Sponsored content
The Kansas City Museum is working with museum design firm Gallagher & Associates to create educational exhibit interactives and media for the history exhibits in Corinthian Hall. The interactives and media will include audio/visual, touch screens, animated/projection maps, listening stations for oral histories, an accessible on-line collections database, virtual tours, and QR codes.
Overall, the interactives and media will build additional layers of learning that expand the existing exhibit content, making it more dynamic, participatory, and engaging. The Museum is using the following guiding principles to develop these new experiences:

•Design for young people as a primary audience and ensure that content meets and advances standards for primary and secondary social studies as well as real world learning;
•Use a restorative practices approach—center untold or undertold narratives that expose the initiating cause of historical harms, exclusions, and injustices; offer examples of resilience and resolution.
•Highlight the relevance and correlation of the past to the present;
•Ensure diversity and representation;
•Foster a sense of belonging and shared humanity; and
•Inspire connection, communication, and community involvement.

To create that connection, each interactive and media experience invites visitors to consider their relationships at different scales– with an individual, their neighborhood, their community, their city and the region as a whole.

In Cultural Confluences Rivers-1870s, a gallery on the second floor of Corinthian Hall, the horizonal map and perpendicular vertical structure shown here will be transformed into an interactive with projection maps and immersive audio that explores the transformation in Kansas City’s physical and human geography from the mid-to-late 1600s through late 1800s. The interactive will explore how the system of trails and routes lead to geographical borders and boundaries and the impacts over time of European settlement, forced removal, colonization, and industrialization on the landscape and people.