Attachment_16_Project_Brief.pdf

LOWE Project Brief Boott Cotton Mills Museum Interactives

February 8, 2021

MISSION & PURPOSE

“The National Park Service preserves unimpaired the natural and cultural resources and values of the national park system for the enjoyment, education, and inspiration of this and future generations. The Park Service cooperates with partners to extend the benefits of natural and cultural resource conservation and outdoor recreation throughout this country and world.” – National Park Service Mission Statement

“Lowell National Historical Park preserves and interprets the historic structures and stories of the Industrial Revolution and its legacies in Lowell, serving as a catalyst for revitalization of the city’s physical and economic environment and promoting cultural heritage and community programming.” – Lowell NHP Park Purpose

PROJECT RATIONALE

A key interpretive theme for LOWE is that “Lowell is a microcosm of the historical and contemporary shifting of cultural identities and tensions brought about by broader social changes such as industrialization, urbanization, and globalization.”

Thirty years ago, LOWE created an exhibition in the Boott Cotton Mills Museum that surveys the history of the city of Lowell from the period just prior to the city’s organization up through the late 20th century. That exhibition features a series of conceptual modules that recount how plantation agriculture, subsistence farming, trans-Atlantic trade, and early efforts at mechanized industry underlie the creation of Lowell as an origin site of the industrial revolution in North America.

The exhibition features a functional weave room on its first floor, which demonstrates mechanized cloth production for visitors and weaves cloth that is available for sale in the museum gift shop.

The exhibition on the second floor features a collection of agricultural, commercial, and industrial objects, which communicate those industrialization narratives. Larger objects include a metal lathe, throstle spindle, carding machine, drawing-in frame and automated loom. Smaller objects include a shackle used to bind an enslaved agriculturalist, a shipping merchant’s office furnishings, accounting equipment, plantation and subsistence farm implements, and machinist’s tools.

A feature of the original exhibition was a series of manipulative components attempted to provide supplemental experiences related to several exhibit modules. Those components simulated or demonstrated activities such as picking raw cotton, feeding roving to a spindle frames, dressing the warp thread for a loom, etc.

ATTACHMENT 16

February 8, 2021

Those exhibits generally recapped processes and did not explore larger concepts that are actualized in those processes. The proposed interactive components are expected to prompt visitors to think more critically about those overarching concepts, and thereby support self-directed inquiry and dialogue as visitors move through the space.

Specifically, the proposed interactive exhibits will supplement how visitors encounter the cultural transformations that have transpired in Lowell, and that give Lowell its distinctive urban history.

This design-build project will also provide greater cognitive and physical accessibility to the exhibition.

The new exhibition will provide a safe, accessible, high-quality, and contemporary visitor experience that is audience-centered and relevant to 21st-century visitors, including presently underserved audiences.

The interactive modules will address five concepts:

• Time – experienced by enslaved producers The Industrial Revolution in America and Britain was propelled by the mechanization of textile production and particularly of spinning and weaving cotton. All of the cotton used in Lowell came from enslaved agricultural workers in the US South. This component should especially help younger learners to comprehend the human effort of 19th century practices of cotton growing and harvesting. Cotton growers worked from sun-up to sun-down and were tasked with daily quotas for planting and harvesting. Acreage was a typical metric for planting; the hundred-pound sack was a typical metric for harvesting. Failure to meet planting or harvesting quotas was severely punished.

• Time – experienced by waged workers

Factory work is organized by time also including the time required to produce a profitable amount of product, the time required by the machine operation, and the time required by the dependencies of factory production. Failure to meet these time constraints are punished by loss of wages (i.e. piecework, docking), physical safety (i.e. working in close quarters with rapidly moving equipment, and loss of livelihood (being dismissed and/or blacklisted). Discipline is both external (punishment by superiors) and internalized (conforming to employer or owner demands).

• Agency – the social process of industrial manufacturing The initial workforce in Lowell, as in other manufacturing locales, was drawn from mainly younger and unmarried women, from subsistence farms throughout

New England. For these workers, factory production was a new social environment that brought them into close contact with others who they would not have met on the farm and introduced them to peer experts whose own life experiences were both revelatory and identifiable.

• Ingenuity – 19th century engineering as practical experiment

Factory jobs concentrate producers (workers) and technologies (machinery) in production that results in consistent and useful output. In the early 19th century, most engineers learned ‘on the job’, while fewer received formal training.

Solutions were arrived at through trial and error. These early efforts demonstrated that tools and technology come about through practice, rather than theoretical design, and not all at one time. Improvements combine planning and serendipity, so that not all improvements are successful; not all limitations are failures.

