Thesis Approval Progress

I spent the majority of this week working working on narrowing down the scope of this project and finally landed on a solid concept that was approved by the thesis board.

Narrowing process:

Cabinet of Wonders, Museum of Funny Ladies Complete Design –> One Exhibit –> Writers Room –> Women Writers in the 1970s –> Sybil Adelman Sage

How can I create an innovative and interactive experience/exhibit that tells a piece of the story of Women in Comedy through research, development, and prototyping the interactions?

For this project I plan to focus on the story of Sybil Adelman Sage, one of the first women comedy writers to pioneer this industry for future lady tv writers. Through research, content gathering, interviews and design, I plan to prototype 1-2 interactions to tell this story. This research, design and prototyping will be a proof of concept for a larger experience that is the Museum of Funny Ladies, in particular this exhibit about the journey of female comedy writers.

Now that this has been approved I can move forward with the research for this story.

Meeting With Lawyer

This week I had a meeting with April Hathcock at Bobst Library to discuss using assets and what that means for copyright. Being a student and not a profit making organization, if I just use clips instead of whole shows/songs/etc, I should be fine based on fair use law. April gave a presentation last week about this, that I was able to attend. Great resource here.

Library Research

I spend some time checking out more books this week on women in comedy. I have a new pile. The US Park Services might want to add these piles to their records as a new mountain range in the city of New York.

I also had a meeting with Danielle at the Tamiment Archives. I had planned to be in a position to look at archived material, but since I am now probably dealing more with primary sources, this turned into a meeting of possible ways to use these archives in the future, and possibly working with them to digitally archive their materials with the Skanect.

I spent a great deal of time searching the articles and databases online archive at Bobst for more articles to add to my list of reading. Lots of great things to read ahead.

This week was a lot of gathering of materials. And I hope to parse through all of it in the coming days.

Interviews

This week’s interview with Sybil focused on her environment as a writer and her timeline of writing. I am working on understanding the environment that these women writers worked in. Each writer had a very different experience, obviously. She is able to give a peak into other scenarios as well, and some books I am reading also offer this wider scope. Depending on how far I get in these crucial research weeks, I can reach out to other writers.

Gathering Content

Last week I acquired a vintage RCA television. This week I was able to get my hands on vintage Bell Systems rotary phone. I also received this visual of a November 17, 1973 TV Guide Article Featuring Sybil Adelman Sage and her writing partner.

TV Guide – November 17, 1973

I also started creating a spread sheet for possible scripts – this is a WIP

Clips

I watched Sybil’s Mary Tyler Moore & Maude Episodes, as well as CNN’s History of Comedy: The Funnier Sex episode.

THIS COMING WEEK

Library: The next trip will involve getting museum design related books.

Interview: This week I hope to visit Sybil and start recording her stories to use as content in the prototypes.

Collect: I hope to collect more primary sources – photos, scripts, clippings, articles, an IBM selectric typewriter

Story: Based on the research I hope to start formulating the story arc.

LATER

Craft the user journey

Interaction design