Edmund de Waal
© Edmund de Waal. Photo: Josh White, courtesy The Huntington
The Eight Directions of the Wind unfolded across three environments: the Art Gallery, the Chinese Garden, the Japanese Garden. Each with its own pace, its own set of cultural associations, its own relationship to time.
The work didn't need interpretation. It needed conditions.
My role was to build a framework upstream before design decisions were finalized, before the institution had locked in its approach. Not to define the experience, but to define what a successful one would feel like and how we would know when it was happening.
The multi-site structure was inherent to the work: de Waal's themes of migration, material memory, and belonging playing out differently across formal gallery space, Chinese garden movement, Japanese garden stillness.
The challenge wasn't consistency. It was continuity without flattening. What carries a visitor from one environment to the next, and what shifts are allowed to land.
Most evaluation enters after an exhibition opens. This one was built while decisions were still being made, giving it actual influence over how the experience was shaped.
Working across curatorial, education, and leadership teams, I translated de Waal's thematic intent into a shared operational framework. Visitor outcomes aligned around three registers: personal reflection, material and historical understanding, and observable attention: slowing, dwelling, returning.
The outcome blocks below represent how visitor and institutional goals were held together, without one subordinating the other.
Evaluation as experience infrastructure, not post-launch reporting.
A multi-site outdoor exhibition requires a different measurement approach. Standard gallery tracking doesn't account for movement between environments, non-linear paths, or the kind of sustained attention that happens in a garden rather than at a wall.
The framework adapted spatial observation methods for all three sites and kept qualitative methods deliberately open, structured around specific installations, not general impressions. Programming was treated as experience, not supplement.
By the time the exhibition opened, teams were already aligned, not scrambling to define success retroactively, but working from a shared framework that had been built into the planning process.
Multilingual access, community outreach, and interpretive tone had all been shaped upstream. The institution didn't have to retrofit the work for broader reach. It was already designed for it.
When evaluation is introduced early enough, it stops functioning as a report. It becomes part of how the experience is built.