Technology and Wellbeing – factory work as deskilling, repetitive, tedium

Factories are noisy and chaotic, and integrated production requires strict dependencies between processes and outputs. Workers – ‘operatives’ in the jargon of the mill owners – were considered interchangeable, ‘productivity’ measures enforced factory discipline, tools were directed and assigned by overseers and not principally elected by tool users. Jobs became ‘operations’ with limited associated skills, and working conditions, rather than end-product, became a major consideration for workers. Work was both tedious and hazardous. Unlike artisanal practice, no single factory worker could say ‘this is the result of my labor and mine alone.’ Workers seek to improve their conditions of work in a variety of ways.

EXPERIENCE OUTCOMES

The overarching goal for this project is for visitors to see and understand themselves and others through an interactive, self-directed experience. Rather than confine the concept of ‘culture’ to the unique or exotic practices of ‘others’, the experience of the new interactive components will facilitate analogy and connection with visitors’ own and others’ lived experience.

Organized group visits by teachers and school districts will find these interactive components useful and aligned with learning objectives articulated in curricular standards for civics, social studies, history, engineering, and science & technology.

Intergenerational groups will find these interactive components to provide an opportunity for meaningful activity, conversation, and shared inquiry.

Heritage tourists will find these interactive components helpful for further connecting with the cultural history of textile manufacturing and the industrial revolution in Lowell.

The new interactive components will facilitate dialogic learning, to facilitate inquiry-centered, self-directed users, and support mediated teaching/learning practice.

AUDIENCE

Specific visitor types to be served by this project include local cross-generational cohorts, primary and secondary school students and their teachers, and heritage tourists visiting the region.

Based on current statistics and the life expectancy of the exhibit, a minimum of 1,440,000 visitors will benefit from the project. Lowell NHP welcomes approximately 47,000 youth and students to the park annually, with close to 500,000 youth and students benefiting over the lifetime of the exhibit.

Lowell NHP also engages with 300,000 virtual visitors annually through the Park website and social media. This project may also enable new asynchronous and synchronous on-line engagement, including through virtual field trips to the museum.

METRICS AND EVALUATION

Successful outcomes for this project include the following.

1. The interactives will promote longer dwell times with specific exhibits and with the exhibition overall. Prototyping/formative testing will examine affective and cognitive engagement demonstrated by respondents, and experiment with methods for improving that engagement and dwell time.

2. The interactives will attract additional visitors to the Museum, including currently underserved cultural communities, who will find the new exhibits attractive, engaging, and compelling.

3. The interactives will be helpful to school groups visiting the museum, especially from Lowell Public Schools who normally visit the park every year during their fourth and eighth grade.

ALIGNMENT WITH LOWE STRATEGIC PLAN

This project aligns with the 2019 LOWE Strategic Plan goals, which are:

1. Create a conservation community, working with partners, preserve, develop, and provide access to the park’s historic structures, canals and walkways, and collections.

2. Build greater relevance by working with partners and neighbors, developing content that broadens understanding of Lowell’s history and reflects the experience of its diverse communities.

3. Craft engaging experiences by reimagining the visitor experience to be more engaging, enjoyable, inclusive, and accessible.

4. Contribute to positive change, by promoting civic engagement and resource stewardship.

5. Create a culture of collaboration and inclusion, by embracing collaboration and recognizing expertise across the Park, among partners in the community, and with audiences and visitors.

6. Employ technology effectively, by using current and emerging technologies to improve communication, visitor experience, and Park impact.

ABOUT LOWE

Lowell National Historical Park is comprised of unique cultural resources and a national symbol of the Industrial Revolution. In the park’s Enabling legislation P.L.95-290, the Congress found that: certain sites and structures in Lowell, Massachusetts, historically and culturally the most significant planned industrial city in the United States, symbolize in physical form the Industrial Revolution, and are nationally significant historical resources, including the power canal system, seven original mill complexes, and significant examples of early housing, commercial structures, transportation facilities, and buildings associated with labor and social institutions.

Listed in the National Register, Lowell NHP is nationally significant for its examples of industry, community planning, architecture, and social history for the period spanning 1822-1900. The park’s 2016 Foundation Document identifies Lowell’s historic urban industrial landscape and the Boott Cotton Mill Complex as fundamental resources.

Cultural identity is a significant part of Lowell’s social history and teaching cultural tolerance through raised awareness of cultural diversity is a compelling need in the world today.

Addressing that need, the UNESCO Declaration of Principles of Tolerance states, "Tolerance is respect, acceptance, and appreciation of the rich diversity of our world’s cultures, our forms of expression and ways of being human." Lowell is an ideal location for exploring cultural identity and advocating tolerance because it is a long-time gateway city for immigrants and refugees whose demographics continue to change. The goal of this project is for visitors to see themselves and better understand others through an interactive exhibit experience while visiting the park.