Planning Tools
American History Workshop uses a unique set of tools in its planning and design work.
Professional
Practice Through Collaboration: After many years of consulting,
AHW recognized that individual cultural organizations cannot realize
long-range goals by working only with their own resources. Further,
public historical interpretation has no institutional basis for “R & D,” not
within universities, professional associations, or public funding agencies.
But much can be done collaboratively. To this end, AHW has initiated
an annual New York Institute for Public History Interpretation, a 10-day
training workshop for mid-career professionals. Many AHW projects include
internships and training opportunities for entry-level professionals,
especially those from minority backgrounds. Telling
Lives, the newest AHW initiative, aims to foster
consortia of museums, libraries, and archival projects to share research,
public programming, and educational resources.
Community
Story Workshops: Gathering groups representative of local and tourist
audiences is a way of learning how key potential themes are currently
understood, how diverse communities seek to learn, and what local cultural
and organizational resources are available for partnerships. In the
Berkshires, we discovered that visitors to an artist's home and studio
have little usable knowledge of how a practicing artist divides his
time among solitary work in the studio, meetings with dealers and patrons,
and carrying on a life outside of work. This moved the exhibit planning
far beyond the examination of completed pieces to explore the creative
process at work.
Experiential
Flow Diagrams: Thinking of the site visit from the beginning as
an event in time, not merely in space, is a way of disciplining the
design process. For the Monmouth (N.J.) Battlefield Park visitor center
exhibit, for example, AHW created multiple pathways that reflected
widely diverging visitor expectations. Recreational visitors could
get an overview of the 12-hour Revolutionary War battle in a 12-minute
walkthrough. More committed visitors could explore tactics, weapons,
and the social context of war making for hours on end without disturbing
the "streakers."
Thematic
Overviews: Rooting the stories to be told in wider historical and
cultural contexts, backed up by good scholarship, puts the project
on a solid footing. Knowing the present is a precondition to interpreting
the past. The introduction of an automated salmon-butchering machine
to Pacific Northwest canneries in the 1900s and 1910s raised questions
about ecology, immigrant labor, global markets, and technological change
that are equally powerful for regional residents today.
Iterative
Design: From the early moments of the project, key backers (staff,
board members, community sponsors) should see the "whole picture." Master
planning is of course composed of many distinct research and design
studies, but it is dangerous to isolate elements from their connection
to other key domains. It is not just a building or an exhibit that
is being constructed in the planning process but a community of supporters,
who need to be knowledgeable enough to carry the project forth on their
own for years to come. AHW projects proceed from one big picture to
another, always fleshing in more details and always testing suggested
changes by their impact on other interrelated elements.