Jun
17
2025
This year, Ideum celebrates its 25th anniversary, and to mark this milestone, I've been compiling a series of blog posts that share some of our experiences and lessons learned along the way. My first blog post, Twenty-Five Years of Experience Design, encapsulates some of my thoughts on experience design, prototyping, accessibility, and team building. In this post, I want to share one of the aspects that makes Ideum unique: how we develop both projects and products. Our process is deeply rooted in the best practices of museum exhibit design. We have been continuing to examine the qualities of each of these different activities, looking for areas of crossover and improvement.
First, it is unusual for a small company primarily tied to the museum field to produce not only custom exhibits and interactive experiences, but also a lineup of hardware products. Our touch tables and touch displays have undergone significant evolution since the introduction of our first interactive table in 2008, with more than a dozen distinct models now available, many featuring a range of screen sizes and additional options. We’ve sold thousands of these systems over the years in nearly 60 countries, and we were recently named one of the top ten manufacturers here in New Mexico. While all of these products are found in museums, most of our sales are directed to various markets, including other informal public and educational settings such as visitor centers, zoos, and planetariums. We also sell to universities, schools, AEC sites (architecture, engineering, and construction), research labs, public safety organizations, trade shows, and even retail settings.
Our museum experience has helped shape these products, making them easy to operate and maintain, more accessible, secure, and rugged. Museums can be very demanding spaces, and my own experience working at the Exploratorium in the 1990s hammered that home. Hands-on Science museums are the extreme example in the museum world, where visitors are encouraged to touch, and often, younger visitors get carried away. The risk of visitors either misusing or abusing your exhibit goes beyond science museums and applies to most public spaces.
This first-hand experience helped guide us when we developed our first touch table, and building rugged, quality gear has been a requirement since we began producing products. Over the years, through speaking with clients and examining our processes, we’ve made additional improvements to the quality of our products. Our touch tables and touch displays are not only rugged, but they also feature lockable power and I/O (input/output) access. They are easy to service (when needed); our computers are easily removable and replaceable. Additionally, we have robust and redundant cooling systems that help extend the lifespan of the electronic components.
Our product development supports many of the activities involved in designing and developing custom exhibits. This is particularly true when designing screen-based exhibits. Still, some of the lessons learned from product development also apply to even the non-tech or low-tech exhibits we develop. For example, we have over 15 years of experience working with metal and collaborating with metal fabricators. We understand all of the processes involved in metal fabrication. Our product development utilizes sheet metal, extruded aluminum, cast aluminum, machined aluminum, and steel, as well as, more recently, 3D-printed metal parts. Additionally, our Tasting Table and Reader Rail, which are more recent additions, use wood products and inhouse welding. This experience has helped us as we’ve designed very ambitious custom projects, such as giant curiosity cabinets and an intricate scale model.
Of course, when we develop custom exhibits that use screens and other electronic elements, we can draw on even deeper experience. Several years ago, we created our Inline open-frame displays for integration into custom exhibits. There are now 11 different models of touch displays with 4K or 8K resolution, perfect for integration into cabinetry and other exhibit materials. In addition to the displays themselves, we often utilize our standard I/O boxes and some of the fan arrays used in our products in our custom builds. These components all make the final custom exhibit more robust and easier to use and support.
While we've learned firsthand how to integrate our Inline displays, we’ve also learned from other fabricators. As other fabrication outfits and exhibit design firms utilize these open-frame displays, we have had conversations and provided support, deepening our understanding of best practices in terms of integration. One example is Pawlet Furniture Makers in Vermont, which built some beautiful display cases for the Granger-Mounton Museum. (You can see this excellent wood working on Instagram.)
Another clear benefit is that nearly everything we design, whether a product or a custom project, is developed for public audiences. Many design approaches related to accessibility can be applied to both. We’ve conducted extensive research to support our products, which can be utilized in custom project work. We have written a white paper on our products and their support for both ADA and ETSI (European) accessibility standards. (See: Accessible Design for Multitouch Tables, Large Displays, and Interactive Experiences.)
While I’ve outlined the nature of project and product development and how these distinct activities can have symbiotic qualities, there are some pitfalls. The most obvious one is to design your custom project, just as you would a product. Spending too much design time on a custom project can bust your budget. Additionally, custom work, by its nature, involves a client, so you will have an extended team of stakeholders who need to be part of the process. Designers and managers need to shift gears to make custom exhibits great, but with fewer resources allocated to them than to products, and often with an extended team both inside and outside of Ideum.
Conversely, product design can’t be entered into without understanding that the process needs to be vastly different. We need to determine supply, support, and support materials (for multiple customers), marketing, pricing, partners and distributors, shipping, and other aspects of product creation. Of course, the product design process needs to be more elaborate and thorough since multiple quantities of the product need to be produced. Often, most of the components in our products are outsourced to external fabricators, so we need to have additional drawings and collaborate with our fabrication partners to ensure quality and timely delivery. Additionally, all electronic components must be identified and tested, and supply chains must be established; a task made more challenging by the world of on-again, off-again tariffs. All of this makes the process much more involved.
While the differences are pretty straightforward, there are also some commonalities worth mentioning when examining product and project design. First, having the right team members participate in the process is crucial; you will need design and technical expertise, as well as a willingness to collaborate. We've been fortunate at Ideum to have so many knowledgeable staff members who are open to working through the process and reaching consensus wherever possible.
Prototyping and creating mock-ups of exhibits or emerging products is an integral part of the process. We continually assess the aesthetic qualities, durability, accessibility, and serviceability of the products and projects we develop. Additionally, the project or product will be shaped by its intended use and, potentially, its intended environment. A single exhibit needs to fit into a larger exhibition, and it usually involves some aspects of storytelling. Understanding a product's setting and expected use allows you to improve the final design, making success more likely.
Project development and product design can be complementary, and we continually refine and improve both processes to enhance their effectiveness. This approach extends to some of the other services we provide. For example, Ideum engages in full exhibit design and development: from concept through schematic and design/build. Having a deep understanding of the fabrication process, along with software development and AV design, enables us to create practical concepts that are not just theoretical, but ideas that can be effectively implemented.
Additionally, our software development and AV design benefit from our extensive hardware resources, as well as our exhibit fabrication and custom design capabilities. All of these activities increase our knowledge, and for small exhibit projects, it allows us to be a “one-stop shop.” Additionally, understanding each of these activities enables us to be a better partner, with a deeper understanding of the work at hand, when we take on larger projects that involve collaboration with a third-party AV firm or another exhibit design firm.
