Institution Wide Interpretive Planning by Judith Koke Marianna Adams

Author:Judith Koke, Marianna Adams [Judith Koke, Marianna Adams]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781598748062
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2008-09-30T00:00:00+00:00

In the late 1980s, the museum made a commitment to systematic strategic planning that board and staff would update annually. Strategic planning proved crucial as it drove a deliberate, evolutionary process of discovering the institution's identity. Planning entailed joint board-staff bench-marking trips to other museums in the mid-1990s followed by audience surveys and zip code by zip code profiling of the regional market. By the turn of the 21st century both external and internal pressures encouraged ambitions for systematic change. Early in 2003 the museum's Executive Committee deputized a Board-Staff Play Study Team to consider the pros and cons of bringing play to the center of museum activities. The team was charged with exploring such basic questions as finding a workable definition of play and projecting the themes and exhibits that definition would support; forecasting the impact on educational programs, membership, and attendance; answering whether or not the museum would need to change its mission statement; assessing the impact of a mission change on marketing, financing, fundraising, and human resources; and projecting the effects of the stimulus of new collecting. Answering these broad-ranging questions about changing the institution's mission linked the museum's most important fiduciary, civic, and intellectual responsibilities. And so, when in 2004 the museum's board voted to adopt a new mission to explore play "in order to encourage learning, creativity, and discovery," it seemed more like a homecoming than a wondrous birth.

In 2006, new attractions of the expanded museum included the Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden, the 12,000 square foot Reading Adventureland—an interactive history of children's literature, and space for the Woodbury Preschool, which engages its pupils in a play curriculum. The museum's signature exhibit Field of Play opened to invite guests to experience and reenact the elements of play—anticipation, surprise, pleasure, understanding, strength, and poise — in a play environment that features paired time-trial dragsters, a crooked house, a Dance Dance Revolution machine, a pretend underwater-scape, and an "Ames" room which surprises the muscles and the mind with its deceptive, off-kilter proportions. Broadly, Field of Play is about play as human development, play as a social phenomenon, and play as an individual experience. The exhibit demonstrates that play is basic to human nature, and that understanding play is important to understanding culture and the way culture changes.

The new mission made play the museum's main subject, but play is also literally the object. Field of Play connects ideas about play to real play experiences now and in the past with dozens of low and high-tech interactive elements and more than four hundred artifacts. The objects and the interpretive exhibit in which they take life make clear that dolls and toys, the core strength of the museum's collections, are not trivial because these artifacts cultivate the imagination, channel creativity, and encourage critical and strategic thinking. Toys require us to cooperate in play and so teach us fairness. They disclose what we believed and what we valued and sometimes what we dismissed or feared. Toys, in fact, are among the most revealing artifacts that humans have produced.

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