Monday August 31st marked the beginning of the Fall 2020 semester at the ETC. The Fall 2020 semester marks a number of firsts: the first fully-remote semester, the first semester with furloughed/half-time staff, etc. In other ways, this semester will be just like any other fall semester at the ETC: teams will begin working together effectively, clients will arrive with expectations, and individual students will struggle to find jobs to make their grad-school investment worth the cost. 

This website and blog document the progress of Museum.Live: a project building a “storytelling platform/tool” intended for use with the constituent staff of 5 Pittsburgh-based Museums in order to execute virtual museum experiences. For 8 weeks in the summer, a team of 4 ETC students researched, designed, and playtested initial platforms and protocol for this “storytelling platform.” 

Highlights of the Pre-production package include:
-Virtual Tour Protocol: Museum Hosts lead tours in Zoom and share their screen to show guests images/media from a museum-specific website that stores and presents media. 
-Zoom Platform: The gold standard for video conferencing, was chosen for user familiarity and 2-way conversations
-A website mockup built in Figma: Key features include upload, organize, museum branding, and full-screen viewing.  

The current team is tasked with building and producing the remainder of the platform based on this initial work.
Deliverables for the fall semester could look as follows:
-Working and Usable Website: an online and hosted website/Git Repo that can be deployed to the hosting solution of each museum’s choice
-Design Documentation: Checklists/guidelines for Museum staff to reference in executing a virtual museum tour based on research collected in the early weeks of the fall project. 
-Sample Virtual Tours: recorded and possibly taught to Museum Staff 

By discipline, some highlights of Week 1 appear as follows. 
Design: 
-Settled on a first prototype that resembles the Figma prototype but is fully online 
-Begun a fully-exhaustive Service design document/User Experience Journey map 
-Scheduled Virtual tours at 4 different museums (Tenement Museum, Fallingwater, Poe Museum, and the Louvre)
-Drafts of initial design pillars/axioms 

Tech/Art:
-Began research on platforms (Hosting services, CMS, Front-end/Back-end frameworks, website architectures) 
-Scheduled meetings with ETC faculty with Web Dev experience (Bryan Maher, Steve Audia, Michael Christel)

Production: 
-Selected team roles 
-Set up foundation of Pipeline/Sprints 
-Set up organizational tools
-Google Drive (including Archive of Summer work)
-Slack 
-Scheduled Initial Faculty Meeting and Client Meeting. 

Overall, the week was productive. There remained some uncertainty as to how well a fully-remote ETC team would fare. This was echoed in some initial ETC correspondence. Things were different, but at least we students aren’t alone in that sentiment. I remain optimistic, but cautious. 

Goals for next week include:  
-Pick website development tools 
-Make Gold Spike to test pipeline
-Break down the Figma Prototype into discrete website features
-Translate discrete features into the Gold Spike