finding the beach institute

Scad Serve X Beach Institute

What is the Beach Institute?

The Beach Institute is a museum located in what used to be the first school for African Americans after emancipation. Today, the Institute is dedicated to telling the history and culture of Southern African Americans, specifically in Savannah.

What Did we do at beach

The Beach Institute had only 2 requests in our original meeting with them: QR codes and social media. This gave us the freedom to find the most important pain points in the Museum. We focused on Wayfinding and Preservation

Preservation

Wayfinding

When we were taking our initial tour of the Beach, we really enjoyed the museum experience; however, during the tour, we thought this would not be as good without a tour guide for one big reason. There was very little to nothing to tell you where you are, where to go, or what is in the exhibits you are going into. Due to this, we designed and fabricated multiple signs to place throughout the museum: 4 maps of which indicated where all the exhibits are, placed in the elevator and the landing of all the floors; one sign for every exhibit, which includes a few paragraphs introducing the artist or subject, and a QR code for more information about the subject; Finally we made a sign to direct guests to the museum entrance. In addition to the signs, we also worked on giving the beach an online presence to help tourists find out about the beach when planning their vacation. follow @thebeachinstitute on TikTok.

As a museum, we wanted to preserve the history, and one of the things we noticed was that the information on how the beach institute went from a school to becoming a museum was really hard to find. Imagine our surprise when we found that President Paula Wallace had a hand in it. She bought the building in an auction, fixed it up, and sold the building to the King Tisdale cottage foundation for a dollar. We made three more signs showcasing the buildings’ past, present, and future.

Final Thoughts

I learned so much about the local history and really enjoyed working with everyone. I’m so proud of what we did. It was definitely a lot of pressure being a Caucasian woman working on this project, but in the end, we were all happy with the result, and I am excited to see the impact our work will have on the Beach Institute