- [Narrator] There is a small phone booth here that was once the only means of communication for recruits attending the Rhode Island State Police Academy.

(bright music) We'll explain how this red dot was used by businesses across the state to help law enforcement communicate, and we'll take you behind the scenes to see what goes into the creation (saw buzzing) of museum exhibits and galleries.

This is "Treasures Inside the Museum."

(bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (wind whistling) (flag pole rattling) Since 2006, the Rhode Island State Police have honored and celebrated their proud history at a small museum located on the grounds of their headquarters.

Their mission is to share stories through artifacts, documents, and photographs so that future generations will appreciate those who came before them.

- It was a vision by Retired Lieutenant Everett Amour back in the late '90s to house all the artifacts that they were acquiring, not to let 'em just go by the wayside.

But as we came out COVID, we realized that what we need to be doing is telling the stories of the men and women.

I mean, you can walk around the building and look at a uniform or look at a piece of equipment, but it doesn't tell the stories of the men and women that use that equipment, you know, throughout the history of the state police.

- It means a lot to keep these memories by displaying them.

- You know, people 20, 30, 40, 50 years from now can see you know, where we were and where we are now.

- You want the legacy to go on.

You gotta let the story be told.

(bright music) - [Narrator] The museum is a walk through time, creating an opportunity for learning and discussion, while interpreting the collection of objects on exhibit.

There are several examples here of their distinctive uniform, donated by former troopers.

A motorcycle here reminds visitors of a time in history when this was the primary mode of transportation for the state police.

There are also a number of exhibits featuring the different types of communications that have been used over the past century.

But before radios, troopers were reached using a red dot.

- Back in 1925 when the department started, we didn't have any radios, or the department didn't have any radios for the motorcycle or the patrol cars.

- So the trooper would be Out there for hours upon hours patrolling rural routes with no communication.

- So what they had to do is they picked out different places, locations, key locations like a gas station or a store or something like that, and would display, it would have this red marker here.

The red dot, they called it.

If they needed a trooper, they had no radio communications, they call the stores or the markets, and say, have the trooper call the barracks.

The individual would go out and hang out the red dot, the trooper will go by, pull in, call the barracks and get his assignment.

Believe me or not, there weren't that many local police.

You know, the big cities had them, but some of the towns didn't have police department, so we were the main law enforcement.

And the only way that they could get us was by this way here.

(bright music continues) - [Narrator] Another form of communications represented here is something that any trooper who attended the state police academy before the days of cell phones would be quite familiar with.

- It's a telephone booth.

People actually, for the people who just grew up with cell phones, this is the opportunity to make phone calls, to actually talk to somebody on the phone.

(laughs) When you're at the academy, you're there Sunday night through Friday.

You're staying over there.

You were there 24/7 for over five, almost six days a week.

Your only opportunity to contact your friends, and maybe it was find out what was going on in the real world (laughs) was use the phone booth to contact and find out, talk to your friends.

You had no other opportunity.

There was no visiting hours.

The only opportunity you had to talk to anybody was maybe the two or three minutes before lights out.

- Every student trooper would get a few minutes to talk to the loved ones at night.

They had to make it quick.

- You'd hear some guys talking baby talk to their children.

Maybe an argument with a girlfriend or a boyfriend.

It wasn't very private.

So there was, three or four deep could hear what was going on in the phone booth.

The phone booth was going the way of the dinosaur with the advent of cell phone, so it was lovingly taken from the training academy and restored here at the museum.

- [Narrator] Today, the old payphone still works, and if you can find a quarter in your pocket, you can make a call and get an historic message from the state police.

(dial tone hums) (phone beeping) - I am Retired Lieutenant Ken Bowman from the class of 1974.

Did you know that the First Scituate Barracks was located in the Village of Scituate?

The home is now the parish rectory for St. Joseph's Church.

(bright music) (bright music continues) - [Narrator] There's a collection of firearms here that chronicles the evolution of weapons used by the state police through the decades.

(bright music continues) Visitors can take a selfie with one of these mugshot signboards and check out an old logbook.

It's how records were kept in the years before computers.

Another item to look for is one of the last known neon signs that drivers might remember seeing outside of one of the State Police barracks.

- Back in the early days, the State Police barracks were all in private homes, until the 1930s, when you started building the brick and mortar barracks, which most Rhode Islanders know now, located in Wickford, Oak Valley, Lincoln, and Portsmouth.

And out in front of the buildings was a large, bright neon sign that said Rhode Island State Police.

Back in that day, those signs were a beacon of assurance that the troopers were here when you needed them, especially in on the back roads, the rural roads going from Scituate and whatnot.

