Interactive Exhibits for the Virtual Museum

What's Inside? An Interactive Exhibit that checks you out.

2007-11-15T21:17:00.000-06:00

In response to national obesity and health concerns for today's youth, TMDA is developing an exciting new interactive exhibit, called "What's Inside?" that measures muscle mass, fat mass, blood mass, bone mass and organ mass.

The Scenario reads like this:

The child removes shoes, stands on the scale and presses the "calculate" button. Height, weight and body mass are calculated. Lights pulse, gurgling, whooshing and synthesized "computing" sounds play, the tubes fill with proportional volumes of liquid representing the five main body components.

Educational Objectives:

This teaches, in a very tangible manner, the concept of body composition. It also points out, in a very entertaining, non-threatening way, where there is work to be done. (Read that "a regime of diet and exercise"). The analysis is completed by an on-screen display which says "perfect", or " drop and give me 50" or "a few less candy bars per hour" or "eat fruit instead of pie". If you would like to obtain this exhibit for your museum, please contact Patrick McMillan at: director@tmdaexhibits.com

Your Town Design & Planning Workshops

2007-10-18T11:11:00.000-06:00

On September 26-28, 2007 Anne Toxey was invited to lead a series of workshops in the annual Your Town Workshop held this year in Granbury, TX (a small rural town just southwest of Forth Worth). Funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, Your Town Workshops bring community leaders and design professionals together. The conference is intended to provide design solutions to rural communities who are struggling to maintain their sense of identity and vitality.

The above photo (a building in Granbury) provides a small sample of the architectural uniqueness small towns have to offer. For more information on Your Town, click on the link below: http://www.yourtowndesign.org/

Teaching What We Do: Exhibit Design

2007-10-14T12:06:00.000-06:00

TMDA will be teaching museum professionals how to plan, design and produce captivating, interpretive and interactive exhibits that engage and educate our audiences. The Texas Historical Commission http://www.thc.state.tx.us/index.html recently awarded the group the bid to teach a series of workshops on exhibit development and design. The workshops will take place in October and November and be held across the state in all ten regions of the Texas Heritage Trails Program.

http://www.thc.state.tx.us/heritagetourism/htprogram.html

Workshop participants who are largely museum staff and directors will learn core concepts on approaches and objectives of exhibit interpretation, methods of research, exhibit development and design, as well as graphics and production logistics. The workshops, part of the Preserve America series, are Part III of an ongoing series to develop heritage tourism, preserve historical and cultural resources, and boost local economies. The link below takes you to the September press release: http://www.thc.state.tx.us/news/pressreleases/pr2007/pr090507.html.

Uintah Western Heritage Museum & Regional History Center

2007-10-01T15:19:00.000-06:00

The new architectural conceptual master plan is available for download and review! This also features the interpretive exhibit design in the exterior garden. Please write director@tmdaexhibits.com for user name and password, if you don't have it already, so that you can access these images, documents and movies.

http://www.tmdaexhibits.com/Uintahmuseum/Uintah%20Research/

The ones we want you to see are in the last 3 folders on that page.
Once you've had a chance to look these over, we invite you to post your feelings and thoughts here. For those of you who would like to respond privately, please write or call us.

Thanks for tuning in!
Patrick & Anne

Amazing Media Exhibit Design Tools from Adobe and Apple

2007-04-16T10:50:00.000-06:00

This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but since the arrival of digital video (also known as the digital video revolution) the ability to make films on a low budget continues to improve. Museums can now afford beautiful quality media presentations thanks to the continuous evolution of these suites. Two which we have been following, almost since their introduction, are the suites of tools from Adobe, notably the soon to be released Adobe Creative Suite 3, and from Apple and its newly unveiled Apple Final Cut Studio. Both of these links will take you to fun, poignant, interactive sites that not only show what these tools can do, but what you can do with them to boost your museum's appeal to visitors. Now all you need is a vision, a story to tell, and time to make it perfect.

A new day for TMDA

2007-04-14T16:03:00.000-06:00

While TMDA has been developing web-based exhibits for clients for many years now, these have been within the context of physical, exhibition spaces. We have also used the Internet as a medium for sharing exhibit research, ideas, designs, and models with clients, even setting up blogs for discussion with disperse shareholders. Today, however, we are initiating a different sort of web-based exhibit: our own showcase of ideas and exhibit-related or education-related information and news that we want to share with our clients and other readers. Stay tuned...

Google builds a virtual museum

2007-04-14T00:21:00.000-06:00

The evolution of the museum experience from active to passive changes daily. This blog will chronicle all of the museums published online using spectacular tools which also seem to evolve daily. Among those are courtesy of Google: Google Earth and Google Sketchup. The Virtual World is now online and in the hands of its denizens. The first of these I'd like to show you debuted last week. The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum and Google Earth have created an online exhibit about the genocide in Darfur, Sudan. Witness the wonder of an exhibit that matters. We can ask "Why is this happening?" instead of "Why has this happened?"