Wing Luke Museum

The situation

The Wing Luke Museum had recently bought the historic Eng Family Homestead at 611 8th Ave S, a house with an L-shaped lot that backs onto Canton Alley, and had an open question about what the site should become. The neighbors in the Chinatown–International District would live with whatever got built, and the museum hadn’t yet asked them in a way that got answers.

The museum brought in Framework, a cultural placemaking practice, to run a rapid public engagement project that used storytelling and emerging technology to help people imagine culturally rooted uses for the site. Framework partnered with a University of Washington Communication Leadership course led by Sandy Cioffi, and the UW students did the creative: they came up with the stories and activations, prototyped them in AR, VR, and AI, then built them out for the event.

I started as the course’s teaching assistant. As the event took shape, Framework also hired me as a freelancer to run the project. We never settled on a title, but the work was project management: scope, schedule, budget, a work plan split between Framework, the museum, and the course, and the event day itself.

The production plan

I wrote the production overview the team built the event from: Looking Back, Looking Forward, three hours on Saturday, May 24, 2025, in Canton Alley and on the homestead’s lot. It set four program goals: gather community input on how the homestead and the alley should serve the next generation, position the museum as the neighborhood’s cultural center-point, bring in new audiences (especially families), and generate earned media and revenue.

The UW students created five activations: a story alley with audio benches, rotary-phone story booths, a “Color the Future” drawing wall, Tea + Talk, and a bean-planting station with an AR layer. For each one, the plan spelled out the guest journey, good, better, and best versions so the team could scale it to the time and budget available, staffing, a work plan split between Framework and the UW course team, and a supply list. It closed with what the museum needed to deliver and by when.

What I was responsible for

• Scope and planScoping the work with the museum and managing the project lifecycle from ideation to launch.
• Timeline and budgetDelivering under a tight timeline and a small budget, with no room to slip the event date.
• TeamCoordinating the UW students’ creative work with Framework and the museum, and keeping it on the museum’s priorities and the visitors’ needs.
• UW courseTeaching assistant for the course whose students did the creative and built the activations, and the link between their part of the work plan and Framework’s.
• EventPlanning the public event on the lot and overseeing 18 student volunteers on site on the day.

Who was in the room

Four groups had a stake in how the day went: the museum, which owned the site and the questions it wanted answered; Framework, which ran the project and brought me on to manage it; the UW course, whose students did the creative and built the activations; and the 18 student volunteers who needed clear roles on the lot.

What came of it

Looking Back, Looking Forward ran on Saturday, May 24, 2025, on time and on budget. For three hours, Canton Alley and the homestead’s lot were open to the neighborhood, with all five activations running: the story alley, the rotary-phone story booths, the Color the Future wall, Tea + Talk, and the bean-planting station.

The 18 student volunteers worked from the roles set out in the production plan. Neighbors and visitors got to stand on the lot itself and tell the museum what they want it to become.