By: Stephen Wisniewski

Collaborations between small, often under-resourced, children’s museums and much larger institutions can often challenge the way we think about resources, practices, and about what and who we value, both in terms of institutions and audience. One major gulf in experience that I noticed was our understanding of immersion, a key concept in children’s museums that reflects our values and assumptions.

“Immersion” is, in many ways, taken for granted as the goal of an exhibit experience. The term seems to permeate both the internal and public-facing language of institutions, as well as promotional pitches for every designer and product aimed at children’s museums. Of course, “immersion” can have a variety of meanings, but one could argue that, more often than not, it means resources—and lots of them.

Because of its ubiquity, and its squishy but commonly understood meaning, the concept of “immersion” can offer a window on multiple important discussions in the children’s museum field: it can be an illustration of the many ways that resources are structurally inaccessible to small museums; it can illuminate the ways we exemplify larger museums as a standard for all institutions; and it can be a practical challenge and an opportunity to inspire engagement no matter what resources you happen to have access to.

This came up frequently as I designed exhibits with colleagues from large museums: full structures, walls, complex narratives, electronic screens, predetermined visitor paths, sounds, and smells were all proposed as elements that could produce immersion. Of course, all of those things can be powerful elements of an exhibit experience, but they also require significant resources to envision, implement, and maintain. It also always helps to have high ceilings and nice, big doors. From the unspoken need for an empty, dedicated gallery space to house an environment to staff, maintenance, and material resources, this immersive ideal is realistically only available to a very limited number of institutions. Structural barriers, as well as unspoken assumptions about what achieving “immersion” might look like, often serve to functionally exclude small and under-resourced museums from conversations about impactful, high-quality exhibits. This is just one of the ways our field can forget about resource disparities.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that small museums can’t and don’t already do innovative, engaging, and immersive exhibits on par with the most expensive traveling experiences. It just means we do them differently.

One of the most unexpected successes of the FFACES exhibits was an element that seemed almost too simple to be noticed: a small, freestanding wooden bridge with a slight arch in the middle and a graphic koi pond underneath. It didn’t do anything, and it wasn’t necessarily part of any larger built environment, but every visitor under five years old seemed to gravitate to it, and often stayed there. This, to me, is an example of a small museum approach in practice. This simple element actually re-centers the exhibit experience on children, instead of competing with adult sensory preferences and perceptions of value. We found that children were compelled by the suggestion of a larger world outside of the bridge: how do we re-center the experience on allowing children to imaginatively fill in those spaces rather than on a resource-intensive built environment? The bridge can physically exist in any museum space, no matter how small or temporary, but the experience remains powerful for children and accessible for small museums.

It might seem obvious, but also bears remembering: children are small. It doesn’t always take a lot to nudge their perspective into new and exciting territory, or immerse them in an experience, no matter how mundane that experience might seem to an adult. Sometimes, it just takes a walk from point A to point B with a tiny hill in the middle, or a unique textural experience, or the invitation to fill a blank canvas. Remembering that fact as adults and as designers—and valuing it as highly as multi-million-dollar environments, without considering it a compromise—can be very difficult. But I believe that embracing those immersive possibilities can produce better exhibits, as well as expand what kind of institutions and experiences we value as a field.