My day STARTED productively...

Let's start with a revised list of questions I would like to ask somebody at another museum--because I think it's worthwhile to consider something I learned at Life & Science. When I asked about their Aerospace collection, I was told that they would like to redo it at some point and if they were to redo it, they would probably get in touch with the Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville at some point during their design process. Which typically lasts several years.

Yeah, I know, impossible task. Excuse me while I bang my head against the wall for a few minutes. Don't worry: All the interns are doing it, having realised the sheer enormity of what we're being asked to do... something that would be totally possible if we could duplicate ourselves, set both of ourselves to the task, and maybe had an extra month or three. But I digress.

My revised list of questions is as follows:

1. How do you choose what audiences to cater to, and how do you opt to cater specifically to those audiences--or different audiences within the same exhibit?
2. What principles of visual or spatial design are important when creating an effective exhibit? 
3. How do you persuade guests to engage with the content you provide?
4. What is the worst mistake a person could make when designing a new experience? How can that mistake be avoided? 
5. What makes a museum worth revisiting? 
6. Are there any techniques you tend to favour for creating a sense of flow within an exhibit? What is the best way to move people from one gallery to another? 
7. Do you use guest feedback when creating new museum experiences?

This stems from things I discussed with Roy, as well as things I've run against since or thought about more that I feel would be nice to know. I'll discuss who I should talk to next with Steve later today. Among other things. (I should make a list of things I need to ask today, too, because I really do need to know some stuff before I continue with The Master Plan and while I'm flattered that he wants to set me up for a career in this museum thing, I assume he'd also like me to be able to do my best with the job he wants me to do now.) 

I also mocked up a sample interactive that, if we have something small that can run a powerpoint presentation, would be a pretty space efficient way of including the interactive I sketched a couple of weeks ago--the "What does this thing do?" type. How does it work? Well, did you ever play review jeopardy in school (or have you ever had to make a jeopardy game)? 

PowerPoint lets you hyperlink to other slides within the presentation. So if, for example, you click on the first option, you get directed to a slide telling you whether you're right or wrong and more information about the device that does that thing.

It's also possible to disable advance-by-clicking or other methods of advancing a powerpoint, or to upload a powerpoint as an HTML-5 webpage. I would need to discuss this and play around a bit more to produce something really polished and usable, but I think this represents a pretty solid proof-of-concept. 

Also, I spent yesterday afternoon experimenting with CAD programs. Sketchup is the best I've tried, but only because I spent about an hour getting increasingly frustrated with a program called FreeCAD which promised a user interface a bit more like SolidWorks (which doesn't run on Mac). Sketchup isn't without its faults: It's a bit annoying to use at the best of times, especially when one hasn't used any kind of drafting program for over a year. I'll mess with it more later, whenever I start feeling particularly masochistic. The LayOut program I used to create the floorplan yesterday was a helluva lot more intuitive (not really), and I think I'll be able to use it for making a pretty polished floorplan that can be neatly labeled, printed, and filed away as some kind of official record. Whoop.

A conversation I overheard between two of the staffers: 

"Connect connect connect! Got it!"

"Working on the 26 meter?" 

"No. The printer over there."

"Ah. That is an achievement."  

Says it all, really. 

As for the rest of my day...Well. Due to unforeseen technical difficulties (read: the nearest place that sells Apple power cables is an hour or so away) my meeting with Steve is postponed and I haven't the foggiest notion what I'm supposed to be doing with my time. In other words: Awesome. 

Which means, I suppose, that I ought to take the initiative to contact the museums I think could be helpful to contact as part of The Quest, work on editing the documentaries I'm working with such that they're of a reasonable, bite-sized length with subtitles, and do something about the encroaching ice pick headache. Not to mention, whenever I feel like throwing something the most, more sketches. 

At least I think there's a presentation on meteorites in half an hour and we're being called on to give a college panel to the Duke TIP kids (why we made the choices we made!) at five. Which is, yes, technically after work, but if it helps them out, so be it. Still, I can't help but feel a little like the fellows who ended up answering a telephone stored under one of the floor tiles: 

"Jim, go find out why the floor is ringing, will you?"
From "The Vital Link", a 1966 Goddard documentary

He's not sure what exactly went wrong, why exactly this was the best place for a phone, why they have to remove the tile every time the want to talk to somebody, or whether or not he should try and fix this by himself... but he's making due in the interim.

Unless Goddard made a habit of storing the telephones down there. Which is possible, albeit insane. Apparently somebody lost a mug under one of our tiles during the NASA days and only found it when they were bringing the site back online to turn it into PARI, and there are regular jokes about "See if you can find the intern we lost under the tiles a few years back!" 

But... You get the point. 

Edit: And nobody actually told the Duke TIP kids about the floor. What? I enlightened the ones who were curious, and also gave them the handy spotter's guide to telling NASA tiles apart from DoD tiles. (The DoD has no sense of humour or colour of which they are aware.)