Recap KBDA Tour

From our AIGA Faculty Advisor, Shirin Raban:

"First and foremost, I'd like to thank Allison Bloss and Elizabeth Salud from KBDA for putting together such a wonderful presentation and studio tour for “Age of Mammals” at the Natural History Museum in Downtown L.A.

(See the photos on our Facebook page, with thanks to Jared Millar.)

We had the opportunity to get a first-hand understanding of the exhibition design process, including the details and innovations that were involved. This exhibition is a multi-facetted approach to not only telling us about the past but also moving us into the future.

Simon Adlam, director of Exhibit Production at the Natural History Museum was very gracious and took the time to go over the details of the visuals in the exhibit as well as the design process. The audience for this exhibit is very diverse; therefore they had to go over much iteration to ensure the easy accessibility of the information to general public.

The floor plan is very interesting and innovative in that it utilized the natural light from the windows in conjunction with spotlights to strategically highlight particular sections. The start and end is left up to the guest to choose. The director explained, “We have used a very democratic communication here to involve the audience at many levels. This project was based on the entertainment model in that we took huge risks in working in an entrepreneurial manner. Our success in working with KBDA in creating a cohesive brand is going to extend to other sections of the museum as well.”

Allison and Elizabeth explained to us the process of design. The most exciting part was that KBDA was involved in the whole process starting with strategy generation and moving into design and production implementation. They used a variety of mediums in conjunction with exhibit materials, such as wall graphics and illustrations; freestanding explanations and a very intuitive touch screen online catalog.

We learned much about teamwork, forgetting of egos and focusing on the end result and also understanding about the many aspects of design that work hand in hand in exhibition presentations."