It’s in the Details: Constructing Accessible Exhibits in The Dot Experience

Designed with accessibility in mind at every phase, The Dot Experience will be unlike any museum experience in existence today. From design, to prototyping, to the construction itself, every detail of the space must be thought through. We spoke with Mike Marnell, Director of Fabrication at Solid Light, about building a truly accessible environment. During his nine years at Solid Light, Mike has worked on tons of projects, interactives, and exhibits While Mike says every project is different, “Everything about creating The Dot Experience has been different. Any assumption you ever had as a sighted person goes right out the window–it’s just not applicable or relevant.” 

In The Dot Experience visitors will be invited to touch everything—when a fragile artifact must be kept behind glass, a tactile replica of the item will accompany it for visitors to explore by touch. When building an experience where visitors will access information using multiple senses, each element must be closely considered— materials used, the angle of braille, and determining the perfect level of detail. 

Accessing Information Through Touch 

Mike learned right away in prototyping sessions that the way different materials feel to the touch can make or break the experience for a visitor. “If you read with your fingers, you experience the entire world with your hands,” Mike explained, “so when certain participants touch Medium Density Fibreboard (MDF) as opposed to plywood, as opposed to plastic, some of them would be like, ‘Oh, I can’t even touch that’.” When a surface feels good to the touch, a visitor can fully engage with the information that is being conveyed.  

Our replicas will be accurate and informative, but they must also be legible to the touch—which sometimes actually means dialing down some details. A busy or cluttered item can be confusing and come across as “white noise”. The importance of finding the right amount of detail to convey was especially evident during the prototyping of life size figures that will be featured in The Dot Experience, Mike told us. Our prototype group was presented with several different sculptures of people’s faces with varying degrees of detail—from hyper realistic, to a simpler face with only key features displayed. This less detailed face turned out to be the most legible, while “the wrinkles and the crow’s feet, and the laugh lines of the hyper realistic version became a distraction.” 

Much like our replicas, Mike told us how our interactive elements are planned and tested down to the exact hardware being used. Our prototyping sessions ensure that visitors who use wheelchairs or have reduced mobility can fully engage with our interactives, and that they are “understandable, appreciated, and effective for people who are blind or low vision.” Our braille decoder wheels have gone through several iterations behind the scenes, before we landed on a design that was comfortable and easy to engage with, freeing the visitor up to fully immerse themselves and take in the information. 

 How Can You Make Your Space More Inclusive? 

We hope that visiting The Dot Experience will encourage visitors to consider how to bring accessibility and inclusion to their own spheres. Mike said it best when he reflected that for many sighted folks, The Dot Experience “opens up a whole new world that kind of has always existed in parallel, but unless you visit it, you don’t know anything about it, right? This is the opportunity to visit it, live there, walk around in there, and kind of see, do you like this world? You know, could it be better?”