This semester has been insane, quite literally. I’ve been wanting to start up another blog that follows this project, but just haven’t had the time to do so until now…so if you’ll excuse me, this post will be a condensed documentation of the first half of the semester, and the remainder of the blog will hopefully be separate blog posts highlighting our journey to the end (hopefully more detailed than this post will be).
Some context: This blog is about my PICT class, which is re-designing and installing a new visitor center at Jemez Historic Site, New Mexico. PICT is a class that takes place every other year in the spring and works with clients to redesign and install exhibits in cultural institutions. In the past, they’ve worked with Coronado Historic Site, Los Alamos Bradbury Science Museum, etc. I’ve never been one to opt to take the PICT class because of the scope of the projects, but being that my graduate degree focuses on multimedia project installation I figured I’d better be in this class.
We started the semester with taking a field trip over to the Jemez Historic site. We had a tour of the site by a Native guide. He told us some of their origin stories, took us down into a renovated Kiva and even played some flute music from an eagle bone flute he constructed himself. That was a magical moment!
When we first entered the visitor center, this is what we were presented with:
As you can see from the above two photos, it’s not very exciting. The rest of the visitor center was just like these two images…we had our work cutout for us! lol!
After getting a tour of the grounds and everything, we met up with the rest of the Native council for an initial meeting to talk about who they are, what they would like to see from us, and what feelings they want their visitors to leave with. We took this information back to the university and started work shopping things!
We have a lot of information to work with and to share properly with future patrons to the site! The prevailing theme is that these people, the Jemez People, are still alive today. Their culture still persists, as it always has. We want to showcase their past, their present, and their future.
We spent the next few weeks coming up with ideas, prototyping those ideas, and refining those ideas. Next we had a client meeting over skype with them during a class period, where the different teams took turns to present their ideas. They loved a lot of the initial ideas and were really impressed! We’ve honestly never had an initial client meeting go that well before, which was awesome! So that just means that next it was time to refine these ideas, polish them, and build better prototypes.
Here is a blueprint sketch of the placement for our ideas to give you an initial example of our plans.
And here is an example from one of the groups, they are re-designing the floor of the visitor center to be a laser etched design of the site grounds.
Two weeks ago, we gave our big presentation to the Native Council of Jemez Springs, the Mayor of Jemez Springs, and some cultural affairs people from Santa Fe. We killed our presentation and they want it all!
With classes picking back up this week (now that spring break is over), the real work can begin. This next month and half will be nothing but work work work, produce produce produce, and then INSTALL!!! I’ll hopefully be updating this more frequently leading up to the install day and finally the grand opening!
Jemez Historic Site Re-design 