The History Center in Tompkins County
In my final semester at Cornell, I took a course called Design, Media, & Community. In the semester long design-seminar, 3 other students and I worked with The History Center in Tompkins County, a local institution dedicated to preserving the regions rich history. Our semester long goal was to design a proposal that would enable The History Center to incorporate Transmedia Knowledge principles into their exhibits, their archive, and their school programs. In a nutshell, Transmedia Knowledge is defined as the transition to an experiential, hand-on approach to learning, whether that be in the class. The tenets of Transmedia Knowledge are founded within certain types of learning such as lab work, place-based learning, studio-seminars, co-ops, and field trips. Through semester-long work in the classroom, numerous on-site visits to the History Center, and a massive shift to distance learning amongst the pandemic, my team built a website that outlined an in-depth proposal advising on now the History Center could optimize their current resources to establish stronger academic programs that utilize Transmedia Knowledge principles to enhance learning amidst the pandemic. Our final deliverable, a website documenting our semester long-journey and proposal, can be found here.
Project Elements
Field Visits
We began our semester’s work by conducting an initial visit to the History Center to learn about their resources and current community programs. While we new our semester-end goal was to design a proposal that would allow them to enhance their public offerings by utilizing Transmedia Knowledge, we first had to meet with their employees to get a strong sense of how they were currently operating. Through our initial visit we gained key insights from the employees on operational inefficiencies within their archive and education infrastructure which we used as foundation to begin planning our proposal.
Halfway through the semester, we paid a second visit to the History Center. This time, we visited alongside a class from one of the local elementary schools. In the few hours we spent with the class, we were able to gauge hands-on how they were utilizing the History Center’s Resources in their curriculum and were able to narrow down our focus towards designing a proposal to enhance the History center’s academic partnerships.
Info Comic
An info comic is a useful tool construct a narrative and user story for a design. The above photo shows a screenshot of an info comic we made to showcase how our design proposal could play out in reality. It paints a scene of students going to the History Center to engage in place-based learning outside of the class. For full info comic, navigate here and scroll to “Deliverables”.
Pechakuchas
A pechakucka is a quick and digestible presentation medium that follows a 10 slide x 20-second delivery format. Each one of my teammates made an individual Peckakucha to be used as informative supplements to help the History Center and the schools better understand the tenets of Transmedia Knowledge and how they fit would fit into the programs we were proposing. Navigate here and scroll to “Crash Course in Transmedia Knowledge Using PechaKuchas” to view the 4 videos.
Remote-Learning Pitch
Halfway through the semester Covid-19 forced us to shift our focus towards proposing remote-learning solutions that would allow schools to conduct partnered programs with the History Center from a far. We detailed two proposals - podcasting and virtual exhibiting using Artsteps - which would allow for students to take advantage of easy to use technology to complete creative assignments from home. Navigate here and scroll to the “Virtual Design Proposals” section (password: community).
Proposal Website
We capped off our semester by presenting our findings over Zoom to our partners at the History Center and in the local high-schools. We built a web-page detailing our research, design work, and proposals. As our Teams webmaster, my main responsibility was to compile the semester’s work and deliverables into a neat, easy to navigate, and attractive web-page. As of this fall, the History Center has been using our site as a guide for implementing our proposals.