Last year, a speaker at the MA conference said that their exhibition wouldn't be done until the day it closed. I thought that was a great way to sum up the need to stay responsive to visitors and to build flexibility into exhibition design.
So is All About Me done, now that it's finally open? No, that sounds too final. It's really just the end of the beginning - now for the tough test of whether it can withstand the excited hoards of children who pour into Eureka! every week.
All About Me has had a couple of hard weeks of road testing over the Easter holidays. However much pre-testing goes on, there's nothing like the pressure of a busy wet fortnight to see how well the exhibits stand up to so much play.
Next week, it's down to Halifax again but this time for a celebratory event. Hopefully the team can begin to relax and enjoy seeing all their hard work in action.
And that book with pictures of children getting ready for bed? It's a fine example of our anti-text strategy! We realised that we could tell the story of bedtime perfectly well without using any words so that even our youngest visitors can enjoy the book.