Internship: Designing for the Public

By Maci Mark.

Over the past few months, I have had the wonderful opportunity to work on my internship project with the National Parks of Boston while also serving as a Seasonal Park Ranger. For this project I have been working with the Digital Humanities and Innovation Team to research, write, and design new waysides for the USS Cassin Young. The goal of this project is to provide more context, interpretation, and connection for the ship for people who do not come aboard (due to restricted mobility or other factors like weather). When coming on board this project I was excited to further develop my skills of writing for the public; this is something that I know is important, as it is often a first impression and is the first chance to help people connect to a historic site. But I was surprised by another skill that I worked to cultivate over the past few months as well: designing for the public.

I had experience in writing for the public in other contexts, writing blog posts for UMass Boston’s University Archives and Special Collections, in my work in Hist 682 Digital Public History, and as an undergraduate student at Gettysburg College working on digital humanities projects there. But writing for waysides was a new to me task, both in how it provides information, the constraints of limited text, but also because of the important role played by design. If it is not eye catching, easy to read, and in an accessible location people are not going to stop and read. The design is a key aspect of a wayside.

I first got the chance to work with design this summer when working on the Tavern Wall we have at Faneuil Hall. Located in the Education Center in the basement of Faneuil Hall, the Tavern Wall is a space where we can anonymously engage with visitors to read their thoughts and reflections. We pose a thematic question, provide background information, and further reading through a QR code if interested. Our Tavern Wall acts similarly to the way that literal tavern walls would have had papers, flyers, and pamphlets posted on them. Literally planks of wood with nails in it for visitors to post their responses to our prompt, it also creates an anonymous forum for engagement.

Tavern Wall prompts and information are generally changed monthly, and when I started my season in May I was given the opportunity to work on the June Tavern Wall and create one for Pride Month. I worked alongside my coworkers to help write the EQ (Essential Question which guided the theme of the wall) and was then given the opportunity to design the wall myself. I strove to create an eye-catching wall that was easy to read and did not overwhelm with information.

The Pride Month Tavern Wall ended up with two informational posters about the 1977 Gay and Lesbian Town Hall Meetings that occurred there and posted QR codes so that visitors could read further on the town hall meeting if they were interested. It evolved around the EQ: What does Pride Mean to You? Overall, this Wall was a success with 80+ responses over the three weeks it was up, ranging from all age groups, and varying from a picture of a pride parade to a long paragraph about someone’s journey to coming out.

Working on this Tavern Wall both showed me how meaningful anonymous interactions like this can be, and also the importance of design. Ease of engagement also contributed to the success of this Tavern Wall, as it offered multiple forms of engagement, from reading, to answering, to scanning QR code, to even just reading others responses. I included a rainbow at the top of the posters I designed, to help make it eye-catching and topical, but I also included plenty of pictures of the town hall meetings as well. When walking by the space or checking on the wall I often found visitors reading the signs and reading others’ answers. I learned a lot about design from this project, about the importance of accessibility through easy-to-read language as well as easy-to-read text, via contrast in text and background, and images, which tend to draw people in. Images, especially of the site in the past, tend to draw people in as people love to see what places looked like in the past. The NPS has accessibility standards which guided my practice. After working on this I saw good examples of both good and bad accessible writing everywhere.

I have had opportunities to work on and assist with two more Tavern Walls over the past few months. And I am taking what I learned about design work over the past few months with me as I enter the final stages of writing and designing the new USS Cassin Young waysides. While waysides are very different from the Tavern Wall, they are similar in providing opportunities for anonymous interaction, establishing connections, and most importantly, providing a first impression.

The lessons I learned about designing for the public can be applied in all my future public history work: the importance of font, coordinating colors, making texts accessible to read, images, and that brevity matters. But most importantly what I have learned over the course of the past few months is how important it is to make information easily accessible whether that is through diving into specific stories with Tavern Walls or through waysides, helping to provide a positive first impressions and provide a deeper understanding of the site.