Come Fly with Me – Birdmen, Chasing the Thrill: Pushing the Limits of Experience through Exhibition Design

The future of exhibition design relies on making exhibition a critical mode of expression by creating compelling experiences that cannot be accessed in other ways. This proposal explores how experiential exhibition design can be effective. Come Fly with Me was conceived of as a tool to communicate how experiential exhibition design can create transformative experiences or begin a process of transformation. At the heart of the subject is the human quest for the experience of flight. Due to the inherent physicality of the subject matter of wingsuit base-jumping, the design of the exhibition carries within it freedom from a content-focused narrative and creates space for an exhibition based on and in experience. Far beyond the didactic aspects of the exhibition is the opportunity to share the feeling of stepping into the shoes of a wingsuit base-jumper, the locus where the true communion of experience and information comes to life. This exhibition aims to take the audience out of the routine of their daily lives through a combination of immersive, evocative environments; technology; and the experience of proximity flying. Proximity fliers participate in this sport because there is something elemental driving them to taste the freedom of flight, and when visitors leave Come Fly with Me they understand this on a deeper level, having experienced it themselves through the exhibition.

Author

• Bikowski, Elizabeth T

Language

• en

Keyword

• Base-jump
• Experience design
• Exhibition design

Date created

• 2018

Type of Work

• Master's Thesis

License

• All rights reserved

Rights statement

• In Copyright

GW Unit

• Exhibition Design

Degree

• M.A.

Advisor

• Brennan, Barbara

Committee Member(s)

• Briggs, Nigel
• Crellin, Naomi

Persistent URL

•  https://scholarspace.library.gwu.edu/etd/g732d918x