Responses by Natalie Tschechaniuk, director of production, G&A.
Background: The purpose of the Edelman Fossil Park & Museum (EFM) is to help visitors understand their place in time: how their actions in the present have an impact on the future. It helps if you like dinosaurs, but EFM isn’t really about dinosaurs—they’re just the hook. The real-life stories of dinosaurs and their time on Earth as told through the immersive gallery experiences, powerful media pieces, hands-on interactive installations and and 66-million year old fossils provide moments of surprise and delight for visitors both young and old, expert and amateur, born and raised in New Jersey and visiting from afar.
Design core: Every design decision was anchored by the mission to make the experience personal. Our challenge was to get every visitor to walk away feeling a connection—to the Cretaceous past, to their own present or to an ever-forming future. The EFM experience achieves this goal by both confronting visitors with uncomfortable truths and carefully layering information, encouraging engagement that informs new perspectives. Each visitor to the Edelman Fossil Park receives an Explorer Badge that unlocks a unique level of personalization. When visitors use their badge in the Museum, their engagement is reflected in their EFM profile, where they can level up through continued learning, return visits and personal actions. The badge is also key to an incredible game called Fossil Detective—an indoor scavenger hunt, powered by RFID, to find fossils hidden all over the galleries. After finding a fossil, visitors use a leaderboard to identify the fossil, earning points and gaining necessary practice for the real-life Quarry Dig experience.
Challenges: A unique challenge in the design of the EFM was the imperative to communicate scientifically accurate information in an interactive way to visitors who have very different experiences with science. EFM takes a clear stance that all information presented across every media upholds current scientific processes and principles. This level of authenticity takes time and requires input from top individuals across a variety of fields. Even when we didn’t have much time, we always had direct access to top researchers through Dr. Kenneth Lacovara, the museum’s founding executive director. Throughout the museum, there are many interactive experiences: digital touch screens, RFID fossils, microscopes, rocks hidden in cubbies and many others. They all had to be perfectly crafted to not cut any corners.
Favorite details: I’m very proud of the way that EFM threads narrative details together seamlessly. The storytelling starts on the grounds, before visitors enter the museum, and continues through every encounter with the space. However visitors choose to take in information, they will see core themes of deep time and sense of place repeated and that the details represented in artistic depictions are consistent throughout. And, they will understand that every dimension upholds EFM’s perspective.
New lessons: The most profound thing I learned during this project is the importance of designing spaces that have a clear connection to their place. G&A could have created a dinosaur experience anywhere, but the EFM could only have been built exactly where it is—on the site of an old quarry in the middle of southern New Jersey. That is the one place on Earth where it makes sense to tell this very specific but universal story.
Time constraints: Like with any project, sometimes great ideas happen at inopportune times. As we moved through the exhibit design and fabrication process, we worked with the client, the fabricator and other project partners to respond to great ideas whenever they arose. However, we were not always able to fully realize them if logistical challenges prevailed. In those cases, we tried to design the best response that would both meet the current request and leave it open to future improvements.
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