During my work in Bulgaria, I engaged with staff and community partners at Muzeiko, the first children's science museum in Bulgaria (and the entire region, for that matter.)
While my primary purpose was to help build internal capacity at Muzeiko -- related especially to exhibit development, prototyping, and engaging with community partners, I also learned (or re-learned!) some things I think would be useful for anyone working to develop better exhibitions and programs at museums.
3 comments:
Though some of the list items in this article are specific to the work the author did at the museum in Bulgaria, a lot of them can be directly applied to the work that dps do for almost every project. The suggestions for prototyping really spoke to me because there has already been a project or two that I have had to change at the last minute because something I assumed would work ended up failing miserably. For projects that involve construction, I am definitely going to create prototypes moving forward so I have more time to make adjustments or completely rethink things. I also think that it is important to get feedback from others, especially people outside of the freshman studio who can offer a less involved opinion, and the points made about setting time for work outside of their "studio" to do things separate from their work made me realize that my projects have been taking more time than necessary because I am giving them more time than they need. To start being more successful in my work and wellness, I am realizing I definitely need to work to adopt some of these practices over the next few weeks.
The line that spoke most to me was "if you don't have time and money to prototype your exhibits, will you have time and money to fix your mistakes once you've installed your exhibits?" As soon as I read that I had to have a silent round of applause for the author and their spot-on observational attitude. As a DP I've done MANY projects that should have been prototyped, but weren't, and fixing all the things that you didn't know would be issues on the real thing is so much more costly and frustrating than putting in that extra time, money, and effort to make sure it's what you want, even vaguely, before you begin final construction. There are also so many products in the real world that could benefit this kind of process. My drafting desk in 33, for example, has a spot on the bottom right-hand corner that while the desk is upright, any utensil (T-square, triangle, etc.) gets stuck on the flat part of the desk and thus does not create a straight line. Prototyping and testing the desk would have been EASY. But whoever's job it was decided it was fine. Clearly, since I went on for a good 62 words about it that's an issue that really bothers me and could have been easily remedied before final construction. Prototyping and testing is such an important and non-negotiable design step in any creation field.
The parallels draw between this article and being a DP are really quite striking. The amount of lessons that I learned in that first year and a half here, as they apply to specific processes and more meta, without knowing that I was learning them is kind of overwhelming. The relationships between prototyping and the reaches of the final product, being able to like (hear: respect) your collaborators enough to disagree and be honest about what you are creating, the need for continuous feedback, and to never stop reaching for moments in which you can develop your skillset are all such valuable lessons that have really ingrained themselves into my practices as a collaborator, manager, and a creator here. Workshops are really special places to be able to develop these skills in particular because they create the school-esque bubble where everything is fake and you are allowed to fail with minimal consequences, but they also have the potential for you to make real world impacts. Overall, this sounds like a very exciting experience that have resulted in critical development.
Post a Comment