Helping visitors practice new observational and exploratory skills is the way to go. It’s all about setting up the visitor for success at guided discovery.
Read morePart 1: A Slice of Guide on the Side
photo credit: Bill Reynolds
Sparking Innovative Ideas
Time to adapt smart practices from the business communication world to the leisure interpretive design world! Reading outside one’s field can be an idea booster and is fertile ground for crossover potential. Let’s apply our interpretive lenses to the Fast Company journalistic content.
Read moreNeed a Challenging Perspective?
Need a Challenging Perspective? Haven’t had your boat rocked enough lately? We have a book guaranteed to do this and is the motivation for EID’s mission, principles and coaching outcomes. It reimagines the interpretive role to incorporate hosting, inviting, and motivating visitors to explore their special heritage places, become storymakers and uncover universal cultural and natural processes.
Read moreWhat’s ESSENCEtial?
In the blog, Operation: Success Critical we began exploring the EID principle - to clarify your site’s reason for being - by looking at the importance of defining your site’s distinguishing characteristics. We provided a series of questions for your team to grapple with. We left off on a marketing note of brand values and differentiation – concepts the interpretive profession doesn’t always embrace. We need to. Along with determining the essence of the collection or site.
Read moreExcommunication by Font
We wish you a Happy New Year and hope you have a joyous and fruitful 2018. Thanks for the comments and emails you sent us in 2017. Two of the emails were quite direct and are worth sharing. The first comment took us to task for the font on Bill’s email, but it made us think about the use of the words “Interpretive Design.” The second comment, by Jon Kohl, was full of constructive commentary and asked what we had to offer in the field of interpretation.
Read moreOperation : Success Critical
Differentiate or die! During the day-to-day reality of competing for your visitor’s time, you need to determine your niche to stand out in the leisure marketplace. We’ll explore the how and why to resolve one’s identity crisis.
Read moreWhat We Want Is A Seat At The Table
And so it begins…Bill Reynolds of Canada, Lars Wohler of Germany, and myself, Mike Mayer of the USA start an adventure working with big and small museums, parks, zoos, historic sites, aquariums and other such sites. Sites that we in Experiential Interpretive Design (EID) call preservation, collection and historic recognition sites. We deeply love these places in all their many aberrations and are profoundly concerned they might lose their relevance.
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