Areas to work on

Arizona Science Center is a lovely museum and we were very grateful for the opportunity to tour there space. In looking at their facility and thinking about it though our perspective of what we see in rancho there were a few areas that we would want to tweak if it was our space in our city ....

The museum did not seem "ready for us". In previous conference visits all of the museums have been in tip top shape. This museum had a traveling exhibit that had closed last week open, but when you walk inside packing material. The gift shop and some of the programming spaces were closed. On our last conference visit to Houston every programming space had something going and staff available to tour you.

Way finding / marketing - there seemed to be nothing guiding you anywhere? At VG we have specific colors on the floor showing us our way. Once you walked in through the main door of the museum there was no way to know where to start or head to next or any theme.

The colors, fonts, sizes and placements of signs all reinforced that these spaces were for older children / adults. As far as we know, libraries, stores, television all market to children with color, texture, etc.  - this space seemed to be lacking what is enticing to children.

There were also exciting areas, like the Planetarium, that were just hidden behind their large concrete wall with posters, displays about the excitement within. There was an imax screen somewhere that was displaying a penguin movie, which we never saw?

There was ONE space in the entire museum for children under the age of 4 - a fenced in playhouse. It did not appear to have anything interactive with it. No lockers or storage space in entire museum for families.