Exhibitfiles.org

In the middle of April I attended the annual Museums and the Web conference, this year held in Montreal, Canada. It was 5 days of highly interesting sessions and I got back home loaded with information and inspiration that should hopefully be put into work in the near future.
One of the great things about such a conference is the opportunity to be presented with new excellent initiatives. A webpage I could hardly wait to tell my colleagues about is www.exhibitfiles.org. It’s a community site for exhibit designers and developers and seems to me to be a brilliant idea! 

The site was founded by the Association of Science-Technology Centers about a year ago. At present it has 723 members and seems to be growing fast. The site is user-generated and will thereby develop according to the members’ interests. The team behind the site wants to create a resource that collects information on exhibitions. You can enter what they call a case study of a particular exhibition or write an actual review of an exhibition. Of course there is also a blog where members can discuss whatever topic they like.
Camilla and I just signed up as members. What immediately caught our attention was a recent blog-discussion headlined “Unexhibitable?”. As we are currently making an exhibition proposal on obesity we are facing the problem. At first glance this topic seems easy enough to come around, but the more we think about it the more insecure we get. Can we actually make an exhibition that will be appealing and not offend people? Is obesity one of these unexhibitable topics? We have made our contribution to the discussion on the blog of exhibitfiles.org.