Exhibition making: creating an interpretive feast
Murphy Peoples, Exhibition Experience Developer, Te Papa
Murphy Peoples selfie, on the waterfront outside Te Papa
Murphy Peoples is an Exhibition Experience Developer in the museum sector. For the last five years they have been working at Te Papa and previously worked in museums and science centres in the Australian cities Melbourne and Canberra. Murphy joined the INNZ committee in 2025.
Experience Developer is a role that seems to exist only in large, multidisciplinary organisations (well, that’s where I’ve come across them!). It goes by many names so it can be hard to find others that do the same thing in the industry. I’ve come across Interpreters, Interpretive Planners, Content Developers, Concept Developers whose work is aligned with my own.
Interpretive planning in exhibition making
If I paraphrase my job description, I would that that I play a lead audience-centric role in developing multifaceted, multimedia experiences that inspire learning, drawing on my understanding of audience motivations and needs (using psychographic and demographic research) in the museum context.
In large-scale exhibition projects I hold creative (rather than scholarly) content oversight, and provide audience advocacy, creative concept development, and quality assurance.
I prepare concept documentation and briefs, and support knowledge holders, community members, and subject matter experts to make their stories come to life for our visitors.
Beyond jargon, what does this mean in practical terms?
When I first came to exhibition making, the metaphor I was told that really stuck with me is:
'Creating an exhibition is creating a feast for our guests, rather than our favourite meal for ourselves.'
So, let’s make an interpretive feast!
Inviting people to the feast: Target audiences
Who is coming to the feast? And what are their dietary requirements?
Being a role that is focused on audience-centric experience development, the first questions I will ask a person with an exhibition/experience concept are: Who is this for? and What do you want them to get out of it?
The answer to these questions allows us to begin to define some measurable audience outcomes, or goals (i.e. what we want them to get out of it). There is great power in being able to communicate your audience aspirations when describing your concept. It gives the flavour of tone and approach, and helps others understand your vision.
Hearing directly from your target audience in response to your early conceptual thinking is a great way to test your goals. This is also a nice reality check when you don’t have close contact with your target audience regularly and are very close to the content! For this reason, I’m a huge fan of holding focus groups. As an Experience Developer I facilitate these, often in partnership with our in-house audience research team.
These sessions are very insightful and can be a crucial pivot point that guides and shapes an exhibition concept. For example, when working on an exhibition about the interplay between gut health and our brains, focus group participants kept asking about how the content and data we wanted to include related to themselves, where things were in their body, what is means for them and their life, and what they should do with the information. This turned the whole exhibition concept to be centred on the visitor, inviting them at the entry to walk the length of their gut, speaking directly to them in the text, and literally mapping things onto their bodies via digital interactives.
A feast of gut healthy food! For the ‘Gut Feelings’ exhibition at Melbourne Museum, focus groups showed us that we needed place the whole experience in terms of speaking directly to the visitor. Image: Murphy Peoples
Brainstorming the menu: Concept ideation
Now that we have our invite list, let’s create the ultimate menu that our invitees will enjoy!
I facilitate and lead ideation workshops, mostly using Design Thinking methodology to ensure we remain audience-centric. Even though the milestones for exhibition projects are (usually) the same, the route to get there is different for every project. The style of ideation and working shopping needs to be responsive and flexible (although they almost always use sticky notes).
I once kept my sticky notes for a year (before recycling them). Image: Murphy Peoples
For example, if we’ve set ourselves up well in terms of target audience and outcomes, there is a sole knowledge holder or expert, and some fairly straightforward content, three days of workshopping and discussion with the right project team (e.g. could include a spatial designer, digital producer, and project manager) can land a fairly solid concept to take forward.
Something more complex involving multiple knowledge holders (or disciplines) or with people who have not made exhibitions before, and/or in collaboration with community, and/or for a target audience who the venue does not always attract, ideation must fairly be given more time, involve different types of brainstorming activities, and include deeper conversations.
Checking the menu: Interpretive planning
Have we covered everyone’s needs across the whole menu? Did we get carried away with desserts and forget to offer a chicken dish?
Something I’ve found incredibly useful on complex exhibitions is the use of an interpretive plan or interpretive schedule. This is a live document that maps content and taonga/objects with experience type (e.g. digital interactive, text panel, hands on model), senses involved, and goals for each experience/exhibit of what the visitor should think, feel, do (and sometimes ‘do next’). We might even go as detailed as audience demographics or psychographics (like the Morris Hargreaves McIntyre Culture Segments) where these change and flex across an exhibition.
The reason I love this tool so much is it gives you a great snapshot of how varied the experience is across the whole exhibition – e.g. Have we got a lot of reading in one area that could be broken up with something hands on? Have we created a whole lot of experiences aimed at adults, even though our target audience is intergenerational whānau/families?
An interpretive plan that maps our visitor ‘think, feel, do’ goals also really nails down the communication objectives for each single experience, exhibit, or display case. This is so important to see how a narrative is playing across the whole exhibition, but also crucial when it comes to briefing in others, whether it is spatial design, graphic design, writers, digital producers, or specialised contractors.
Providing silver service at the feast: Stepping back and watching visitors enjoy
Good service during a feast should mean that everything goes smoothly. Food is plentiful, your drinks are refilled without needing to ask, you have the cutlery you need, and the saltshaker is in reach. Your service should be undetectable, almost invisible, to the guests.
When you have a job in exhibition creation that isn’t overtly connected to a visible outcome it can be hard to easily say what exactly you did (i.e. I didn’t design or build anything).
Working in exhibition interpretation is about supporting knowledge holders and a project team to work towards common goals that stem from audience needs and then delivering on these. The end product is one that your target audience enjoys, that achieves your outcomes, and this is reflected in evaluation and feedback.
There is nothing more pleasurable that sitting in an exhibition you helped create, watching a visitor use a particular exhibit in exactly the way you planned and overhear them saying to others the things you hoped they would.
I guess my cheeky way of describing what I do is to say that I ensure we make exhibitions for our visitors, and not for ourselves. And ultimately, I enjoy watching our visitors feast!
Me bursting out of a cake at the 2018 ‘Sugar Republic’ experience in Melbourne. Image: Murphy Peoples
