January Wrap-Up!
The end of January is already here! It has been a busy time here at Eastern as the exhibit comes together. This week brought several deadlines, which can always make for stressful experience. As seen in last week’s blog, editing our booklet has been a long and arduous process of writing, editing, re-writing… you get the point. While it can be a difficult process, it has also helped us to organize and solidify plans for the next two months.
Part of the planning that has come together recently are the other events we are planning around the opening of our exhibit. Some of these are events that are being put on by the class, including a pop-up museum proceeding the opening of the exhibit, a guided tour of the exhibit, and a genealogy workshop led by Cayla Wagner. We are also working with professionals in the local and museum community, including a document restoration workshop with a local bookstore, a lecture by current director of the Illinois State Museum, Michael Wiant, and the opening keynote of the exhibit, delivered by the Illinois State Historian, Dr. Samuel Wheeler.
Our formative evaluations offered quite a bit of useful knowledge for putting together the formal aspects of our exhibit. The four teams journeyed the future site of the exhibit in Booth Library to test out some of our “elements of design”, and were able to record actual student responding to text, interactive materials, and graphic displays. We received great responses, the few tweaks we needed to make were still well received.
Finally, we are looking forward to one of the last stages: fabrication. The team will be creating the construction designs which will be built in about a month and a half. While we have scale models, discussing construction methods and practical application was a great opportunity to convert theory to reality. The central case will be our biggest project, but the whole group will complete the design this week.
If you have not already, give us a follow on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. There are lots of great updates on the exhibit and the group being added every day!
