Internship Spotlight – Amanda Rodgers

This post is part of our Internship Spotlight series. For this installment, Amanda Rodgers (’25) writes about her internship experience at the Pacific Bonsai Museum.

From January to June of 2024, I was a Community Engagement Intern for the Pacific Bonsai Museum (PBM) in Federal Way, Washington. I was drawn to this internship for two main reasons: first of all, I’m particularly interested in what it looks like to display cultural practices—such as the cultivation and care of bonsai trees—through exhibits, and specifically the role that museums can play in fostering both an interest in and a physical connection with those practices. Secondly I was incredibly excited about the projects that Janie Bube, Programs Manager at PBM, had conceptualized for the interns to work on. Janie has an incredible knack for pinpointing community needs and developing projects relevant to those needs with the unique offerings of the museum, all while maintaining a close eye relative to PBM’s bandwidth given their small staff size.

From our first meeting I knew that these were projects I wanted to be involved with. These projects were: revamping the museum’s Field Trips program, developing a Horticultural Therapy program for Veterans, and a redesign for the museum’s Donations Wall, which was the last opportunity for engagement with visitors before they left the museum itself. From the Museology program, three interns including myself formed a cohort for this internship, working on three different projects at different stages, and as a result the projects felt very personal rather than peripheral.

I began the internship working on the Donations Wall project. This was strategic: I was the least excited about this project but I wanted to have a more hands-on experience with the others, and the first stage was research. This involved internet research and site visits to different museums and museum-adjacent institutions around Seattle to see how others were capturing their audiences in this way. While I had initially thought that I lacked experience for this project, my design background served as an asset for developing a critical eye for displays that were meant to spark interactivity and engagement. I ended up loving this first research stage because it gave me a reason to go out and see other types of museums and exhibits in the Seattle area, analyze them, and then find ways to repurpose it for PBM.

Moving into the next stage, I began to work on the Field Trips project, but given all my research from stage one, Janie and I decided to broaden the scope of my work to include visitor engagement more widely. At this point, I began to develop a series of games for outreach events, museum events, and field trips. These games were meant to help visitors gain an observational relationship to the bonsai. In all, I designed a total of four interactive games, which all underwent several rounds of edits after initial piloting, and had varying levels of support from the other interns and from Janie. It should be noted that while all of the games were designed so that visitors could “self-check” themselves, visitor experience seemed to benefit from interaction with staff, volunteers, and docents.

1. 

   The first game was inspired by an interactive game in the gallery at the Gates Foundation Discovery Center, which was a matching game between facts and statistics. A specific ask from PBM staff was that the interactives be educational, and so this format seemed appropriate as a learning device. In our version of the game, we had visitors spin a wheel that had the names of some of the trees in PBM’s collection written on it. Wherever the wheel landed, visitors had to match the name of the bonsai with a photo of the tree itself, and they could flip the card to self-check as well as learn something about the tree itself. In the first iteration of the game, this is where the game ended. However later on, Janie had the idea of adding three more “levels.”

   

   Having correctly matched the name of the tree to the tree itself, they could then move on to matching the tree to its foliage, and then to its bark, and finally try to identify the style of bonsai. Oftentimes visitors were intimidated by the first step, and usually these same visitors managed to use some kind of prior identification (“I know what an Oak looks like”) to prove their claims of having no bonsai knowledge wrong. Many visitors also appreciated the game format, as well as left noting that they had actually learned something from their visit.

2. Inspired from a visit to the Burke Museum, I developed a puzzle that again had visitors match the individual trees to their foliage and then their bark. This one was designed for smaller kids, and in the first version of the game the puzzle matches were made using similar shapes.
   

   

   This proved to be distracting from actual content and the format was confusing with three different categories, so we ended up changing the puzzle format into a less literal one. In the second version, three concentric circles with trees at the bottom, foliage in middle, and bark on the top spun around so that visitors could match them up. Visitors could also use the back to self-check. These puzzles proved fairly popular in several senses, and at events we were asked several times if they were for sale.

3. In order to help deepen visitor’s knowledge of the history and technique behind some of the bonsai in the museum’s collection, we developed a kind of “trivia game” which was used for outreach and museum events.
   

   

   We displayed two or three jars with answers to a trivia question velcroed to the front, and visitors voted with marbles on which one they felt was the correct answer. On the back, there were velcroed one of two prompts: an invitation to try again or a confirmation that they got the answer right.

4. A site visit to the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park inspired the final game, a “passport” that operated as a kind of scavenger hunt and which visitors were invited to take home with them. Visitors were invited to find and write the name of different trees whose photos appeared in a little book, and for each tree they found they received a stamp that gave them some information about what kind of tree it was, such as “deciduous,” “coniferous,” or “fruit-bearing.”

Along with the games, I developed two coloring pages for the museum and, finally, an activity booklet modeled after the National Park Service Junior Ranger booklets that was foundational to building the new Field Trip format. During the museum’s annual Bonsai Fest! event, they debuted a new exhibit meant to last a year and a half all about the science behind bonsai. The museum (which is outdoors) is divided into alcoves, and each alcove’s labels covers a different topic under the umbrella of this subject. With the activity booklet, I designed activities that aligned with the information in each alcove. Therefore, those leading the field trips could both refer to the information in the exhibit and then have students complete the activities in situ. Before the internship ended, we piloted our first field trip with implementation of the booklets, and seeing my work in action was incredibly gratifying as well as humbling. While it sent me back to the drawing board to some degree, I still completed the internship having developed a tool that the museum could use going forward, and indeed has used since my internship ended in late June.

In the end, I had done more graphic design work in those six months of internship than in nearly two years, despite my desire to move away from it. Initially, I was a bit disappointed—I almost felt like rather than pivot I had dove further into something I already knew. However, ultimately I realized that my past career experiences can only serve my new ones, and nothing about one’s past is siloed enough to not influence their work going forward. I was also able to deepen my appreciation for collaborative work and provide technical expertise for developing veritable educational materials from scratch. I enjoyed using my skill set in a new way, and could see the value in what I have to offer moving forward, as well as begin work on a tangible portfolio of work for my future career in museums. I took my projects at PBM incredibly seriously, to the point where I often didn’t feel like I was actually completing an internship but rather working with the team in earnest, and as a result my time working with PBM was often intense and demanding. However this paid off: the confidence I gained and the professional relationships that I built were incredible rewards for that hard work.