Relevance and Wonder, Science and History

I've mentioned before that we're working on a project that's a marriage between a local history museum and hands-on science center: the Fort Collins Museum and Discovery Science Center. 

One of the strategies in terms of exhibit development is leveraging the history to support the science, and science to back up the history. This helps create an environment which is multi-layered, and connection-rich (not to mention a nice match with current educational standards).

Using history to provide context to the science presents the concepts in a real-world manner. Visitors don't tend to experience life in isolated silos of science, history, art, etc. They experience them simultaneously, so this is a familiar fit. 

At the same time, science and scientific phenomena can provide a level of impact and wonder that history can't. The vehicles in science museums tend to be more hands-on.  So we're using the engaging tools of science exhibits to provide attractors to both topics.

On another level, we're using this overlap approach in two other ways. One is that we're fostering connections between global topics and visitors by using local instances of an idea, and vice versa.

The other is by highlighting role models of all ages, shapes, sizes and abilities. This brings a first-person voice to the multitude on the museum floor- it personalizes the experience. It also can have the affect of making seemingly out of reach achievements seem more... acheivable for the average Jill.

The ideal for any cultural institution marriage is to develop a situation where the complementary qualities can come together and create something bigger or better than either could be on their own.

Prior to a new building, the Museum is starting to experiment in the existing museum and via their blog to with these ideas. Take a look!

Scale & Context: a follow-up

By Scott Moulton, LEED AP

I was compelled to follow up on Maria's Scale / Context post. I love the way it points out both the way that design matters and has real consequence but also lives and dies by it's context or constraints. There is (or was?) a real interest in architecture to using the site as the starting point for a design. If you abstract that a bit and consider site as context, I think all good design starts from this point.

For me context includes the site or whatever existing point you are starting from, the social conditions and the client. It is the moment of deciding what you've got and what you should do that success of the project is determined. The Highline in NYC is a great example of this working. So is the good old Freitag Bag. In ways these can be seen as reuse/ recycling projects, but they go way beyond that. They are leveraging the world as it is to make the world as the designers want it to be.

Design should be more like jujutsu and less like boxing.

Giving Context to Experiences

We've been working on several historical projects recently. These history museums and societies provide more than facts and figures about the past. At their best, they foster an understanding of the contexts that led up to events, and forge connections between history and individuals. One such example is a project from the United States Holocaust Museum "Children of Lodz Ghetto". USHMM collected stories from diaries and interviews with survivors of the ghetto. These were archived together wi th photos of artifacts, people, film footage, and individual stories. For example, the history of Jutta Szmirgeld provides snippets of her time from age 12 in Lodz to her amazing survival of Auschwitz. Such collections enable us have empathy for the past by providing us with a more complete picture of life at that time. The technology allows us to gather and share these stories fluidly with one another, while allowing the museum to do what it does best: give us an open-ended, yet informed experience of the past. [originally posted elsewhere, revised]