How People Make Things, Children's Museum of Pittsburgh
www.pittsburghkids.org/hpmt/
Summary
Our longest museum research partnership has been with the Children's Museum of Pittsburgh. This is a unqiue relationship that began with intellectual synergy and is now sustained through a series of joint funding intiatives and organizaitonal links — UPCLOSE associate director Karen Knutson is the head of Research and Evaluation at the museum, and graduate student Camellia Sanford is the museum research fellow.
Through this research partnership we have been able to explore many different issues. An ethnography of the museum's expansion project focused on leadership and organizational change as the museum worked to design its new "green" building, create a new town square model — with other non-profit organizations moving in under its roof, including a Head Start program and a radio station, and to develop a culture of experimentation, prototyping and data driven decision making in the redesign of exhibits and programs. This large scale project will result in a book for museum professionals. Other projects with the museum have focused more internally, using our research to help the museum develop, among other things, new exhibits, website games, a large NSF-funded traveling exhibition, called How People Make Things. In other work with the museum we've jointly explored the role of parents in interactive experiences, beliefs about art and art practice, creating a program to help support the development of parenting skills, and comparing the outcomes of science-based exhibits and children's museum designed exhibits. The wonderful power and potential of our research partnership with the Children's Museum has been recognized by the field, winning awards from the Association of Children's Museums, and the Association of Science and Technology Centers.
People
