Our story
COVID-19, or the novel coronavirus, took the world by storm in a matter of months. Our lives were upended almost instantly. What was once routine, like grocery shopping, commuting to work, socializing with friends, and attending events, became abstract, as the idea of spending time in the presence of others stoked fear of catching the coronavirus. Much of life that we loved we had to lose or adjust. Whether it was a middle school dance, a high school graduation, college classes, going into the office, or even dining out, everything changed. And we don't know when things will ever go back to "normal."
The mission of the Endangered Culture Museum is to document and remember our rhythms of life before and during COVID times, and to celebrate the resilient and creative nature of the human spirit as it adapts in the face of uncertainty. We seek to remember the rituals that brought us together, and how we can still come together, however differently it may look in this season.
Our insights
Throughout our research, we realized that the rapid adjustments we made to our daily lives left little time to process the impact of COVID on our culture. We also realized that COVID impacted culture disproportionately, and that some groups felt its impact more deeply, as they lost their milestones, like graduations and weddings. The realization of the loss and change of culture and the desire to create space for people to celebrate and process COVID's impact on it paved the way for our cultural museum idea.
Our audience
Our research around our target audience included news articles, anecdotal interviews, walk-a-mile simulations, and fly-on-the-wall observational research. Based on our research, we broke down our audience into these 5 key personas, whose lives and cultural habits we believed were most impacted by COVID-19.
Our inspiration
We wanted to take the experience of a museum, with its exhibits, interactivity, and wealth of information, and move it online. We took inspiration from other crowdsourced museums and data archival methods, featured below.
The Museum of Broken Relationships
This museum has several brick and mortar locations globally as well as a website that documents some featured items. The museum takes items discarded from past relationships and documents the stories behind the items, which naturally includes the spectrum of human emotions.
The World Wildlife Fund Endangered Species Directory
The WWF Endangered Species Directory is a nonprofit devoted to the documentation and preservation of endangered species around the world. Their archival methods of classifying and sorting species by their level of endangerment was a large source of inspiration for our own cultural museum.
Museum of Tolerance Los Angeles
The Museum of Tolerance Los Angeles is focused around telling the stories of the Holocaust. Its efforts on remembrance include an immersive component where museum visitors follow the story of an individual and their fate as they travel throughout the museum's exhibits.
