Saturday, August 10, 2013

Week One Done

Today was all about getting hands-on with some of the great cultural history the University of Birmingham has to offer...technology, geology, art & architecture.

We had the chance to play with multi-touch tables (think gigantic iPad like screens) in the Cultural Heritage and Learning Hub. Dr. Richard Clay described how these fun technologies will transform the way museum visitors interact with exhibits. We saw how a sort of chronological lens can be placed over a map to sift through archives to pull up and geo-locate artifacts in that time period. The former urban planning student in me got excited about how this could transform the field. They are even using Xbox-like cameras to scan people and have exhibits predict what the user might like by guessing their age. Dr. Clay described what it might be like for students of the future, as the use their mobile devices to interface with real-world materials, the classroom technologies, and even their counterparts abroad. We left imagining what it might be like if our own universities could virtually borrow a museum collection from the University of Birmingham to use on our own smart tables. 


In our small group discussions afterward we realized that the UK and the US define cultural engagement in completely different ways. Whereas the US is focused almost entirely on people, the UK is much more concerned with places and things. They are keen to preserve their art, architecture, literature and other types of museum-worthy artifacts for the benefit of future generations. They are also determined to engage the general community.This is inclusive of age (even small children) and socioeconomic background. 

After lunch we had the chance to tour Winterbourne House and Botanic Garden. I've never toured a historic home I didn't like so I was really excited about this. My interest peaked when I saw that the home was built by the "pioneer of town planning". Inside the floorplan was so unlike any other home I have visited. Each room was carefully designed to have a garden view and was positioned in the back. Running across the entire front of the home was a large wide hallway. The natural light was incredible. I can't help but think he designed it "like a planner", carefully considering the vistas :-)
In the afternoon we made two more museum visits. The first was to the Lapworth Museum of Geology.  I never knew fossils were so much fun. Honestly! They have so many specimens they are bursting at the seams. Lapworth was most certainly a hoarder. We saw everything from a T-Rex head to a fossilized bug worth nearly $38,000. They even had fossils that had been dug up in Crawfordsville, Indiana. Upstairs were old geological maps of all sorts. The most interesting was a top secret wartime map of the beaches of Normandy and a letter detailing what type of soil conditions they might find. I could have spent hours there. 



The final museum visit was the Barber Institute of Fine Arts. It is not a huge collection but it is packed full of all the big names...Degas, Rubens, Rodin, Van Dyck, Turner, Rembrandt (on loan)...It was the perfect pre-cursor to our afternoon tea and scones. I also really loved meeting the new Director, Nicola Kalinsky, and hearing her talk a bit informally about how they decide on new acquisitions.


Although I am really exhausted, I decided I had to take advantage of our free evening. We all took taxis downtown and split off in our separate ways. I bought Helen 2 adorable outfits for fall and stopped off at Wagamama's for yaki soba & gyoza take-a-way. Mission accomplished.