A Month Worth of News!
Current Collective has been back to work for over a month now and I’m just now getting around to writing up a recap. Look forward to more frequent updates and more in-depth subject-specific articles in the coming weeks!
We all took the summer off of this museum project to do internships. We still met once a month to talk over Skype about different museums we had visited and to share ideas.
Week 1: Off-roading and Team Building
The first week back as a group, we wanted to be sure to get off on the right foot as a group, so we planned a trip together to see parts of Madeira we hadn’t visited yet. We spent a day bouncing around in a jeep in the laurel forest, swimming in natural pools, and vlogging our hearts out.
We took this first week slow to get acclimated to our lives on the island and to get into the right headspace to work.
Week 2: Re-visiting our Concept and our Client
This week, we looked back at our concepts from last semester. After some evaluation, we decided that we weren’t very excited about any one of our existing concepts and went back to the drawing board a bit.
We approached this by first, deciding exactly what story we wanted to tell. We came up with two variations for this and took them to our first client meeting since May!
After discussions with our client, we decided to pursue our second concept: Madeira is Made for Energy as a way of introducing renewable energy sources and challenges using Madeira as the context. With this, we moved into week 3.
Week 3: Iteration!
In our third week, we began to refine our concept and to consider ways that we could make this vision work in a museum context. We had a series of group and individual brainstorming sessions and created some conceptual storyboards as our vehicle of ideation.
At this stage, we split our ideation into two distinct parts: the story the exhibit would tell and the structure that the exhibit would take. We planned for these to converge in the future.
Week 4: Visiting the Pumped Storage Hydro Plant
This week, we spent a lot of time with our client both in meetings and touring various facilities that manage power in Madeira.
We presented the work we had done on our story and structure to our client and they seemed pleased with the direction we were taking and offered some other feedback.
The next day, we were taken on tours of two interesting pieces of infrastructure that serve the electrical grid here: the pumped storage hydro plant and a control center for the grid. These visits were really helpful for giving us concrete examples of ideas we had been thinking about abstractly. The control center, in particular, gave us a better idea of the challenges of managing a small scale and isolated electrical grid and how renewables currently fit into their energy diet.
Week 5: Design Crits and Scoping
After a session with one of our professors, we got some feedback about the scope of our project. He recommended we significantly scope down the amount of work we plan to accomplish during the rest of our project. He also recommended we refine our story content so that we can make a stronger exhibit proposition based on what we want to teach.
As a result, we spent this week refining our story, doing research on the state of the art in energy storage, and looking into some museum education resources like Learning From Museums.
A lot of this week was spent planning for next week since three out of four of us were traveling, but we spent our time well and are looking ahead to some museum testing and our quarter term presentation!
