A Reflection on Life&Science and...um, what?

Can YOU see Zooboomafoo?

I was out yesterday because I was visiting the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC. If you haven't been, have kids, or like to act like a kid, I highly recommend you go. Or if you just like lemurs, Apollo 15, bears, tree houses, and you're looking for an activity for the day. It was a lovely surprise, although I will say the "life" part of the name is accurate while the "science" is intended more to encourage scientific thinking in kids. But I AM learning that my taste in museums is hopelessly outdated. Modern thinking is that kids science centres should focus on learning through play, rather than learning through making the museum collections as cool as possible.

I'm a bit of a dinosaur, I guess. I like museums like the Schiele, or the MoLaS's Aerospace collection. I talked to Roy Griffiths, who's the vice president in charge of exhibit design on their, um, exhibit design, and he sounded mildly embarrassed by that whole area. I think that was taking it a bit far; it was well designed, with good interactive exhibits--match the orbit of the space shuttle to the space station! Point a satellite dish at an IR receiver and listen to a recording of actual space communications! See how marbles bounced off a parabola bounce to a single centre focal point to understand how satellite dishes work! I saw several people interacting with them, and found them quite enjoyable myself. Still, I can't help but think that just rearranging a few things could have produced a coherent narrative that might have made a good exhibit even better.

...I'm starting to get on board with the museums-as-narrative-devices thing, in case you hadn't guessed. I think it's something PARI could do well, if we tell the history of the site through the space junk in the museum. I think that's also something Steve wants me to expound upon, so, good.

Also in MoLaS: A butterfly house with tropical/exotic butterflies, such as this iridescent blue morpho.

I also discussed transitions between exhibit areas, things to avoid like the plague when designing an exhibit, and the rationale behind serving either kids or adults and leaving teenagers to enjoy themselves or not at their own discretion. (Teenagers are basically impossible to cater to, since many would rather not identify themselves as kids despite still liking some kid things or hang with their parents, who would appreciate a museum aimed more at adults. There's no winning.)

As for transitions in exhibit areas, Roy had an interesting point. I've bemoaned our two completely ill-at-odds collections in previous posts: Rocks have very little to do with space junk, and the result is something with a most peculiar mood. Roy's point was that we could either tie them together through techniques of opening up the space between them, perhaps putting a window from one area to the next, that kind of thing...or play up the differences, make the transition more abrupt, use it to showcase two different styles like some kind of sample of the things we can do at PARI so invest in us and let us put a proper building aside for this purpose k thx bye. (Those were not his words. I'm paraphrasing and adding in my own interpretation.)

...he also said that the single worst thing to do in exhibit design is to work solo. I...yeah, I kind of guessed. My overall impression after talking to him is that I've been given a basically impossible task and unless I find a genie or Rumplestiltskin or the crow Peri or the random magical stuff Jack found in his stories, it isn't bloody likely to be entirely completed. But I'll do the best I can, of course, and everyone who asks what I'm doing--it's a common thing, because no two people at PARI are working on the same project--is just going to get quizzed about whether or not they think my latest harebrained idea is a sound one. At least everyone I've spoken to agrees that the big window in there should be used for something, and many agree that a timeline is a decent enough idea.

However...as for today...

I come in and somebody has left a shoebox full of 21.5 mm camera filters from 1954 on my desk.

1954 filters through a 1954 filter that the digital camera tried to compensate for
...thus rendering them obsolete at least as far as cameraphones are concerned..

I don't know why.

I don't know what I'm supposed to do with them.

I'm not sure how exasperated I should be that people keep leaving random donated objects on my desk for me to deal with. 

I guess I'll put them with the stamps? ...seriously, what the heck am I supposed to do with these? They're nice, several are unopened and still in their plastic wrapping inside their leather cases wrapped in their original EdnaLite labels in their original cardboard boxes, but what am I supposed to do? Track down a 21.5mm camera? I think the last time I took photos on actual film was sometime in the early 2000s, if you count polaroids. They aren't going to fit a telescope, and that's not what they were made for anyways. 

With filter

Why did somebody even donate these? What did they hope to achieve by putting them on my desk? 

Without filter, in the approximately 2 seconds before the camera compensated

Mysteries of the universe, indeed.

Oh, and my parents and grandparents are coming to Brevard today, so that'll be nice. I can give them a tour of PARI tomorrow, and hopefully won't bore them to tears.