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Hi Natasha (and all) Two pieces of advice I would give above all others - and before I even thought about exhibit content. First: don’t be tempted to think that you can make these kind of exhibits as a do-it-yourself project. Its tempting to think that ‘a volunteer who is good at carpentry’ can knock up some simple exhibits quickly and cheaply. Well, they might be able to do this but these exhibits will more than likely fall apart nearly as fast as they were made. Creating good looking, reliable, engaging and above all SAFE hands-on exhibits is a specialised art and people like myself, who do this for a living have spent years learning the hard way what doesn’t work. If you employ one of us to do the work you’re benefitting from our accumulated years of hard-won experience and the mistakes we’ve learned to not to make. If you do-it-yourself you’ll be starting on the same learning curve we did, years ago, and may well make the same mistakes we made years ago, too. Second: have a realistic budget for the project. Making even the simplest of hand-on exhibits that last well can be quite an involved task. Often simplicity in design is the end point of a lengthy process of iteration, where multiple designs, each simpler than the last have to be conceived, trialled and ultimately rejected. Don’t compromise your project by allocating a shoe-string budget just because the end point you want to get to is seems to be very simple. Remember that the stuff you’re buying is going to get a lot of use, and so is going to have to be really well made if its going to last. You don’t say what visitor numbers you expect, or how long the exhibits are expected to last for, but as a very rough guide you really ought to be budgeting AT LEAST £2,500 plus VAT for each finished exhibit you hope to have. It wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect to pay twice as much as this for ‘simple’ exhibits to go in a museum with very high visitor flows. If you have a decent budget you can afford to make prototypes and trial them to discover what does and doesn’t work. If you’re working on a shoestring your ‘prototype’ ends up being the final exhibit, and these are never as good as things that have been properly developed. You may think that this advice is not entirely disinterested, because I make hands-on exhibits for a living, but I’ve been in the business 25 years and I’ve seen some of the consequences of not following this advice. All the best Richard Richard Ellam L M Interactive Science Shows and Hands-On Stuff [log in to unmask] <mailto:[log in to unmask]> www.lminteractive.co.uk <http://www.lminteractive.co.uk/> + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + GEM list: Contact the list owner for assistance at [log in to unmask] Anyone can join for free at any time by sending this message to [log in to unmask]: Join GEM Firstname Secondname Include only the text above, without email signature etc. The title of the email doesn’t matter. Send it to [log in to unmask] If you are going on holiday or have an out of office message for some other reason, you can send this message: Set GEM nomail When you get back: Set GEM mail You don’t 'miss' any messages by doing this as they are all available via main GEM list web page as above. Finally, if you need to change your email address, but stay subscribed to GEM, just send your new email address like this: CHANGE GEM [log in to unmask] + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + +