Forskar barn på museet

 "Researching children at the museum"
On Tuesday we took a trip to the Swedish American Museum and were able to shadow two groups of clever and curious second graders.
The museum offers amazing resources for school groups and is setup in a way that allows the staff to adopt tours to different age groups:

1. A hands-on, experiential section where children are sent back in time to experience the lifestyle in Sweden and the hardship that came before and after immigration.
2. The "actual" museum about the Swedish immigration to America, with information about the life back then, the struggles of the journey and the hopes and fears associated with leaving one's country.
3. An activity time, which includes the performance of a song/dance or some craft activity, giving the students time and space to experience Swedish culture similar to what their peers in Sweden might do.
The teachers are provided with an educational package packed with materials to enable them to prime the children for the visit and ensure they get the best out of their trip.
It looked like they all quite enjoyed it and we were amazed at the amount of information they took away from their visit.

Tomorrow the museum will celebrate its 10th anniversary, so if you are in the area make sure to pay it a visit.

Reframing our scope

After a few visits to the museum, the group came together with our research and looked through the areas we think we can do deeper research on.

The bigger clusters that appeared are about:

• audience focus
• student group experience
• participatory activities
• identity
• impact on community
• exhibits vs. events balance
• exhibit interaction
• curation focus/hierarchy
• architecture space planning
• getting there from outside
• multipurpose spaces inside
• spacial flow/way finding
• collateral/interpretation tools
• exhibit interaction
• staff
• policies

We plotted these bigger themes based on how long it will take to implement, and how much impact it would give to museum, and decided to focus on STUDENT GROUP EXPERIENCE. This area will take a little bit of time to implement, but it would be pretty impactful when applied. When we focus on student group experience, we will cover some other themes like, participatory activities, collateral/interpretation tools, multipurpose spaces inside, audience focus, exhibit interaction and policies.

Visiting Little Black Pearl

This week, some of our team members headed over to Little Black Pearl (LBP)–Art and Design Center's Options Laboratory High School to meet with teachers that we will be collaborating with.

We will be running two workshops with the students.

For the first workshop, we are intending to have the students to explore the museum, and do research with us.

The second workshop, we will be collaborating with students from LBP in a workshop setting to generate ideas for the museum.

We are excited to be running workshops with the students and looking forward to creative and wonderful outcome!

image source

Observational Research (and a great show!)

This week we officially kicked off our observational research at the DuSable Museum. On Thursday, Gretchen took the train down to the Hyde Park institution to observe the traffic patterns and movements of visitors as they made their way through DuSable's permanent exhibits.

On Friday morning, the rest of the team headed down to DuSable to catch the special student and senior showing of 'Something About Oscar Brown Jr.' starring Morris Gearring. Oscar Brown Jr., a Chicago native and lifelong resident, was an influential singer, songwriter, poet and Civil Rights activist. The show was wonderful and the team was impressed with the enthusiasm and energy of the student audience.

After the show, the team took notes and photos as the 350 students and their teachers navigated their way through the exhibits in the museum.  The 'Africa Speaks' exhibit was particularly popular with the young students. 

We also had the pleasure to meet with Antoinette Simmons from DuSable's Education Department. She was generous enough to make room in her very busy schedule to speak with us about the joys and challenges of hosting student groups at the museum. We're looking forward to returning to the museum and the Hyde Park neighborhood next week to continue with our research initiative. 

Project Kickoff Meeting

On Monday, the ID team met with Charles Bethea, Chief Operating Officer of the DuSable, at the museum for a kickoff meeting. Lisa Montgomery, Director of IIT's Student Center for Diversity and Inclusion, joined us as well. 

Charles gave us a tour of the museum to show us the existing exhibits and to explain some of the challenges inherent in using a repurposed building. We also saw the beautiful model of the new roundhouse building—the museum will be going through some big changes when it opens.

We're excited to be working with the museum during such an exciting transition! This project gives us some interesting constraints to design for: a variety of visitor types to engage (student groups, local families, tourists), spaces that need to be multipurpose and succeed in form and function, and a need to stay true to the Chicagoan and African American communities of which the museum is a part.