WAM Weekly Blog

Snapshot Week 1

For the first week at the museum we met our sponsor Adam, and listened to his vision of “Third Space” within the museum. He seemed very energetic about the future of the museum and he bought each of us a book, “The Great Good Place”, to help us better understand the concept of “Third Space”.

After finishing the book, we went to Boston to experience real “Third Spaces”, including The Apple Store, Starbucks, Restoration Hardware, The Nespresso Store, Boston Public Gardens, Quincy Market, Whole Foods Market and the Museum of Fine Arts. This was a wonderful journey and we came back with exciting ideas for the museum and started planning other research techniques more specifically for the museum.

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Snapshot Week 2

We did more background research on “Third Spaces” to revise our background chapter for the final report. In addition, our team decided to conduct focus groups and interviews of museum employees to see how to relate WAM and “Third Spaces”. We also started drafting interview and focus group questions.

At the same time, WAM’s big event “Knights” was coming! This was very exciting. We were volunteers for the museum. We mainly handed out the schedules of the events, guarded the “pink horse” in the Salisbury Hall and guided people to enter the exhibit, especially when it was very crowded. There were many types of events happening at different areas of the museum, which could serve visitors with various interests. For example, they had fire shows, live music, wine tasting and people dressed up as diverse characters. This event was a great example of how museum events look like outside of normal operation hours. We observed and noticed a lot of  potential “Third Spaces” in the museum!

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Snapshot Week 3 (Research)

Our team finalized the focus group and interview questions. We also conducted interviews and focus group with museum employees from different departments. We conducted them in Lancaster Lobby, the Museum Café and in Salisbury Hall to experience different spaces within the museum. Museum staff were very helpful and excited about their ideas! One of the museum staff members even read the book “The Great Good Place” before coming to the focus group and showed a lot of interest to help us accomplish our project. We really appreciated that!

We visited Portsmouth Book and Bar in New Hampshire and interviewed the two owners there. That It is a very successful third space for a wide range of people. Portsmouth Book and Bar has comfortable seating, affordable food, nice service and welcoming atmosphere! This kind of operation could be a great model for the WAM in the future.

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Snapshot Week 4 & 5 (Research and Data Analysis)

Our team surveyed visitors in person and also posted our survey on Facebook. We got 122 responses in total. While we were surveying at the museum in person, the visitors were very friendly and cooperative to answer our questions and help us to provide constructive ideas and recommendations for the museum. We surveyed people of all ages.

After these surveys, we collected a lot of data and got tons of ideas for the museum from different people. We sorted those responses and presented them with pie charts and bar charts.

At the same time, our Civil Engineering team member, Steve, created floor plans and renderings of different potential third spaces within the museum based on the interviews and surveys.

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Snapshot Week 6 & 7 (Final Week)

We can’t imagine how quick this project is coming to an end! Our team is busy putting what we’ve got for this project together. We are finalizing the report, presentation, editing videos and gathering deliverables for our sponsor. Looking back at what we’ve done these six weeks, each of us is very passionate to present our outcomes to the sponsors and advisors. We really hope our project can help WAM create more value to the community and its visitors.

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