Water Museum: A First Draft Vision

My vision of a visitor's journey through the Water Museum at the Delft Conference in May 2018.

Embracing the theme of "Urgency and Hope," I envision our museum inspiring the viewers to transform into active contributors to water crisis solutions. Through David Orr's article, "Place and Pedagogy," it is clear that preservation of our lands appears most critical when people are connected with place. In my vision of the museum, the first elements that the visitor sees serve to re-connect our audience with natural elements relating to water through awe-inspiring photos of nature and the role that water plays in our lives. We must first attempt to re-establish our sense of rootedness and love of place before claiming that is important enough to improve.

The visitor would then participate in a more hands-on element following the entryway that solidifies the concept of how we interact with Earth's water, whether that be showing how we obtain water for drinking, health, or recreation. I would also like to answer the question "Where is all our water going?" in this phase to reveal the nature of the water crisis.

An eye-opening experience would then be necessary as kind of a "wake-up" moment to the global water crisis. We could play the "Sounds of water" video created by our classmates, which illustrated the potential loss of water through a different sense.

The museum could then offer a series of intersectional exhibits amplifying water as gender, water as health, water as environment, water as justice, water as access to education, water as economy (basing these categories off of water.org's Impact page), water in religion, water in culture, water as wealth, and water wars. The visitor would choose a few of these exhibits, maybe all of them, depending on interest.

The idea that I am developing, an exhibit on "The Incredible Process of Evapotranspiration," may fit into the "water as environment" area depicting the despair and destruction of nature without water.

To solidify the concept of topophilia, or "love of place," I would love to feature a tour of Delft's water management strategies led by Delft students/residents that showcases best practices and highlights the elegance, beauty, and passion of solutions that come from a sense of rootedness and strong relationship with place.

In a previous blog post on the Water Museum exhibit ideas, I suggested instilling a "questioning attitude" in the viewers so that they may ask questions of proposed solutions about the downstream impacts of the idea. David Orr more directly proposes a standard for design work that "should aim to cause no ugliness, human or ecological, somewhere else or at some later time" in his 2007 University of Pennsylvania commencement speech. He states that this standard causes one to "think upstream ... [and] to look downstream to the effects of design on climate and health of people and ecosystems." This way of thinking is accompanied by a humility that society doesn't seem to value in designers. This humility urges designers to:

"honor and preserve other places however remote in space and culture." - David Orr

In my opinion, David Orr's 2007 commencement speech blends urgency and hope perfectly and elegantly. If we could instill the same emotion I felt at the end of the speech into our viewers by the end of the exhibit, I would call that a success. I was filled with a readiness to act and excitement about being a part of the solution at the end of the speech, which is much more inspiring than how I feel after a scolding or doomsday communication.

One tool to summarize the museum's content could be the "Water Scarcity" video we developed for last week's assignment. This video could be played above the area where visitors write "I will" statements, post them, and review all those existing already.