MIT Museum Exhibitions

The MIT Museum is transparent about scientific progress and what it means for the planet and all living things. Our design openly shares the institution's knowledge, reflecting why and how scientists work. We invite the community to question technology, artificial intelligence, gene manipulation, and life elsewhere in the galaxies. Everything is accessible for children while providing depth for those with deeper knowledge. Our tools include bold graphics, audio-visual presentation, innovative physio-digital, and new interactive experiences based on cutting-edge AI and machine learning. Over 25,000SF of galleries, located on two floors, considers accessibility throughout with multi-sensory interfaces. The museum supports a high standard of sustainable principles that led to material selections that are robust for long life expectancy and made with recycled or renewable resources. Choreographed for maximum impact, the quality and diversity of materiality and spatial design bring the visitor through complex themes in an accessible, playful way.

Five galleries talk to a different scientific realm with distinct spatial and material characteristics befitting the curatorial narrative. 1 Life Sciences design includes curving planes and organic materials such as cork, felt, and wood. The forms include linear, organic display tables. Eighteen artist installations intermingled with that of scientists illuminate issues of gene manipulation. 2 Essential MIT has a series of platforms made of undulating, backlit, perforated metal. Triangular planes fold as tangrams displaying scientific instrumentation and tactile interactives. A giant media display as visitors to make a personal "bot" as their avatar for exploring scientific questions. 3 AI Gallery includes a dense scaffold of steel tubing scaffold and a metallic armature. Audio cones: As visitors approach circular, wall-mounted "ears", they hear a scientist explaining their work. An armature of curving OLED screens invites visitors to collaborate with AI to write a poem, alternating lines of text. 4 Collections has a 100-foot-long glowing wall of vitrines and videos. This multi-faceted language responds to the specificity of the artifacts but with a playful exuberant vocabulary. 5"Art and Science," a changing exhibition gallery, has a curving white armature serving as a counterpoint to robotic metal sculptures that move and create organic sound.