussions of the museum visitors’ experience overall.
The Museographic Language book is very valuable and I hope it gets shared widely in North America.