Think about the last museum you walked through. The wayfinding. The exhibit panels. The story on the wall.
Now think about how long that story had been there.
A year? Five? Ten? In many institutions, once the infrastructure is built and the content is installed, it stays — often for a decade or more. And over time, the space starts to feel less like a living reflection of the people it serves and more like a time capsule of the moment it was designed.
That same tension exists in any space built to tell a story — visitor centers, campuses, branded environments. The infrastructure decisions you make at the start determine whether a space can evolve with its audience or gets locked into saying the same thing long after the story has moved on.
Ellie DiPietro and her team at JCHS decided to build something that wouldn’t get locked in.
As the Director of Research and Collections at the Jefferson County Historical Society (JCHS) in Port Townsend, Washington, Ellie helped lead a full museum reimagining — one that celebrated its public reopening in April 2026, welcoming 700 visitors through the doors on its first weekend alone.
But the reopening isn’t just a milestone for JCHS. It’s the proof of concept for a fundamentally different approach to designing interpretive space — one built on a modular exhibit system, recyclable materials, a unified content strategy, and a relationship with the community that’s designed into the infrastructure itself.
The principles behind it apply to anyone building environments where the story needs to keep evolving.
One Theme. One Museum. Everything Connected.
When JCHS reopened the Museum of Art + History in April, visitors didn’t just walk into a refreshed museum. They walked into an entirely new model for how the museum works.
Previously, art and history lived in separate areas. Content changed at different speeds — some sections updated frequently, others stayed the same for years. The result was a patchwork, and the stories being told had started to overlap with what visitors could find at other regional institutions. When every museum in the area is dedicating hundreds of square feet to the same well-worn regional history — like the Puget Sound Mosquito Fleet, the network of steamships that connected waterfront communities across the Sound from the 1850s through the 1930s — visitors don’t have a compelling reason to come back.
The reopened museum works on a completely different model. Now, JCHS operates on a unified annual theme. Its inaugural theme is ‘Home'” — and every exhibit, every artwork, and every community story in the museum connects to it.
That single organizing principle changes everything about how the space functions. Instead of surface-level coverage of many topics, the museum goes deep on one — pulling in perspectives from past, present, and future to explore what that theme means specifically in Jefferson County.
The Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe’s deep connection to the Olympic Peninsula becomes a lens on what home means to the region’s Indigenous community. The Starrett House — one of Port Townsend’s iconic Victorian buildings — becomes a way to trace how the meaning of home has shifted alongside the county’s economic fortunes: built as a showpiece to attract investment, left nearly empty during a regional bust, subdivided into rentals when Fort Worden needed housing, and eventually reborn as a bed and breakfast when tourism took hold.
“We can’t tell those stories if we don’t pivot and look at one specific topic and dive into it deeply,” Ellie says.
The takeaway here extends far beyond museums. A unified theme doesn’t limit what you can say in a space — it makes everything you say land harder. When every element pulls in the same direction, the visitor doesn’t have to work to find the story. The story finds them.
Whether you’re designing an exhibit, a visitor center, a campus welcome experience, the question is the same: is there a single organizing idea holding this space together, or is it a patchwork of disconnected moments?
When Nothing in the Space Is Too Precious to Change
A unified theme only works if the physical infrastructure can keep up. If your exhibit system takes a decade to overhaul, a two-year content cycle is a fantasy.
That’s the problem Ellie and her team needed to solve — and it’s a challenge that anyone managing physical environments with evolving content will recognize.
Ellie described a reality familiar across the industry: exhibit infrastructure is typically built in place, difficult to change, and designed to stay for a long time. “And that’s why some museums can feel really old or dated,” she says. “Like, if I was here five years ago and nothing’s different… Why would I go back?”
JCHS needed a system as flexible as the stories it wanted to tell. Working with AldrichPears Associates — an internationally recognized interpretive planning and exhibit design firm based in Vancouver, B.C. — the team developed a modular exhibit infrastructure that Ellie describes as “exhibit Legos.”
Interchangeable reader rails. Standardized panel sizes with graphic templates. Components that can be added, removed, or rearranged without rethinking the entire system. And graphics printed on Falcon board — a pure paper product that can be fully recycled at Port Townsend’s local paper mill when the theme cycle ends.
