Spaulding Center for Transportation

Grinnell, Iowa

The Heroes Center is a central component of the Iowa Transportation Museum, currently under development in Grinnell, Iowa, at the former site of the historic Spaulding Manufacturing Co. The Heroes Center enables the Museum to be up and running before its doors officially open to the public. Through a blend of personal interviews and videos, it gives visitors immediate access to the stories behind America’s rich transportation legacy and allow them the special opportunity to nominate heroes from their own lives.

Story

The Spaulding Center for Transportation wanted to create an online Heroes Center to tell the stories of both everyday and extraordinary heroes who devoted their lives to transportation. In order to clarify the goals and structure of the website, we developed a story that put the focus on telling the stories of heroes. The board of the Spaulding Center liked it so much that they revised their larger plans for the Iowa Transportation Museum to make people and their stories the focus, rather than just the machinery of transportation. Although the museum is still in the developmental stage, this story helped to galvanize them around some key elements that altered their strategic thinking about their entire project. That’s the power of story.

Download Story as PDF

Expression

This website introduces the Heroes Center to the general public. It was important to communicate that the essence of the Heroes Center is people as well as make the nomination of heroes as easy as possible. We primarily used images of people working in transportation to portray the personal nature of the center. We also used the tagline “honoring the people that make life go” to communicate the essence of the Heroes Center quickly. The nomination functionality provides an easy way for users to nominate a hero and ties into an easy-to-use online database for review by the Heroes Center team.