As Mark noted, all three wave tanks are now in. Months of planning and design come to fruition … almost. Unfortunately, the two-dimensional layout failed to account for the placement of the table legs under the tanks. The proposed situations of the tanks put their legs right on top of the trenches in the floor, which won’t work due to a need to access the trenches for drainage and other water issues.

Whoops! So, things were quickly rearranged on the spot, which is pretty much always the way of things in the museum exhibit world.

The one tank that we let visitors play with revealed a host of issues of its own, including kids climbing onto the tank table and kids vigorously slamming the wave-making handle back and forth. No major injuries, but plenty of “alternative affordances” – creative, unanticipated use of the exhibit. So we’ve pulled it from visitor use for now for a bit of redesign.

In other planning news, we are replacing a well-planned video exhibit that had three vertical screens with the video stretched across them with one. Again, planning called for a cool three-screen timed animation that never came to fruition, so we are retrofitting, as it were.

Call it “make it work” Monday?