While we enter the final 6 weeks of course, and begin racing full speed ahead, I thought I should reflect on our final project a bit more. More specifically, I wanted to take you all on a journey which I call Curating an Exhibit. Luckily for us, we have a physical and digital space. Throughout this blog posting I encourage you to reflect critically on the spaces that we have and think about what aspects of this we can include within our exhibits.
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When curating an exhibit there are many questions that we must ask ourselves. Lynsay did an amazing job highlighting these during our conversation today regarding a design brief.
Who is our audience?
What do we want them to know (when they come to the exhibit and visit our website)?
How can we engage them?
What purpose to they have (and reason) to want to visit our website?
What items will make them want to come to the exhibit?
Who are our stakeholders and how do they influence our exhibits?
Similar to writing a paper, as curators we have an intention which we can call a thesis. This thesis is one that is persistent throughout the entire exhibit. It is an underlying theme or message that guides and influences our work. This doesn’t have to a repeated phrase or even mentioned within the exhibit itself but we as the curators must remember this within our work. This thesis will inspire not only us, but the visitors as well. This can be related to Marc’s question of “how do we reach a target audience that is beyond the notion of ‘people like us’’? If we identify our target audience, we can then identify those who exist outside of it? Why would those people be interested in our exhibit, and how can we intentionally build those ideas into our framework?
In order to truly be successful with this, we need cohesion across all the teams. My role as the project manager to assist with this cohesion. If you are waiting for something and the other team has past the deadline, my job is to help the team and you while we waiting. We must be transparent and trust each other in the different areas.
Here are the list of dates and deadlines that we discussed in class, with a few extras and adjustments. Remember if you are unable to complete a task by the deadline, do not worry! Just communicate and let everyone know.
February 28: Finalized Exhibit Layout (Hard deadline, March 2)
March 1: Design Brief for Website (After reviewing exhibit layout) (Hard deadline, March 3)
March 3: QR Codes (Information on how to make them gathered)
March 5: List of all content required for website (Hard deadline, March 8)
March 8: 3 poster designs created and ready to be printed (Hard deadline, March 10)
March 20: Website Beta ready to launch (Hard deadline, March 25)
March 21: Pamphlet created (based on exhibit and website) (Hard deadline, March 26)
March 22: Exhibit set-up (Hard deadline based on change of exhibition dates)
I will be adding more deadlines to Trello based on the tasks that everyone is completing. Remember if you are unsure please ask, and it is better to overshare than underscore in a group project!