At the time, you didn't pay too much attention to 'em, 'cause it was just part of the daily life in the state police until they weren't there.

So, to me, that's a special treasure that we were able to... We've got the last one, we think, known in existence, and we're having it refurbished now to be displayed here in the museum.

- [Narrator] Other police tools on display include an early breathalyzer, a radiation detector, and some early lie detectors.

What you might not expect to see here is an old Indian fire pump can.

- When I came on the job in 1963, we carried these in the cruisers loaded with water.

They were carried during the forest fire months, May and the fall, and there were loaded with water.

You carried 'em in the backseat, and it was different.

When you stopped, this thing came forward, and when you backed up or go forward again, it moved.

There weren't that many people living in the rural areas.

People moved, they were in the cities, and you had to wait for the volunteer to come.

It could be a while.

So we had the first step that we could take.

We could only do so much, but we did what we could.

I used this couple of times on Route 95 when you have a small brush fire, but that was the extent of it.

As you can tell, five gallons of water is not gonna go far.

Normally you take it out the cruiser, it'd be full, believe me, and then we would pump it.

The water would come out from here.

Not too much of it.

I mean, like I said, it's five gallons.

This can, I found an eBay.

And when I found it, I came before the library board and said, "We gotta buy it," and I told him the story of why.

This was what one of the first things on the job I had in 1963.

This one I found in Maine.

I was up in antique store in Maine, and it's a brass one.

- We were there, all the time and everywhere, so it was easier for the trooper to get things started, and then everybody else would catch up.

- [Narrator] There's an old map here that troopers used to find their way around Rhode Island in the days before Route 95 was built, and a wall honoring troopers lost in the line of duty.

There's even more waiting to be discovered and stories waiting to be heard, all being preserved by a dedicated group of volunteers.

(bright music) (bright music) Inside every museum is an opportunity to learn about artifacts in history, to be inspired by art and culture.

It's a unique experience for every visitor.

An experience that might be better appreciated with a little insight, as offered by the professionals at H2 Design.

- We are a museum planning and design firm, and we develop museum experiences from the earliest phases of inception, conceptual thinking, content development, through all of the many phases of design to develop an experience until it's ready to be built and produced, which we also do, and then we deliver and install it at museums.

- When we first start a project, my partner, who's also my mother, she looks more at the content of a story and how you're gonna break up the story, themes and different perspectives.

And then I build off of that, and well, what is it going to really look like?

When you walk into a space, it will immerse you the experience, we hope, so what are, like, the materials that we use?

The paint colors?

The floor treatments?

Things like that.

- Trying to identify what are their goals and objectives of the experience?

What kinds of messages do they wanna communicate?

What kind of stories do they wanna tell?

And then what are their related goals?

Are they trying to grow their audience?

Are they trying to diversify their audience?

Are they trying to maybe look into the research and content and work with us to help identify maybe untold stories or underrepresented stories and an experience that they haven't been able to share before?

(bright music) - [Narrator] One recent example of how an exhibit comes together involved the Worcester Historical Museum's desire to reimagine an entire gallery focusing on manufacturing in the city.

- And that involved thinking about how to create a storyline that had a beginning, a middle, and an end, and how to pull forward some stories that hadn't been told in the past.

Tell stories of very diverse voices, people of diverse backgrounds.

We wanted to really pull forward what life was like for a worker in Worcester and how Worcester evolved as a city and the impact that Worcester has had globally, frankly, through industrialization and innovative technologies that have come out of Worcester through all of these very brilliant thinkers and workers of all walks of life.

- When we started the Worcester Historical Museum project, they had this massive list of artifacts that they wanted to put in the space, and it was huge, and there were so many artifacts of different scales.

There were these little tiny pins, and then there were these large artifacts, like, big 300-pound wrenches.

So we thought, well how are we going to grab this in a cohesive way, and what is the theme of the space?

- We started to identify how to organize the space and organize the stories, and what kinds of techniques would be most appropriate to communicate the content.

- [Narrator] The research and design process begins early while the space is cleaned out and made ready for the future installation.

- As we created a whole series of design documents and 3D models, and layers and layers of packages of content to look at with the client.

We were able to go from this very conceptual overview of what the space might look like and narrow it down to what it looks like today and be able to get their buy-in, respond to their feedback, change things, tweak things, and all the while thinking about a very hard deadline.

- When we first start the process, we create something called a bubble diagram.

So something like this, and it's just a way to chunk down, well, where are the different stories going to go?

Where are you gonna enter?

