Imagine you are designing a “Museum of California History.” Identify four things you would include in your museum, making sure to explain, thoughtfully, why you are including each of them—how they connect to the theme, but also what unique element each of them brings in terms of understanding the theme.
Comments: The first thing you have to keep in mind is that museums, especially historical museums, ALWAYS have a lesson they are trying to communicate, because they want you to take something meaningful from the experience. The message of The Museum of Tolerance, for example, is that anyone is capable of bigotry, and we must always be vigilant. The message of the Autry Museum of Western heritage is that the West was a diverse and fascinating place, and very different from what you’ve seen in the movies. So, the first thing you’ve got to do is decide what the lesson of your museum is. That is to say, you have to decide on the most important thing that you think people should know about California, its history, its culture, etc. You should spend your first paragraph introducing that lesson, and explaining why you chose it.
Then you need to pick the four things that you will use help you to express that theme. And what you really want is four things that are complementary, but aren’t TOO similar. In other words, you want them all to connect to the theme, but you also want each to add a distinct dimension to the theme. For example, you could pick things that represent four different time periods, or four different cultures, or four different regions, or four different… well, there are lots of possibilities. Note that you may be very liberal in your choice of things to include; there are plenty of museums that show movies on TV screens, and that build big galleries to hold huge objects like airplanes, and that have recordings and headphones that visitors can listen to. And notice that I use the phrase “things” rather than “objects” because some of the things you might incorporate into a museum are not really objects.
