INFORMATION AGE

Planning, design, and supervision of fabrication for this 13,000 sf. permanent exhibition. An interactive computer network, hundreds of artifacts, authentic period settings, AV presentations, and more traced the social history of electronic communications and information processing. Widely covered by media when it opened, the exhibition was the Smithsonian’s first, largest, and longest running major interactive gallery. Sponsors included IBM, EDS, DEC, Hewlett/Packard, CNN, Pioneer, and others.

Opened May, 1990. By the time it was dismantled in 2007, its interactive system had logged over 10 million visits. The exhibition received wide press coverage, including a spread in Time magazine and a segment on Niel Lehrer Hour. Top team talent: Pam Rogow (project development & design concept), Ed Hackley (graphic design), Bill Anderson (Mural Makers, scenic re-creations), Electronic Data Systems (interactive computer system development and implementation).

Humorous life-size figures nationally known sculptor Steve Hansen were fashioned from paper mache in his Kalamazoo studio, painted, then shipped and installed at the exhibition’s entry. During several studio visits, Jeff helped convey the project team’s vision for each piece.

Auto assembly robots in the gallery gracefully trace moves they execute split-second at work. Jobs lost to automation was an exhibition theme. Today, it’s a harsh reality.

Part of an exhibition-wide bar-coding interactive, this station lets users encode their first name via a touchscreen mock-up of a WWII German Enigma encoding device.

Scenic re-creations, media presentations, thousands of artifacts, graphics and more trace the information age’s roots. Coined by Richard Leghorn in 1960, “information age” described a particularly American string of innovations, often built upon concepts adopted from European thinkers.

The bar-coding system encouraged visitors to interact by entering personal info. Here, a visitor provides a digital thumbprint.

To best provide experiential learning for visitors, Jeff has sought hands-on knowledge of content. Here, Jeff tries entering a string of commands to guide an auto-assembly robot through a simple maneuver. Not easy.

Upon entering, visitors scanned in their bar-coded brochure, which gave each a personal address in the exhibition’s interactive computer system. Eleven interactive stations located throughout the exhibition invited users to scan their bar-code, then do an activity. Each activity involved entering some bit of personal info, like their first name, zip code, thumb print, facial portrait, and more, then doing some digital processing with it. Upon leaving, graphics invited folks to scan their brochure one last time. This netted the participant a print-out of all the data the exhibition’s system had gathered about them, and what databases of the time might make of it. That was then. This engaging exhibition experience has since mushroomed into a massive social issue.