Find the Knowledge Issue in the Prompt

1. Your TOK Exhibition begins with choosing one of the IA prompts.
2. These prompts look short and simple but they're designed to be open-ended, encouraging you to explore multiple interpretations and perspectives.
3. If you treat the prompt literally, you'll end up with a descriptive project that bores examiners.
4. To create a focused and compelling exhibition , you need to break down the prompt and identify the underlying knowledge issue.

Don’t Take The Prompt At Face Value

1. Take the common prompt “What counts as evidence?”
2. At first it sounds easy, just talk about evidence in science or history.
3. But the word “counts” already implies judgment: who has the authority to decide?
4. Plus, “evidence” isn’t fixed, it looks different in a lab, a courtroom, or a cultural tradition.

Recognize Multiple Possible Paths

1. Every prompt can be spun in many directions.
2. With evidence, you could look at:
   1. Science: data from controlled experiments.
   2. History: sources that are partial, biased, or missing.
   3. Culture: oral tradition or spiritual signs treated as evidence in some communities but dismissed in others.
   4. Technology: how digital traces or algorithms create new forms of evidence.

Brutally Narrow Your Focus

1. The strongest exhibitions pick one line of interpretation and push it deeply.
2. You don't want to be producing vague commentary and weak links to objects by doing too many things at once.

Make Your Objects Do The Talking

1. Objects are your evidence so if they don’t directly illustrate your interpretation of the prompt, you’ve missed the point.
   1. A courtroom transcript shows how authority sets thresholds that decide lives.
   2. A scientific graph reveals how privileging numbers can silence alternative forms of knowing.
   3. A family heirloom forces the question of whether personal experience can ever count as evidence outside its cultural context.
2. Each object should add a new angle on your interpretation, not just repeat the same point.

Always Step Back to Implications

1. Your exhibition is about showing what evidence reveals about knowledge itself.
2. If oral testimony is excluded, whose voices are erased, and how does that distort what we call reliable knowledge?
3. If AI-generated data and deepfakes blur the line between authentic and fabricated, what does that do to our trust in evidence as a whole?
4. If courts, labs, or platforms decide what is admissible, how do power and authority shape not just the use of evidence but the very boundaries of knowledge?