An AV Edge

At the recent opening of the National WWI Museum in Kansas City, Mo., I ask the museum's renowned designer Ralph Appelbaum whether advances in AV have changed the way he and his team tell stories.

What's important, Appelbaum responds, is not so much whether video gives designers new aesthetic opportunities, but whether it helps them with job one: driving traffic. “In the end, we are not judged on some abstract idea of quality,” Appelbaum says, but on serving the broadest possible demographic. Do people come? Do they engage? Do they return?

Appelbaum is making these observations while standing in one of the exhibit halls that truly makes his point. The room's design is wholly traditional — a long, elegant conference room with a big, sleek table, walls lined with beautifully lit glass cases full of artifacts of the dead, their silent simplicity suggesting a poetic connection between lives past and our own. It's a connection Appelbaum knows is compelling for people of a certain sensibility and generation. But it's not enough. So on the opposite wall are simple booths that invite you to enter, sit, and browse through a selection of AV artifacts — the music and cultural markers of the time.

Still not enough. The enormous table, upon closer examination, is a modern way to see the past. For those who find artifacts too inert, 90-year-old culture too quaint, and for those who understand things by touching and reshaping them, the table is a canvas of opportunity.

This “interactive table” thrusts backroom educational resources into the heart of the museum experience. No longer sitting in front of bland PCs using familiar browser technology, users wield a stylus light to control a wealth of historically accurate graphics and Flash video through individual exploration and collaboration. The table also has “activity mode,” where a docent controls the experience for a group of users.

This table is just one dramatic example of a design that effortlessly blends visual vernaculars — including AV, artifacts, graphics, plasma displays, and sculpted life-size trenches — into a seamless environment at once accessible to the traditionalist but stimulating to those who expect multiple streams of data and experience. Credit goes to Appelbaum's team (raany.com); Second Story Interactive Studios (secondstory.com) for the design, content, and interactivity of the table; Potion (potiondesign.com) for the table's hardware and user-experience design; Donna Lawrence Productions for the museum's excellent proscenium video presentations; and to systems integrator Electrosonic. Credit also to our parent company's hometown: Kansas City's generosity and perseverance made this remarkable museum possible.

In other news, check out our Sundance blog at blog.digitalcontentproducer.com/sundance, and also stay tuned for our new industry community venture, reel-exchange.com, coming end of Q1 2007. More info at reel-exchange.com/first2know/.