Museum Research Session

Today's museum visit involved clarification of the brief, further idea generation and research into the museum. Here is a selection of photographs:

Group Meeting - Thursday 25 June

Tonight myself(Cam), Kylea and Liz had one of our first group meetings to discuss the brief and share any ideas we've had. 

We started out by having a brainstorming session about what we had come up with since meeting Kay out at the museum on Saturday. The girls had been thinking about all sorts of possibilities, some of which I (Cam) was slightly nervous about as I'd never tried them but that's the fun of the challenge. We spend a while looking at existing Museum websites in search of inspiration and found a wide array of designs and concepts. We took a look at the websites for places from the Taupo Museum (thinking small) to the Guggenheim and New York Museums. This brainstorm proved very successful for all of us, with a few preliminary sketches being drawn up, and now we have the ball rolling on a few designs it should be interesting to see what we all come up with. 

I (Cam) produced some very basic sketches of ideas I have had for interactive games to embed on the website which again should be an interesting challenge. We are all quite eager to see how this works out as adding an interactive element to the site will make it a bit more interesting for the users of the site. 

Anthea pointed out to the girls that we needed to appoint members of the team to certain tasks for the group so we sorted that out as well. Liz will be, as she so cunningly refers to it, the 'Timeline Lady' - in charge of project management and planning out the work we will undertake. Kylea will be the 'Contact Communicator' - in charge of keeping in touch with Kay and the Museum. I (Cam) will be the 'Student Liason' - in charge of communicating with our wonderful mentor Anthea and the yMedia team. 

So after a very successful and 'brief' 3 hour meeting we have assigned sections of the brief to be completed by individual group members so that we can send a copy to Kay and Anthea on Monday morning in preparation for our meeting at the Museum on Tuesday. We also prepared what we would like to achieve at Tuesdays meeting. We now need to find out if the Papakura Museum has any sponsors, present some of the drafts we have done, discuss the brief with Kay and make any necessary changes and finally take some pictures and get any other background information or content from Kay so we can get work on creating some prototypes to present to Kay.

We are all stoked to have made a start and really get into it with a working bee scheduled in the coming week.

Meeting with our Mentor - Anthea

On Tuesday we (Kylea & Liz - apologies from Cam) met up with our mentor Anthea, who kindly organised to met up with us in Kingsland for a coffee and chat. Over our 2-hour chat, we were able to cover the basics, from getting to know Anthea; who she is, what she does, how she became wonder woman! to introducing ourselves and what we've got up to so far along our Ymedia challenge journey.

We found it awesome getting to know the in's and out's of the programme and hear about Anthea's experience and what she gained from it. It was great to discuss our progress with her; our meeting with Kay at the Museum, our initial idea's and direction for where we want to go.

She explained the process we should go through; documentation of our progress, setting realistic goals and creating a timeline of achievements. As she is currently working in the web industry, she was able to give us pointers as to what makes a good website; planning and working closey with the client and creating a structured and well devised site map, which Anthea has kindly offered to bring in some examples of (site maps), next time we met up.

We also discussed issues that we need to bring up with Kay during our next meeting; budget for this project eg; printing, web services and content for the website.

Anthea urged us to get onto designing some 'idea' templates to show to Kay, in order to get the ball rolling for our website, and make it easier Cam (technical master) to work with. We are hoping to have some basic sketches to discuss with her next week, during our next meeting.

We found Anthea very inspirational and look forward to working with her for the rest of the challenge.

First Interview

After making contact with Papakura Museum on the Ymedia website we organised a time to meet with Kay (The Administrator for the museum). So at 10am on Saturday the 20th June we arrived in Papakura to discover this fantastic museum, and with none of us ever hearing about it we were incredibly impressed with its content. We were greeted by one of the enthusiastic staff who kindly agreed to show us around, explaining everything in great detail, in particular an old record player, knitted red dress and old telephones. None of us had experienced interviewing a real client so we weren't entirely sure what to expect, however we were their ready with our notebooks, questions and excitement for the challenge.

We finally met Kay who told us all about the museum and what they needed. We were soon to discover they were in desperate need of some branding, advertising and a web presence.

The following are some questions we needed to answer:

- Who runs it now? How many staff? It is run by both volunteers and part time staff

-What is the core purpose of the community organisation - who does it help and who are the main 'audiences'? The purpose is to educate the local community about Papakura's history, and the main audience would be schools, students, and the local people.

- What is the current marketing strategy? None

- How would you rate the organizations "Digital Media Savviness"? Currently there is none

- What is the capacity of the community group? Would they have the resources to monitor and/or update a web based project? If we kept it simple, and with proper planing this would be possible, we would need to teach them how to update it and leave them with the right resources/manual to continue doing this.

- What do they hope to get out of the challenge this year? Publicity, to get the organisation started and 'out there' and to establish an identity and status within the community and within the Auckland region.

We left Kay with a few more questions to get back to us with such as, how it started, how long its been going, and there core message.

What the museum solely needs is: Logos, Business Cards, Email Signatures, Letterheads, An email database for event invitations and a Website.
It became apparent through the interview that the museum would be best advertised as an educational centre and be aimed towards schools and students. But not limited to this.
The museum currently has eduactional programmes available for schools and students, and this would be a really good area for the museum to push.

Discussing what was needed for the website we came up with the following ideas:
- online donations
- an interactive game (aimed at children)
- online signup (to recieve exhibition invitations, news etc)
- advertise group activities available

The meeting ended with all of us feeling really positive about the challenge, and eager to start!