Bakken Museum Exhibition Experiential Plan

Museum exhibitions are the primary on-site method for museums to deliver their missions, drive attendance, and foster growth and change both for our audiences and ourselves. The first step in developing a new interactive exhibit is an experiential plan. The process of developing an experiential plan creates clarity and internal agreement within the museum about why a museum may pursue particular topics or approaches for exhibitions and what are the expected outcomes. This process helps to ensure that we are aligned, and that our planned exhibitions meet our organizational and strategic goals.

An exhibition experiential plan is a planning tool used to map the course for the museum's exhibitions over the next 5-10 years, and is a necessary step in the creation of interactive exhibits. It is a broad, strategic plan that helps to ensure that exhibitions are aligned with the purpose of the museum,fit within the capacity of the museum to support,are relevant to audiences,take best advantage of the museum's collection, facility, and grounds,and are developed with the input of the museum's staff, community, and stakeholders. An exhibition experiential plan considers the museum's mission and values, community and visitor needs, organizational resources, and attendance-related revenue goals. An experiential plan presents both physical and interpretive solutions to describe the best use of space and other resources to create optimal exhibitions and experiences for both visitors to the museum and the staff that support them. They also provide rough budget estimates and design renderings, important tools to move the next stage of the development for each exhibition described in the plan. The experiential plan is an essential component of developing, and then implementing, the next phase of interactive exhibits at the Museum.

The Bakken Museum proposes to use FY24/25 ACHF grant to hire a firm to work closely with staff to develop the museum's experiential plan, the first step in creating interactive exhibits. This plan (described in more detail in the responses below) will be the roadmap for the museum's exhibition program and will guide the planning, design, and implementation of new exhibitions as well as updates to current exhibitions. As with other strategic processes, the planning will be as important as the final plan.

The Bakken Museum intends to follow a community informed design model of community engagement for the development of the experiential plan. To describe this approach, we turn to a leader in this space:

It is imperative for our museums to change in service to being more inclusive of the constantly diversifying communities who live, work, and play in proximity to us. We conceptualize Community Informed Design as an approach through which we bring together authentic community engagement practices and design processes to iteratively design and develop more inclusive museum experiences. The approach falls somewhere between consulting and co-creation, in that it involves more than talking to an expert/community member once yet involves less than the shared ownership co-creation requires. Articulating this middle space is necessary as a pragmatic response to the limited resources museums provide themselves for engaging community members in design processes and addresses the need for sustainable methods of long term, meaningful community engagement. Finally, it also clearly recognizes that museum staff have active roles to play in the development of more inclusive museum experiences. By engaging collaboratively in multiple cycles of listen, summarize, plan, and try, we are able to look and listen to find our gaps, engage respectfully with the groups whose voices and experiences are missing and ultimately set the table for a wider diversity of perspectives that we need through which to change ourselves.' (Schriber, Goeke, & Bequette, 2022)

The community informed design model does not look at the engagement specific to a single project or timeframe, but rather is suited to a broad planning project that is implemented over the course of many projects over multiple years. This model allows for turnover in participation of both the staff and community members, works when funding comes from multiple sources, and adjusts as goals shift as the work progresses and learnings from previous efforts are applied to current projects.