In Lee’s article, Reconsidering Conflict in Exhibition Development Teams, the team structure was egoless. An egoless team structures “encourages a high level of interactivity and communication among project members” (Frame, chapter 3 pg. 91). There is no team leader, decisions are made by the team, and the project product reflexes inputs from all the team members. This is the ideal of an egoless team structure. In the case of Dogs Group, although the structure was egoless, certain members of the team could not agree on what roles the members should have and this led to conflicts between those members who followed the egoless team structure (exhibit designers and educators) and those that wanted to follow more traditionalist mode of team structures
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They had some excellent arguments about the expectation of curators from museum audiences. Especially in regards to the simplification of museum content, which can be harmful to museum audiences and the argument in regards to curators holding a higher responsibility to the public c if the exhibit is a failure. But their unwillingness to listen to their peers’ opinion made them seem power hungry and conceited. If the curator had relinquish some of their supposed power to the other group members willingly, then I think the group dynamic would have been more cohesive. At the end of the case study, Lee made it a point to say that “the situation was not as chaotic as it seemed”, there was no mention of the project being unsuccessful, just that the curators changed their title to scientific advisors because they did not feel that their roles were that of curators. This made the curator seem childish, because they did not get to hold absolute power like they wanted they changed their title.
If I was in the Dogs group I would probably want to be a curator, but I would be a more opened minded curator. Because I have training in the museum studies program, I understand that the current trends in museum do have merit. I would try to collaborate more with the educators and the exhibit design team. I agree that visitors do like shorter labels and more interactives, so I would make sure that interactives supplement what the lab scripts might lack. I would also incorporate tours and discussion groups for those who were interested in more than just the basic knowledge the exhibit had to
They had some excellent arguments about the expectation of curators from museum audiences. Especially in regards to the simplification of museum content, which can be harmful to museum audiences and the argument in regards to curators holding a higher responsibility to the public c if the exhibit is a failure. But their unwillingness to listen to their peers’ opinion made them seem power hungry and conceited. If the curator had relinquish some of their supposed power to the other group members willingly, then I think the group dynamic would have been more cohesive. At the end of the case study, Lee made it a point to say that “the situation was not as chaotic as it seemed”, there was no mention of the project being unsuccessful, just that the curators changed their title to scientific advisors because they did not feel that their roles were that of curators. This made the curator seem childish, because they did not get to hold absolute power like they wanted they changed their title.
If I was in the Dogs group I would probably want to be a curator, but I would be a more opened minded curator. Because I have training in the museum studies program, I understand that the current trends in museum do have merit. I would try to collaborate more with the educators and the exhibit design team. I agree that visitors do like shorter labels and more interactives, so I would make sure that interactives supplement what the lab scripts might lack. I would also incorporate tours and discussion groups for those who were interested in more than just the basic knowledge the exhibit had to