It's a conversation, not a service

We're getting ready to launch our Arctic Questions (poor name I know, but what can I say, working title becomes title) exhibit and I'm starting to field a lot of questions about it.

A partner recently asked me about Questions exhibit, which is basically a message board or forum that is on the exhibit floor, presented beautifully and linked to the web and iphone.

It's a neat implementation of some pretty standard technology, but as far as I know, no one has really done it this way in a gallery before.

Anyway, this partner asked me whether or not someone from the Aquarium would be on this board to answer the questions. The answer is "sort of". But the real thing is the way in which this person was looking at this exhibit. They were looking at it as a service. The Aquarium would provide a service for answering questions. And that's not really true. The Aquarium would provide a platform. A place where, if all goes well, discussions happen and these discussions answer questions, solve problems, or serve as a steam release system.

So my take away was that I didn't just have to explain that the crowd was going to answer questions, I had to explain the underlying concept and change the POV that our exhibit was a service.