Mind Map: How to ﬁll an exhibition with life?

Starting position

I work in a university. In the last few years she has decided to go public with her topics and  research results and not only to communicate them to the scientiﬁc community. The background  is the idea that there are urgent problems in the world that can only be solved if everyone works  together. To do so, however, one must move from knowledge to understanding and action. So  how do you communicate complex interrelationships and scientiﬁc ﬁndings in such a way that  they are well understood?  The university has or is developing various formats of communication and teaching for this  purpose, which explicitly address not only students, but also society as a whole. One format is an  exhibition. The exhibition is ready, but because of Corona all museums have to remain closed.  This means that the ﬁnished exhibition, which no one has seen before, will not be presented and  will be empty for at least the next three months. So what to do with this closed exhibition, ready  to start? But there is another aspect to the problem: some at the university think that the university should  rather concentrate on its core tasks like teaching students and research than on such activities  like public exhibitions.

Challenge

One of the challenges is already to ﬁnd the right questions and to recognize the actual problem.  The obvious question is: How do we make the most of the time when the exhibition is closed?  But there are other questions that arise, namely: what would be a good use, and for whom?  Which stakeholders actually have what needs? And how do we best meet them?

I have chosen Mind Mapping as my approach.

First, questions concerning the diﬀerent needs and interested of the diﬀerent stakeholders were  collected with the team in a brainstorming session. They were then hung on the wall.   There were already guests from three stakeholder groups: the university scientists, the students  and what we imagined to be typical museum-goers.   Then we began to cluster the questions. On a trelloboard, everyone could think about how they  would sort the questions into a pattern, which was then hung on the wall.

The next step was to consider who the stakeholders actually are. This was collected as a group.  From this, 7 persona were made, which were then provided with a picture. Then it was assigned  which questions concern which stakeholders. At the same time a periodization was made, The team split up, tasks were distributed. In groups of two, two representatives of each persona  were asked about the issues that aﬀected them. A few days later the results were compiled and  evaluated. Goals and criteria of success were speciﬁed. Together they then brainstormed on small formats that would be tried out in the coming months  as Prototype.

Insight

I found it interesting that the group aspect became much more important than the actual ideas.  No completely spectacular results came out of this, nothing that I probably wouldn't have found in  any other way. However, through the involvement of many people and the team, something else  was achieved, which subsequently turned out to be much more important: Everybody was eagerly  involved in the project, supported it unconditionally and there was no criticism or envious looks,  because everybody felt somehow responsible. Even those who were later not involved in the  implementation.

Approach

Next time I would also try the use of Design Thinking Prototypes and on a smaller scale. The very  ﬁrst time I tried to choose such a large project involving so many people, it quickly became much  more complex than expected and also led to some resentment.

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