Mike's Points: 2, 6, 7

The Museum of Yesterday: Point 2
2. Related Work: Museums and Youtube/Flickr

The idea for our project to be a "museum" of ephemeral bits of yesterday is a twist on what people normally think of when they think museum. Our project is using the framework of a museum for our model, but the content of our museum is very different than traditional museums. In traditional museums you have an expensive collection of historical artifacts which reach far back in time. Our museum is a collection of historical artifacts which reach back only as far as yesterday. Museum collections are expensive, conserved and important whereas our collections will be everyday, minuscule and ephemeral. So our museum has a historical context in traditional museums because it will have a collection up for display to the public, yet it contrasts because the display is changing each day and the artifacts will be destroyed at the end of the day.

This project also references online communities for uploading and display of recordings such as Youtube or Flickr. We hope our project differs from these because of the specificity of what we are asking people to record and also the site specificity of the museum being a place you must actually visit to experience. Filtering of "bad" recordings (which the community deams inapporpriate or not fitting) will be voted on and deleted by those who come to the museum, which is a similar method to the voting used to filter videos on Youtube.

The Museum of Yesterday: Point 6
Point 6: Experimental Design

For the design of our final project we plan on doing a series of test runs and prototypes. We will ask a sample group of students on campus to take video, image, audio, or text recording of something ephemeral that they find significant to see what kind of information people gather. We also plan on trying out different methods of presentation, using video screens, DVDs, web pages and ultimately doing experiments in The Cube or Cave if we can have access. Variables which we will use in our test runs will most likely be different questions to find one which best suites our idea and gets people to engage our concept as well as different modes of presentation in the museum. The beginning stages of these test runs can even start with simple questionnaires concerning what people find significant yet ephemeral throughout their daily lives. Hopefully from these various tests we can gain a better understanding of the project and make it as effective and meaningful as possible.

The Museum of Yesterday: Point 7
Point 7: Procedures

The methodologies we will be using to develop our project will begin with a mix between focus group questionnares and paper prototyping. Then from those studies we will develop the projecte further through bodystorming, roleplay and physical walkthroughs. Doing participatory action tests to gage whether or not people would realisticly engage with the project will be crucial. With the prevelance of already existing communities such as Youtube and Flickr our group feels like this would be an accepted idea to people on campus and a more meaningful alternative to those internet communities which can tend to lack specificity and reflection.

Archiving will occur on a website that we will build to upload data to. This can be tested by making DVDs and using netfiles as a test for uploading material. The choice of the medium of video display speaks to the ephemeral nature of the material we want people to collect as well as the immediacy of video. This will also make the information collected viewable by all audiences regardless of their access to recording equipment or internet, unlike something like Youtube. The site specificity also separates our project from Youtube. The recording would be done by anyone from the UIUC community. We can make the website for uploading only accessible to UIUC students if we really wanted to control the input or we could just leave it open with the belief that mostly UIUC community members would submit because the viewing can only occur on campus.

Our group is interested in the intentional storage of ephemeral things that a given community find meaningful. Whether this be the sight of flower on a sunny day or hearing your favorite song on the radio, we are interested in cataloging a communal sense of ephemeral moments of beauty or significance. We are interested in short term memory of these moments put on display in public for anyone to experience. Ideally the accumulation of these tiny ephemeral moments in one space would create an experiential moment of collective short term memory which would show the signifigance of all the things we take for granted everyday.