While traveling in Texas recently, I ran into Peter Friess of the Tech Museum of Innovation. I originally met Peter when he participated as a Fellow in Cohort 1 of the Noyce Leadership Institute, an international, year-long, leadership development program for science center CEOs, for which I serve as core faculty.

More recently, we also interviewed Peter as part of our NonprofitNext research initiative, and profiled the Tech Museum in the new Convergence report.

Peter was in Fort Worth to attend a reunion of his Noyce cohort in conjunction with the annual Association of Science and Technology Centers conference. I was in Fort Worth working with Cohort 2, and to do a workshop on governance at the same conference.

Simply put, Peter is brilliant. Originally trained in Germany as a watchmaker, he went on to earn a doctorate in science education and to lead the Deutsches Museum in Bonn as well as to work at the Getty and the Smithsonian. But I’m writing this post because I wanted to share his latest venture with you.

He calls it “Gallery Without Labels.” At each exhibit/experiment in the museum, instead of a placard explaining the thing, there is a video monitor. You choose the language you want and a child from that ethnic/language group comes on the monitor explaining how the exhibit works while he/she is actually doing it. This gets around language barriers and literacy levels. It makes everyone feel welcome. Apple is an underwriter. For added impact, in the lobby they have 30 video monitors with all the different kids doing their thing simultaneously. It models dynamic community engagement.

What better way to recruit the next generation of innovative museum goers than to show them leading the way?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 8:24 pm and is filed under Assorted Musings, Governance, Leadership, Nonprofit Sector, Travels, Youth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.