Teamwork Makes The Dream Work

The past week has been all about design briefs. The design brief is an end product of the planning phase of any exhibit. It consists of the outcomes of the front end evaluation, our mission statement, and any results of our lively ongoing team member discussions. However, it is never final. This is a working document that will be referred to throughout the entire exhibit process, keeping any changes or new developments inline with the original intention.

A portion of our working design brief. It is awesome the committees are getting to work together like the curatorial and education committees shown here.

Our design brief is still very much a work in progress. Each committee is working hard to ensure that it is the best it can be. During our weekly meeting this past Wednesday we all worked diligently to make final decisions on what objects are most important in each case and how each case helps to answer each of our questions of who, what, when, where, and why. While each committee was tasked certain questions it certainly takes team work all around to ensure that this design brief is the best. Some questions take multiple committees to answer. As we all know team work makes the dream work! The best part of this meeting (besides the root beer floats before hand) was the help Mr. Riccio and Dr. Barnhart gave us when they stopped by. They were able to answer questions we had and give us direction to further the design brief process.

In other exhibit news, oral histories have been set up with several members in the field of Illinois public history. These oral histories will not only help us with our exhibit, but also with our Local History class. It's always nice when you get a twofer! Looking forward, those students doing oral histories are going to meet to come up with a set of 5-10 questions to ask each interviewee. This will help to put together film to be used in the exhibit. These kind of questions could be as simple as "Why does history matter?' to the more complicated question of "How do the histories of Illinois museums and historical agencies contributed to the intellectual and cultural history of the Prairie State?"