Conversation Starters

September 9, 2013

When we were in Washington, D.C. earlier this year, we – of course – visited my beloved National Postal Museum. I’ve already written about our visit in general, but I wanted to add a bit about their current special exhibition, which runs until January 2014. The exhibition is called “Fire and Ice”, and focuses on the Hindenburg and Titanic, both of which came to a tragic end. In case you’re wondering about the postal link, both were carrying mail.

I was super excited to discover, on the museum’s website, that the title of the exhibition was inspired by one of my favourite poems by one of my favourite poets, William Blake:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

The exhibition was really interesting, but what caught my eye were the conversation starters which had been included in the exhibition design. Posted on the sides of suitcases, they posed thought provoking questions and invited visitors to share their answers via Twitter.

I thought it was a really neat idea for introducing social media in to the exhibition, but even without throwing Twitter in to the equation it made for some interesting conversations (e.g. we didn’t have any internet access on our non US phones, so we didn’t tweet out answers, but we still discussed the questions with each other).

Here’s a selection of people’s responses. How would you answer?

@PostalMuseum it’s probably because of pop culture that I am learning so much about mail on the Titanic and Hindenburg . #fireiceexhibit

— Kevin Pinkoski (@KevinPinkoski) September 5, 2013