This morning, Elaine, Magenta and I were finally up to present our chapter from The Ten Faces of Innovation. After spending about two hours the night before working on hashing out the best way to present the material, I was pretty excited to give our presentation and run the activities we had planned. The first activity was something that I actually participated in during Honors 100 Fall quarter. While I adapted it to be a little more scaled back for this activity, the basic premise is that each group is missing some sort of resource that they would need to sustain human life. The only way to obtain these resources is to collaborate with the other groups to create things like shelter, food and medicine. I really like the activity as a warm up to get everyone talking, awake and focused on the material since it was a Monday morning.
We then moved on to discuss some of the key points of the “Collaborator” from the chapter and some of the hurdles that comes with this role. After we summarized the chapter, we passed out four scenarios that we developed based on some of the challenges the book discussed. We had scenarios that dealt with skeptics of innovation, the challenges of transparency and international communication. We gave each group a few minutes to discuss how an effective collaborator would address the situation and then had each group share out what they discussed. As a group, we had written down some of the ideal points that the discussion would hit on, and after each group shared out, Elaine would help tie it back to the ideas that our group came up with when planning.
After our presentation, we got good feedback from other students who felt like we did a good job both delivering the material and making it engaging and interactive. If I could change one thing, I would have given the beginning activity a little more context and time permitting allowed for a little bit of discussion around it. I also felt like I didn’t get to jump in with some of my thoughts later in the presentation, which came down to a little bit of a lack of planning in terms of dividing speaking time evenly. Overall, I felt like it went well and that we relayed the most important information from the chapter to the class.
During the second part of the class, we broke up into three groups to debrief and discuss both our site visits and the different places we had visited in our free time over the past week. One of the topics we began to discuss was how museums, like the Van Gogh Museum, are trying to target the 18 - 30 demographic to bring them into the museums. As a member of that demographic, one thing I particularly liked at the Tropenmuseeum was an incorporation of both historical exhibits and contemporary exhibits about issues like climate change that are particularly important to my generation. In terms of innovation, it got me thinking about ways that museums could still be educational and do a better job of engaging this demographic. It made me wonder if museums did a better job displaying both exhibits from a historical perspective and then liked it to exhibits about issues that the 18 - 30 demographic are passionate about, perhaps it would help to bring more of this demographic into the museum.
I left this idea as more of an open-ended question to our discussion, in part because I don’t think it’s an idea that we can give a definitive answer to. Naturally, what issues this demographic are passionate about are going to be influenced by geography and life experience and no single exhibit will capture the attention of every single person in this age range. While we ran out of time to continue discussion this idea, especially in the context of innovation, it is something I will continue to think about as we continue our site visits during the program. Innovation may be something as simple as choosing a diverse range of exhibits and understanding the target audience. We tend to think of innovation as something flashy, new and technology based, but examples like the Tropenmuseeum prove that innovation doesn’t always appear in this way.
Since we just had class this morning, Megan, Sloane and I headed out to grab lunch nearby right after before picking up Rachel and heading over to the photography museum. We took a nice leisurely 20 minute walk to the museum from the hotel. The museum itself is not large and was built into a structure resembling an old house. On the very top level, it actually had a library filled with books about film and photography that was unfortunately not open to the public at that time. Down on the main floor, we were all fascinated by the work of a photographer named Alex Prager. Her work mainly centers in Los Angeles and brings back a vibe from the 50's while prominently featuring women in her work. She used vibrant colors that look almost simulated in her highly staged photographs and short films. Having taken a couple of photography classes myself, I really enjoyed getting to see work from some up and coming photographers.