¡Empezar! Team Clemente Steps Up To The Plate
“¡Empezar!” — means “begin” in Spanish
Our motivation for our first kickoff meeting was twofold: we wanted to learn more about Clemente and the museum, but also discover what motivated Duane Rieder, our client, to create the museum in the first place. The questions and activities we developed for our meetings prompted Duane and Rob Larson, who works with the museum, to share the Clemente Museum’s history, not as rote fact but as rich stories that conveyed the inspiration of Roberto Clemente and how he made an impact on the world.
Our team mulled over what Duane and Rob shared, and generated a current and future state model to illuminate the problem space on three fronts: the museum experience, the artifacts and their medium, and our target audience.
One of the main insights we got was that despite the incredible collection of artifacts, the process in which the Clemente Museum shows these artifacts and stories to the audience was analogous. The audience had to rely on Duane and the docents to weave the narrative and connect the artifacts for the audience, with little context before visiting the museum or after the tours finished. The experience began and ended at the museum.
Over the course of these meetings, our observations layered on each other, and our initial impression of a museum dedicated to a baseball player evolved into an understanding of the dedication the museum represents. Clemente’s astounding humanitarian work, his commitment to his values and the disadvantaged peoples they served, and the man behind it all, is the core message we’re looking to communicate in the design of our project.
An entirely unexpected adventure of our first sprint, yet one that became integral to our project, was an immediate visit to the museum itself. While we certainly intended on planning a trip, a friendly invitation from Duane during our first kick-off meeting had us scheduling an expedition for the next day. With our masks on and social distancing measures in mind, the three members of our team in Pittsburgh headed for the Clemente Museum.
Even from the outside, the Clemente Museum strikes a unique visage. The tall mural of Roberto Clemente, painted with help from the local community, against the deep red brick adorned with vines, suggested the foundation for the tone of our project. Over the next two hours, as our team travelled through the 19th century firehouse-turned-museum, we laid that foundation, building our understanding of Clemente, his legacy, and the experience that we’re trying to create. As we absorbed the rich stories that Duane told, stories that brought context and life to artifacts, we considered how to enrich them further. We got a glimpse of the impact that Clemente had, and the importance of communicating his legacy to the millions of Latin American fans and children that are a key audience of our project. It became clear how important it was to discover how to reach people that might not be able to physically come to the museum, whether due to COVID, geographic distance, or impairment.
When our team left the museum, we knew we had only scratched the surface. Yet, this initial foray into research has helped us generate questions, from which we’ve developed a research plan to investigate how to boost accessibility and bring Clemente’s stories to a new audience.
After our kickoff meetings and physical exploration of the museum with Duane and Rob, we’ve gotten to understand the current state of the Clemente Museum, and where it can be in the future. Now, how can we bring the museum experience alive for a larger audience and a younger generation to continue the legacy of Roberto Clemente? How do we make the museum more accessible, both during a pandemic and beyond one? A museum experience is multi-layered, engaging both the artifacts and the mediums that connect them. We’ve begun planning comprehensive research to better understand this museum space and how digital technology can transform that experience.
Our plan includes secondary research on these domains, scouring articles and papers for relevant topics, as well as primary research by interviewing multiple stakeholders from museum experts to museum-goers. We want to investigate how to appeal to younger visitors, especially those that might not have heard of Clemente before, so we’re looking towards parents and educators. What motivates engagement in youth? How do we influence attitudes and behavior change?
We’re excited to see how our research unfolds in the next few weeks, and we’re excited to share what we find as we learn what works and what doesn’t. Despite all our questions, it’s most important that we take the leap, dive into our research, and see where the flow takes us. So wish us luck!
Signing Off,
Team Clemente