Where's the entry door and where's the exit door?

Really basic things, and making sure circulation is appropriate for the visitors.

So this is a circulation diagram.

You'll see really simple and straightforward.

This is a phase that we call conceptual design.

So it's very early on, generally we'll bring these to the table, maybe the second or the third meeting after we've first met with the client.

And from there, we can start creating like a floor plan and we can overlay topics on the room, the plan of the room, and we can say, okay, this is where we're going to introduce what the gallery's all about.

This is where we're gonna talk about the evolving city, so that's that big first wall in Worcester when you enter the space.

So what you see here, these are like blueprints, large-scale patent drawings, some street scapes from Worcester.

And we take those and really start to generate the thought process of what is this actually going to look like?

How can we make this feel distinct and make you feel like you're really in Worcester?

And that the design of the walls and the floor, even the ceiling is reflecting that message.

(bright music) The way that we proceed after we do conceptual design is we go into design development, and in design development, we can create a 3D model, similar to this one.

And it allows you to see the space in a more realistic way.

I think it's difficult for a lot of clients to understand, like, a flat drawing, an elevation.

It's just not coming to life, so when we use a 3D model like this, you can overlay material, colors, what the floor is going to look like, and I think it's super helpful.

(bright music continues) - [Narrator] It really is a collaborative process from start to finish.

Larissa and Ariel keep in close contact with museum staff throughout the timeline and oversee the ongoing work in the gallery.

In this case, that means making sure the electrical installation is going as planned.

But plans sometimes need to be changed.

- There were some changes along the way that caused us to need to pivot and think quickly.

- We wanted to represent the different eras of Worcester overhead in the ceiling.

So we were thinking, well maybe we have big spans that run across as you walk in the space and there are dates that are suspended from the ceiling, and items like that.

So we were really excited about this.

The client was too, and that was, again, utilizing some piece of what was over your head to add to the immersive experience.

The downside was the space is so small, we determined that it would create too many shadows.

And what we did instead was we projected the dates on the floor, instead of having them overhead.

They still were there, so as you walk through the space, you can see them just below your feet.

But yeah, it was a definite pivot.

- [Narrator] H2 Design has its own shop where they do most of their own work.

- This is an example of a part of a document set, the construction document set that we created.

At this point we're about 10 months into the project, and by this time, we've been able to look at a gallery, and this is just guiding the builders as to how tall the base of an exhibit case needs to be.

So the base is this big, this is the acrylic bonnet on top, and then we're just sort of showing a placeholder for the object that would go in the case.

So we create documentation like this that allows us to manage all of our scopes of work that are created in our shop.

And then sort of, I'm going to say assembled is the easiest way to describe it in the shop.

We marry the acrylic bonnet to the wood base, we marry that to the preliminary components of a mount that will hold every object, and then we deliver that to site, and then we integrate it in the larger setting of the gallery.

And then we finesse the final components, the final placement, the final shape, for example, of the mount that's gonna hold the particular object in question.

- [Builder] You make an edge.

(saw buzzes) - [Narrator] This is where the plans all take shape, (sander buzzing) where display cases are built, and where final decisions are made about paint colors.

- All right, that'd be great.

- Items like this sword will get a handmade custom mount.

Signs and printed graphics will all get examined closely before everything is shipped off to the museum.

The shop is a busy place that's usually juggling several projects at the same time.

(bright music) After about a year of design and building, all of the components are arriving.

- It takes us a little bit of time on site to bring all of the parts and pieces that we develop in our shop into the museum gallery and sort of tie it into the space.

We were delivering exhibit cases, delivering plints and cabinetry that would hold objects.

We began to affix graphics to the wall, cases to the wall, test out our AV systems, start to integrate all of the technology that we do behind the scenes in order to bring film to life, audio components, and things of that sort.

(bright music continues) - This exhibit, like a lot of those created by H2 Design, is multilayered.

In every direction you look, there is text on the walls, photographs, objects that will fill display cases, and multimedia kiosks to interact with.

- I don't think we ever would've been able to tell that story without the use of multimedia, because it gives us so many more layers that we can go onto the story.

Because instead of just the physical space and the wall space that's there and maybe the overhead elements, now you have all of these, for example, on a touchscreen.

You can pack in so much content.

So for example, catering to people who want to go really deep, you can put as many screens as you want, as many layers into that touchscreen as you want to.

This is just a cool evolution of the process, I feel like, for how things like that are made, and this is super early on in the process, the most rough hand sketch of all time here.

You can see it's just little hand-drawn things of objects in different cases.

