Museomix 2019 Workshop
As a designer it would be a dream project to design a museum space that brings to the viewer an experience that is delightfully memorable. Though a project like that is yet to come my way, attending the Museomix 2019 workshop was the closest I could get to it for now.
The workshop, hosted by Unbox, Banana House and Makers Asylum, was about bringing an intervention, analog or technological, to specific spaces within the Terracotta Museum of the Sanskriti Foundation on the outskirts of Delhi.
I chose to work with the space housing Manipuri and Delhi pottery.
Once the teams were decided, we went to our location and had a look at the exhibit again and did a quick brainstorm on different possibilities for the intervention. The workshop was a two and half day event so whatever we did had to be a quick one to execute.
Fortunately, the team (Spin; we named ourselves that) had a ceramist with a pretty good knowledge of the art of pottery. She pointed out several aspects that the other two members had no idea about, like certain deformities, textures and so on. This led us to the inspiration for a intervention.
Inspiration
The inspiration, as I see it, was the invisible (to the uninformed viewer) difference between the pottery of the two places. Both are made of clay, both look like the traditional earthenware we know them to be, they all perform similar functions but they still are a result of two opposite processes. It is a beautiful socio-cultural metaphor of our society. “The process began with the realisation of what we thought we knew about the pots but we didn’t. So the purpose of the whole exercise was to inform the viewer of the most basic difference between the two pottery processes which was not apparent to the untrained eye just by looking at them.
Description
A good museum, I like to believe, is a place that does not spoon feed you but sparks a curiosity in you that follows you even after you have left the space. So we wanted to keep the intervention to the minimum but also create an immersive experience so that it sticks.
In essence, that was to show that the Delhi pots were made on a spinning wheel whereas the Manipuri pots stayed stationary while the potter spun around it. For this we designed a simple podium that would hold a small spinning wheel with a pot on it in the center of the room. The podium was first placed straight but later at a 45 degree angle so that when one enters from either side of the room they they face one side of the podium. That also helped us place the ultrasonic sensors along the two sides.
The idea was when one comes close enough to the podium the sensor would trigger the interactions. So when one entered facing the Delhi pots, the light inside the podium lights up the signage that talks about the pots from Delhi and the wheel on top of the podium starts spinning. When one further moves towards the Manipur side the sensor lights up the Manipur signage and starts playing the sound of patting the pots with a wooden baton while the pot stays stationary.
One of the things that one wants to do when one sees earthenware is to touch it so we decided to add two strips of clay that illustrate the textural differences between the two pottery processes.
We also wished to project the silent videos of the two processes on the walls next to the exhibits but there weren’t enough projectors. So we decided to draw out the processes and placed printed sunboards on the respective sides of the podium.
At the end, all of the aspects of the intervention were experienced at this one point keeping the main exhibit in focus.
Since it was a two and half day sprint, we were not able to achieve all that we wanted to but at the end it was a great collaborative experience. The intervention, in essence, we felt added to the overall exhibit rather than taking all the attention for itself. It was a multisensorial experience that would take people closer to the pots and possibly make them find out more about them once they went back to their homes.
Team Spin, as we named our group, had three people Revati Jayakrishnan (@revati.jayakrishnan), Akshat Jain (@akijain2000) and I.
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