The Plan and WE FOUND A COOL THING

So I was actually able to meet with my mentor. Which is good. And I have a more concrete list of tasks to branch out from, which is better. For the remainder of the week and until further notice (hah) I am to:

1. Fine tune the assignment from last week, to be specifically titled "Framing the PARI Museum Visitor Experience". My takeaway, which should resonate with those unfortunate enough to be veterans of the IB, is to make it an IB-esque 1-2 page reflection.
2. Research a mysterious concept called "Design Thinking" and determine its major components. (Expect a blog post.) It is apparently more than just graphic design. If anyone has heard of this before, let me know. If not, well, you will (hopefully) be able to learn what the heck that is soon. 
3. Draft/Outline a powerpoint presentation on the book I was researching a while back, the "Read you loud and clear!" The Story of NASA's Spaceflight Tracking and Data Network book (pdf linked again), about 20 minutes long, to present to the staff about the in-depth history of this place. Since I'm going to want diagrams, this also will involve snagging my graphics tablet when I get home this weekend. 
4. Continue drafting questions for museums, to be emailed in PDF attachment to a contact at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC--specifically, the VP of Exhibits and Planning. Hold off on emailing everyone else and their cousins until after that meeting, hopefully fairly early next week. (Mom, I'll keep you posted.)

A photograph from the aforementioned history book. Is this even us? We aren't sure. They could've mislabeled it...

Now, where to begin...

First, I did a sketch of the view from the gallery windows and made some notes on how that could potentially be useful as a timeline of Rosman/PARI, with a few key notes. The new website for the facility, which is still under development (but looks really nifty!) has a timeline after Don Cline (our founder) established PARI as a nonprofit, but the before sections are iffy. And people seem to be curious! So I'd like to aggregate what artefacts we have into some kind of timeline/history display within 5 feet of the wall, to take advantage of the full view of 26E the window affords.

Next,

What the heck is "Design Thinking"?

Design Thinking is a method for creating an end product for a very specific purpose. I get the impression that it can be used for museums, furniture, small objects, computer programs, anything intended to serve a large volume of people with related non-identical purposes. 

The steps listed in a Stanford pamphlet (they know what they're doing, right? They're Stanford!) are as follows: 

Empathise→Define→Ideate→Prototype→Test 

I can infer that, not listed, are the steps "Refine" and "Fabricate", on either side of the ultimate step. I can also infer that, given sufficient funding and time, the stages from Ideate→Test could be looped indefinitely, or until the exhibit is practically perfect. (If that's possible.) 

Phase One: Empathise

(I'm using the british spellings because my keyboard is just set that way and I don't bother to change it. Well, I set it to Russian yesterday because I was trying to translate a page on Apollo-Soyuz. Did you know that it's a bleeding nightmare to try to translate russian when your russian is limited to a partial knowledge of the cyrillic alphabet and about five words?) 

The principle here is to understand people and their needs within the context of one's design challenge. Or, "What do people want in terms of engagement with your product?" Basically, Phase One is just a fancy and formal way of putting the stuff I've already been doing. It's a need that's pretty easy to recognise, just in terms of sanity. Do people come to PARI for our rocks, space junk, history, what? In a very practical sense, why am I here? Why did they bother to bring somebody on board to do all this design analysis? 

The pamphlet goes on to tell people how to empathise with others, which alarms me somewhat. I guess it's useful in terms of making sure you can recognise empathising and stick a label on it, but it also makes me wonder what kind of psychopaths they're catering to. 

Phase Two: Define

The purpose here is to consolidate the information gathered in Phase One. Officially, Phase Two is defined as the creation of a meaningful and actionable problem statement--which sounds like a load of tripe to me. In a nutshell, one uses the data one has gathered about visitors to create a composite user/visitor/guest to design for.