This would evolve and then you could see the next page where there would be certain objects laid out, and then what I was describing about how the object has a description on it.

This would later evolve into a full animated 40-inch touchscreen where all of the objects appear, and I think it's a really cool example of how our work evolves over time with that, dialoguing with the client and seeing what's the best way to tell the story.

(bright music) - [Narrator] The end result is a spectacular gallery at the newly rebranded Museum of Worcester.

There are stories behind every object and every display.

It's an engaging museum experience that will take visitors back in time and honor a city with a rich history.

- All of that work done in one year on that tight deadline, you could just see everything progressing month-by-month, that was super satisfying to me.

- The story is very similar, the heart and soul of the story from what was there in the past to what's there today, but the way the story is told and the diverse voices that now come forward that were not previously told, that's what's exciting to us.

- They have so many cool stories and such a cool collection, but helping them present it in a little bit of an elevated way so they can get these messages across and they can have more visitors that are inspired that by their exhibit, that matters to me.

- [Narrator] For the team at H2 Design, a much smaller exhibit at the Newport Historical Society came with a very different set of challenges.

- We had two challenges.

One was we wanna make sure this feels really distinct and different.

It needs its own identity as an exhibit space.

Two is the walls in the museum, we really couldn't attach directly to.

So how do we display the content?

How do we have the graphic panels and the images, the cases that we wanna display?

- One of the men that was profiled in the stories that were uncovered was a rope maker, and we wanted to recognize the work that he did by bringing in an element of his work, which was the rope.

(saw scratching) - So we came up with this idea of using ropes to carry all of our exhibit components.

So we have suspended ropes that helps give us a structure for all of our exhibit components, but they also, again, serve as a nice metaphor, because one of the enslaved in individuals that we're highlighting was a rope maker.

(tools buzzing) - The exhibit was called "A Name, a Voice, a Life: The Black Newporters of the 17th to 19th Centuries."

In this case, most of the research was already in place.

- The curators had been exploring the archives and documents that are in the collection of the Newport Historical Society.

And through their work and research, they were able to identify 1700 individuals by name that had been enslaved in Newport, and they had previously been recorded as slave or servant in documents that the folks knew of, but they weren't identified by their proper name.

- There were 1700 names.

We wanted to showcase all of them.

So the first design iteration was to have them suspended overhead, like I'm showing you here.

So you'd walk into the seventh day, and you'd see all these names above you.

And the thought process behind it was the names are rising in time and space.

Here they are above you.

We're giving such weight to them.

But then we thought about it as a group and with the client's help, and we thought, we don't want the wrong connotation to come from that display of having these enslaved names overhead.

So we really needed to do a hard pivot on that one and decide on another way to give the proper respect to these individuals.

And we ended up displaying them on their own exhibit kiosks that were right in front of you as you walk through the door.

And we had community members help us write the names on every tag.

(bright music) - [Narrator] One-by-one, each name card was added to the exhibit.

Some were left blank, leaving room for those whose names are still not known.

- And the intention here was these names had gone unspoken for so long, and now they were revealed and they were set allowed for the first time maybe in so, so long.

And you can be immersed by those names as you stand in the gallery.

And that was meant to honor the individuals and to really encourage people to kind of pause and stop and listen and look at the same time.

And we're very proud of how that was executed.

- [Narrator] At the end of the day, it's all about the visitor experience, striking a balance to enlighten the visitor while not overloading them with too much information.

A successful exhibit will engage the mind, create a connection, and stimulate additional exploration of the subject matter.

- I believe that all of us are feel a tremendous sense of satisfaction.

We always are hoping that we can find a unique and completely way to share a story with the public.

- It's all about, to me, the impression that the institution is making on the visitors.

It's such a powerful story.

We're talking about these enslaved individuals that didn't have a voice before.

If it's giving the visitor just that impression, wow, there were enslaved individuals here in Newport.

That's what matters the most to me: just giving them a little bit more information or education than they had before on a topic.

- We're incredibly fortunate that we can be fairly selective what kinds of projects we work on, and that was one that we knew from the get-go we wanted to be involved with and we really wanted to make a difference.

(bright music) (bright music continues) (bright music continues) (bright music) (bright music) (bright music) - [Announcer] This program and other episodes of "Treasures Inside the Museum," as well as digital extras, are now available to watch anytime by visiting rhodeislandpbs.org or the Rhode Island PBS YouTube channel.

Take a private tour with exhibit curators, get an inside look at the conservation process and go behind the scenes to see hidden treasures.

Whether you are interested in artifacts, paintings, photography, architecture, or history, you'll be inspired to learn more.