May round-up

It seems like ages since my last post! The truth is, a lot has been happening at work recently, including quite a lot of writing. It appears that there is a limit to how much I can write at any given time. A few times recently I opened a new document, ready to write a blog post, only to find myself half an hour later staring at a blank page, mentally ranking Star Wars films or planning my next step in the war against garden slugs. At that point I admitted defeat and moved on to something that comes more naturally to me than writing — coding.

But here I am now! To be fair, this is an easy post: since we are now in June, just three weeks before the exhibition, it is time to give you the final monthly round-up.

I’m happy to say, we are almost ready to go! Our team of volunteers has been confirmed, and it includes twelve people from Keele and ten from Newcastle. Some of them are staying the whole week, while others are helping out for a few days, but I am grateful to all of them for contributing their time and energy to our exhibit. I hope they all find it a rewarding experience, and I’ll try to get a few of them to reflect on it afterwards on this blog.

We have confirmed our accommodation and ordered our team polo shirts. I am hoping to get train tickets sorted this week.

Our community partner Wavemaker have created a really great design for our stand. We have a grey and orange colour scheme, and you can see our logo below.

Wavemaker have also designed plywood worktops, including a lovely and very practical tabletop for the centre of our exhibit. The table will host our 3D-printed mechanical hand, and feedback forms for our visitors.

For feedback, we are hoping to get our visitors to “give us a hand” - and a few words: we’ll ask them to draw the outline of their hand, and write a word or more inside each digit. This is loosely based on the idea of the cinquain poem, which is a poem in five lines. It is often used by our partners at the New Vic Theatre in their Cultural Animation workshops.

For our exhibit, we have adapted it to the following:

First line — a one-word title: something memorable from our exhibit

Second line — two words that describe the title

Third line — three words: what you have seen, heard, and felt

Fourth line — four words (or a phrase): what actions you want to take

Fifth line — one word: a final thought

This will be our recommended format, but of course people will be welcome to write or draw anything they like, inspired by our exhibit.

We will use our visitors’ “hands” to decorate our stand, so that it is continuously changing during the week! Afterwards, we will use the poems for evaluation.

What do you think? If you’d like to have a go at creating a cinquain poem based on this blog, please comment or tweet us :)