Experimental
Engage an audience with local cultural heritage.
As escape room obssessed, mystery loving, puzzle fans ScaryMushroom and myself have much in common, and so when she returned from a jaunt around the world to her base in middlesborough just as I was toying with concept of using a puzzle box as an interactive exhibition space it seemed like an ideal partnership. As such this project has started with a somewhat diffferent brief:
Inspiration & ideas
Inspiration
For a few years now I've been playing with the idea of an escape room in a box, in my previous incarnation as a librarian it had potential as a method to teach studnets how to use a library and how to do research, but Scary's return from her round the world trip to a rainy Middlesborough catalysed the iea into wondering if I could make a mildy feindish little box of puzzles that could do the exact opposite of an escape room and get her out and about to see some intersting things at home.
I've been following Mysterious Package Company
The History
Coming into this project I have very little idea of Middlesborough's history but luckily I have a unique, and appropriately creepy, connection to it from which to begin; in the 1970s my father worked for Middlesborough Parks Department where he was once tasked with clearing gravestones from an area designated to become a park. A lost graveyard is a good place to start with any narative, but the research gods were clearing smiling on me because a little digging revealed Ayresome Gardens nee Cemetary is a gift from a narative point of view.
Ethics, Cultural Appropriation, Co-opting lives and histories, and representing mental illness
Aboriginal History, Mythology, and the role of Captain Cook
Victorian Middlesbrough, Cheif Inspector Saggerson, and the Asylum system in late Victorian York
Location Options
Story Structure
"Exhibition" Contents
"Exhibition" Design