But the most interesting thing the modular system enables isn’t efficiency or sustainability — though it delivers both. It’s what happens when nothing in the space is too precious to touch.
“If we put a story out in the public and then somebody comes to us and says, ‘I have a missing piece of this puzzle’ — they either tell us something we didn’t know or correct something we thought we knew,” Ellie explains. “We have an opportunity to learn and change that panel. It’s no longer so expensive and precious that we can’t touch it. We can just slide it out and slide a new one in.”
That’s the shift worth paying attention to. When the infrastructure removes the cost and complexity of updating content, the space stops being a one-way broadcast and starts becoming a conversation. The community doesn’t just visit the exhibit — they contribute to it. And the exhibit gets better over time because it was designed to absorb new input from the start.
The lesson isn’t specific to museums. Any space that tells stories — a visitor center, a corporate environment, a campus, — faces the same tension between permanence and relevance. The infrastructure decisions you make at the start determine whether that space can evolve gracefully, or gets stuck saying the same thing long after the story has moved on.
A Beat-Up Drill and What It Means to Belong
The modular system is how JCHS keeps its stories fresh. But JCHS’s curatorial philosophy is what determines which stories earn a place in the space — and it’s built on a principle that resonates well beyond the museum world.
Among the current exhibits, JCHS displays shipwright tools on loan from Port Townsend’s shipwright co-op — a community with a long tradition of wooden boat building. Many of the tools are antiques. But sitting alongside them is a very contemporary, very beat-up Makita drill.
“People are like, ‘How did you make that look like it’s 100 years old?'” Ellie says. “We’re like, that’s just the actual look of a drill that’s being used all the time.”
Some visitors question why a modern power tool belongs in a museum at all. Ellie’s answer cuts right to the philosophy: “It’s still relevant and it’s part of the story of the people who are here. It doesn’t have to be 100 years old to be important. And it doesn’t have to be contemporary to be relevant to your life today. We try to help people bridge that gap and see that connection.”
The framework behind that decision is what makes it so transferable. When Ellie evaluates whether something belongs in the exhibit, she asks a set of questions: What was this object’s relationship to people during its time? What stories can it tell? And how might a visitor see themselves reflected in it today?
Those aren’t just curatorial questions. They’re design questions. They’re the same questions you should be asking about every element in any environment designed to connect people to a story — whether that’s a heritage site, a brand experience, or a visitor center.
The strongest spaces don’t just present information. They create a mirror — a place where people recognize something about their own lives in what they’re seeing. That’s what Ellie and the team are designing for. And the beat-up Makita drill, sitting proudly next to tools that are a century old, is proof that it works.
Making a 132-Year-Old Building Work for Everyone
JCHS is housed in Port Townsend’s historic City Hall, built in 1892 — decades before the ADA existed. And for years, that history created real barriers for the people the museum was meant to serve.
Ellie described the reality directly: Ten years ago, roughly one-third of the museum was truly accessible. The other two-thirds was blocked by stairs, tight doorways, and physical obstacles that prevented visitors with mobility challenges from reaching entire sections of the space.
“It was heartbreaking to watch,” Ellie says. “People want to engage with the content. And they just couldn’t physically get into the space.”
That experience became the catalyst for a sustained accessibility effort — one that extends far beyond ramps and doorways. The team has removed all stairs leading into exhibit spaces while maintaining the historic character of the building, a balance that’s extraordinarily difficult to achieve in heritage environments. They’re adding tactile and audio elements to exhibits so visitors can engage with content through more than just sight. And they’re building out online collections designed to work with screen readers, so someone who can’t physically visit can still access what’s on display.
It’s an effort Ellie describes as continuous — each improvement revealing the next thing that needs attention, each new standard raising the bar for what the space should offer. The work isn’t about reaching a finish line. It’s about making the space more open and more inclusive than it was before, and then doing it again.
For anyone designing within heritage buildings or older environments — campuses, historic retail locations, adaptive reuse spaces — the JCHS approach is a model. Not because they’ve solved everything, but because they’ve committed to the practice of solving it continually, one layer at a time, without sacrificing the character that makes the building meaningful in the first place.
