Objects, statistics, documentary photographs, labels, lighting, text and headlines, color, space, and place—these are the materials of exhibition design. The designer's problem is how to frame these materials with a storyline that engages and informs an audience and makes the story come alive. The Ellis Island Immigration Museum provides an example of how exhibition designers solve such a problem.

The museum at Ellis Island honors the many thousand of immigrants who passed through this processing center on their way to becoming United States citizens. It also underscores our diversity as a nation. The story is told from two perspectives: the personal quest for a better life, which focuses on individuals and families, and the mass migration itself, a story of epic proportions.

Tom Geismar wanted to evoke a strong sense of the people who moved through the spaces of Ellis Island. In the entry to the baggage room, he used space as a dramatic device to ignite the viewer's curiosity. Using a coarse screen like that used in old newspapers, Geismar enlarged old photographs to life size and then mounted these transparent images on glass. The result is an open space in which ghostly people from the past seem to appear.

The problem of how to dramatize statistical information was another challenge. The exhibit Where We Came From: Sources of Immigration uses three-dimensional bar charts to show the number of people coming from various continents in twenty-year intervals; the height of the vertical element signals volume. The Peopling of America, a thematic flag of one thousand faces, shows Americans today. The faces are mounted on two sides of a prism; the third side of the prism is an American flag. This striking design becomes a focal point for the visitor and is retained as a powerful memory.

Exhibit design creates a story in space. Designers who work in this field tend to enjoy complexity and are skilled in composition and visual framing, model making, and the use of diagrams, graphics, and maps.

Even as an adolescent, I was interested in “applied art.” I was attracted to the combination of “art” (drawing, painting, etc.) and its practical application. While there was no established profession at the time (or certainly none that I knew of), my eyes were opened by the Friend-Heftner book Graphic Design and my taste more fully formed under a group of talented teachers in graduate school. I still enjoy the challenge of problem solving. -Tom Geismar