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| beautifully. There are intriguing illustrative objects to look at. But one does not come away from it with any particular new feeling about the subject, and not even with much detail that one remembers. It is just an elaborate reinforcement of something that one really knew already but that is retold in a very picturesque way. Allowing for the possibilities for exploring does not mean that a museum has to be disorganized either physically or conceptually. It does, however, mean that there has to be a lot which people can readily miss, so that discovery becomes something of a surprise, a triumph, not so much of personal achievement as of personal satisfaction. It is the kind of satisfaction that invariably leads me to tell someone about the experience. Opportunities for discovery do not require the kind of interactive experiments that we have in the Exploratorium, They can also derive from very static exhibits. I admire the dioramas in the Denver Museum of Natural History so very much. I keep finding new things in them - a lizard here or an arrowhead there or a high-altitude heliotrope hidden behind some grass. In a recent visit there, the people around me were constantly pointing out to each other, "Oh, look! Over there behind that rock." The dioramas re-produce the sense of discovery that occurs when one is really out in the woods or wandering around in the high country. Of course, a particularly fine thing for me about those Colorado dioramas is that they represent something familiar to me. I had been in that kind of country. This effect is a quite general one: I have become ever more aware that the exhibits which mean the most to our visitors are those that they can connect with their past experience. But such connections are difficult to establish since each visitor has had a very different range of experiences. Yet one has to keep trying to do so through graphics and through an appropriate juxtaposition of exhibits in the hope that at least some piece of the |  | ||
| museum meshes with a piece of the visitor's past life. Museum experiences most certainly can influence the way in which people perceive their subsequent experiences. We hope, for example, that when visitors who have been to the Exploratorium subsequently see a rainbow or look at the blue sky or see strange shafts of light when they squint, remember the Exploratorium and say to themselves. "Aha! What I am seeing is like the exhibits in the Exploratorium, like the bending of light in Glass Beads or the scattering of light by the cylinder of gelatin in Blue Sky or the diffraction of light around my eyelashes in the Diffraction exhibit. I saw those exhibits on the mezzanine of the Exploratorium." | |||