As an institution dedicated to experimental and experiential approaches to teaching and learning, the Bard Graduate Center (BGC) has spent the last five years thinking about how best to integrate graduate-level pedagogy, digital media, and exhibition development. Central to that exploration have been the BGC's Digital Media Lab, an experimental space for working with new media; and the Focus Gallery project, a venue for small-scale exhibitions that allows BGC faculty to connect object studies and exhibition practice with their scholarly work. This paper will discuss how the BGC has used the development and prototyping of interactives for Focus Gallery projects as a platform for new ways of thinking about the role that students can play in helping shape an exhibition, and how that work can help those students use digital media to recontextualize their study of material culture.