First Person Museum Exhibit Design

Assignment: How would you design the First Person Museum? Read Alice Parman's "Exhibit Makeovers: Do-It-Yourself Exhibit Planning" and describe your plan according to her six steps. Be sure to include a blueprint.

Step #1: Mission Statement, Take-Home Messages, and Storyline

Mission Statement (adapted from the First Person Arts website): "Everyone -- and everything -- has a story to tell. Sharing our stories and the stories of our possessions connects us with each other and the world."

Take-Home Messages:
(a) The story: Every object -- no matter how small or seemingly insignificant -- has two stories to tell: a personal story, and a history.
(b) The museum: The First Person Museum celebrates everyday objects, both for their individual (person) value and the value they possess within the larger (historical, cultural, social) context.
(c) The visitor: People like me play an essential role in museums like this.

The Storyline: Every object tells a story and a history. These stories and histories connect objects -- and their owners -- across time and place, and across racial/ethnic, gender, and age lines.

Step #2: "Galleries of Thought"

Unlike more conventional museums, which often display like objects with some sort of shared category, recognizable chronology, or collective theme, the objects in the First Person Museum relate to each other only insofar as they all have a story and history to tell. For this reason, creating a "gallery of thought" as Craig Kerger and Parman describe such arrangements becomes untenable. However, to show that all stories are valuable (in keeping with my take-home message), I have arranged the gallery into a semicircle; hopefully, visitors will recognize that while each story/history is different, all have value.

Step #3: Inventory & Facts

The sixteen objects that will feature in the First Person Museum have already been selected by a group organized by First Person Arts, and the "facts" relevant to each object have been presented by the owners of the objects (the storytellers) and the students in Studies in American Material Culture (the historians).

Steps #4 & #5: Motivate & Engage Visitors, Create the Look & Feel

Each person visiting the First Person Museum brings a unique set of experiences and perspectives to bear upon the objects in the museum and their arrangement within the space. The task for the curator, then, is to create the museum in such a way that visitors can move beyond those initial conceptions to arrive at the take-home messages of the museum and each object in it.

To that end, my design for the First Person Museum would attempt to strip away all superfluous context from the objects, allowing them to exist in and of themselves. Since Parman suggests cultivating within the exhibit space a "distinct visual style that communicates key messages about the content," I want to choose a design style that communicates the immanence of the objects first, and then augments that focus on materiality with story and history. The following description and blueprint (Step #6) attempts to cultivate such a space.

Housed in a display case of appropriate size, each object would present itself as unfettered as possible. With low lighting throughout the exhibit space and focused lighting (spotlighting) drawing attention to each piece, I would hope to further centralize each object and bring the focus of the visitor to bear upon the very materiality of the object (rather than on the physical surroundings of the object).

I recognize that this approach does contextualize the object in a certain way -- as a piece in a museum display -- and that people will necessarily bring attendant preconceptions and biases to such displays. I hope to combat these "bring-ins" by situating each object (literally) between video and audio presentations of its story and history. Visitors would wear headphones to experience each presentation.

Step #6: Blueprint

My basic design for the First Person Museum. Seating area in center,
individual display "cases" (pretend that the tables are cases, since Floorplanner
didn't have a "display case" option) in ring around room.

Closeup of one object area. Again, pretend that the table is in fact
a display case and note the two screens -- one to display a video
presentation of the object story, and another to display a video
presentation of the object history.

Images designed using Floorplanner.