How 18 Years and Hundreds of Exhibits Built This Approach
Ellie’s approach at JCHS didn’t come from a single discipline. It came from a career that trained her to think about objects, spaces, and stories as parts of the same problem.
She holds dual Bachelor of Fine Arts degrees from the University of Kansas — one in Industrial and Product Design, the other in Technical Theatre and Theatre Design. Industrial design taught her how people interact with objects and physical environments. Theatre design taught her how to build spatial narratives — experiences that unfold as someone moves through them. It’s a combination that maps almost perfectly onto the work of designing exhibits and interpretive spaces.
A flyer in her industrial design studio led her to a student worker position at the KU Natural History Museum. She spent two years there — and discovered a career she didn’t know existed.
“I got sucked in. I’m never leaving,” she says. “It’s addictive. Be careful.”
She went on to earn a Master’s in Museology from the University of Washington, then spent nearly seven years at Pacific Studio — one of the Pacific Northwest’s most respected exhibit fabrication firms. Pacific Studio designed some exhibits, but fabricated far more, which meant Ellie watched hundreds of museum projects move from concept through fabrication and installation.
“That’s one of the great benefits of working at Pacific Studio,” she says. “Just seeing dozens and dozens, probably hundreds of museum exhibits go through.”
That panoramic view — knowing what works, what doesn’t, and what tends to go stale — directly informed the decisions at JCHS. The modular system, the recyclable materials, the unified theme, the emphasis on flexibility — these aren’t abstract ideals. They’re choices made by someone who’s seen enough exhibit infrastructure to know what she wanted to do differently.
Ellie describes herself as “a fixer of things old and new” — a mindset rooted in growing up in a farming community where getting the exact thing you needed might take six weeks. You fixed what you had. You figured out how to combine two things that didn’t seem like they’d go together. You built resourcefulness into your instincts.
That ethos runs through everything at JCHS — from a digitization project that found a cost-effective way to scan 1,200 fragile oversize maps and documents, to a modular exhibit system that accomplishes on a two-year cycle what would take a larger institution a decade. It’s not about having the most resources. It’s about building the smartest system with the ones you have.
A Space Designed to Keep Becoming Something New
The JCHS reopening is a celebration — of a dedicated team, an engaged community, and a museum that’s rethinking what interpretive space can be from the ground up.
But for anyone who designs, builds, or manages physical environments where the story needs to keep evolving, it’s also something more practical than that. It’s a proof of concept for a set of ideas that apply anywhere a space is meant to connect people to a story.
That a unified theme makes every element in a space work harder — because when everything pulls in the same direction, the experience becomes immersive, not fragmented.
That modular, recyclable infrastructure isn’t just a sustainability win — it changes the relationship between a space and the people it serves. When content can be updated easily, the community becomes a collaborator, not just an audience.
That relevance matters more than permanence — in what you put on display, in how you tell the story, and in how you design the system that holds it all together.
And when asked what single piece of advice she’d give to someone designing for a museum or heritage space, Ellie didn’t hesitate:
“Be flexible. If you can’t put things on the walls, or you can’t do that sustainably, you have to come up with something else. Give yourself that grace of, ‘well, I thought of this idea — it was really cool, but I have to put it on the shelf and come up with something different.’ Give yourself that flexibility and it’ll be a lot more fun.”
Ellie DiPietro has spent 18 years in the museum world — from fabrication floors to archives, from firms with over 100 employees to a team of eight with half a million objects in their care. And what she and her team have built at JCHS is a reminder, that the most thoughtful spaces aren’t always the most permanent.
Sometimes they’re the ones designed to keep becoming something new.
Your Space Has a Story. Let's Help You Tell It.
At SuperGraphics, we’re inspired by leaders like Ellie who prove that great environmental storytelling is built on smart systems, sustainable materials, and a deep understanding of place. Whether you’re designing for a museum, a campus, a heritage site, or a branded environment — the right production and installation partner makes all the difference.
Curious how SuperGraphics can support your next project?