Phase Three: Ideate

Brainstorm ideas for the design question established in Phase Two. Thoroughly brainstorm, not throwing anything out until later, saving even the most bizarre or unexpected solutions to the problem. The time to evaluate is after you rack your brains and can't come up with a single thing you haven't already considered, at which point select the best ideas for

Phase Four: Prototype 

Mock up, preferably in full scale or half scale, several of the best ideas from Phase Three. Use cheap materials for quick-and-dirty construction, such as foam board, cardboard, found objects, scotch or painters tape, and laser printed labels. Don't do anything nice at this stage, and only mock up for the things you want to test later--such as scale, visual impact, usability, or a lighting reference. Make it nice enough for visitor feedback, but don't blow your budget here; save that for after

Phase Five: Test

Solicit feedback on the prototype from users and professionals alike for input on usability and design impact, that kind of thing. However, do not give users a "tour" of your design solution; the point of this whole endeavour was something inherently usable with easy-to-understand features that a user with a range of motivations can understand and get something out of. Refine the prototype and repeat as necessary. It may also be helpful to build multiple prototypes and have your testers compare different iterations to each other, so that the most successful designs can be selected for in the final product.

BUT I MENTIONED WE FOUND A COOL THING

A mysterious stand of mysterious plans

Dan, the intern who was working on a paper about his software development, needed a break today. So we headed over to a pile of blueprints and maps and plans in the corner, initially with the mission of figuring out what's going on in that first picture I printed. We didn't solve that mystery, and I'm still only guessing that it's during the construction of one of the two 85' (26 meter) telescopes...probably 26E, since it was built first and the other telescope is pretty obviously not a 26 meter, but possibly 26W and 26E is out of frame of the picture. It's all a bit of a mystery, really. It's also possible the photo was mislabeled. I'm not ruling that out.

BUT ON TO THE COOL THING WE FOUND

We found, as expected, blueprints and maps and plans. We also found some information that looked like schematics and analysis for the 85' telescopes, at which point we called over Colleen, who's the intern working on the 12 meter telescope--it looked like some of the stuff we know she's been working with, and she was able to identify the pictures. But we also found some unidentifiable hand drawn circuit diagrams. (Any electrical engineers, computer engineers, or people familiar with circuit diagrams in general, if you want to come up, we can show you. Your input would be appreciated, since this is kind of a fun little mystery.)  We also-also found some plans from the building of 26 West, the second of the two 26 meter telescopes constructed in 1964:

Some very official bits and bobs from the telescope mount, somewhat yellowed
I think this looks like flying saucer plans at first glance. I know it isn't.
I did take enough engineering to identify what this is in a general sense.

In another drawer, we found plans from 1986-1988. Which is significant and somewhat surprising because Rosman wasn't a NASA facility after 1981. (It was before then--I have an artefact from 1980 that's a NASA calendar, made for Rosman, sitting on my desk right now, if you want proof.) We found Department of Defence Renovation Plans for the main building. 

We looked through them, established that the gold-carpet tiles were installed by NASA as part of the original facility--also identified by its blue brick exterior--and the grey carpet tiles are from the 1988 renovation, and also established something else cool: The renovation wasn't actually completed, there were plans for another expansion to this building. Presumably they lost funding and/or the Cold War ended and rendered this whole thing a bit obsolete. We then went down to the basement, where I remembered some more plans and found the blueprints on much bigger paper, some with the architect's seal visible--a Charlotte firm, for the Charlotteans reading, just FYI. 

WE FOUND DoD ARTEFACTS!! I mean, we found DoD artefacts cool enough that I am going to find a way to put some of this stuff on display. The coolest looking bits, that is. With signage so people know what they're looking at and why we spend about an hour looking at them and figuring out just what the DoD did. (that looks funny.) 

I also noticed the 1980 NASA calendar that was in the folder of, "We have this folder of stuff you might like, intern!" had a map of all the different tracking facilities still active in 1980. So it might be nice to scan that and make a nice copy for the timeline exhibit I'm ruminating on, since the original is in pretty wretched shape--water damage and yellowed and so on. 

We are ROS.
At this point, many of the Australian facilities had been decommissioned.
Alas.