Jump To

01. Problem Space
02. Process
03. Research Questions
04. Brainstorming
05. Ideation
06. Proposal
07. What I Learned

Summary

Focus on making museums fun for all ages and preserving an authentic human connection

A choose-your-own-adventure style scavenger hunt that takes visitors on a tour through the museum

Ability to implement with different levels of investment and involvement from museum

What I Learned

1. Structured brainstorming is extremely productive.

2. Divide and conquer.

Project Specs

Role: Project leader, research, design
Team: Scott Tan, Jonathan Tran
Timeline: January — March 2018 (4 weeks to research, 3 weeks to design)
Skills: Interviewing, observation, rapid ideation

Burke Museum — Research & Design

The new Burke Museum is one of the first museums to take an inside-out approach to the museum experience. Dr. Tyler Fox presented our class with the unique opportunity to explore this new paradigm for museums that brings behind-the-scenes work to the forefront and allows visitors to watch and interact with researchers as they bring exhibits to life.

Our project was to design a framework for exhibits that would allow the museum and visitors to take advantage of this new ‘transparent’ museum layout. We were not subjected to budgetary or technological constraints, and instead encouraged to find a very creative and engaging solution.

Most museum visitors only see a small fraction of the museum’s artifacts and only interact with a few of the staff, and usually not the actual researchers or curators. The Burke Museum had the opportunity to address this problem when designing their new building, which was bigger and had more updated construction. The New Burke is designed with large, open workspaces for researchers to do their work in, rather than behind closed doors or in the basement, as was the case in the old building. Visitors in the new building will be able to walk among the researchers and interact with them as they work.

Dr. Fox provided a very well-defined framework within which to research and ideate about this project. Our first step was to read all materials provided by the Burke about their new building, as well as some academic papers about museum-visitor interaction.

Since this class had several groups, we were able to take a divide-and-conquer approach to the research and ideation. Each person would complete two observations and each group did one interview, the results of which were aggregated and sorted with intra- and inter-group affinity diagramming sessions.

This new museum paradigm posed two interesting questions:

• What new and exciting technologies or ways of interacting can we implement, besides just reading signs next to exhibits?

• How will this new way of working and interacting affect the researchers and the visitors?

Keeping these questions in mind, we set out to gather our research data.

Observations & Interview

I myself visited the Pacific Science Center to observe how visitors of different ages interact with exhibits, and especially what people do at a museum when not interacting with exhibits. I also visited Din Tai Fung, a restaurant known for putting their chefs on display as they assemble dumplings behind a glass wall.

After this, as a group, we were able to get an hour-long interview with someone who worked at the museum. My group interviewed Melissa Kennedy, an exhibit developer who has created exhibits at museums across the US.

View interview transcript

The entire class then collected their individual observation findings and group interview findings and participated in a two-hour affinity diagramming session. The findings that our group’s solution was most driven by are pictured below (click for full diagram).

View full affinity diagram

Given these insights, we came up with 4 broad “how might we” questions that would guide our brainstorming and ideation phase.

After collecting the pain-points and concerns from interviews and observations, we came up with “how might we“ questions to brainstorm ideas that could address each of those broad concerns. Then we did Crazy Eights style ideation and came up with 27 possible ideas as a group.

Each group then picked an idea to explore further and create a prototype with. My teams used a combination of some of the ideas, which are highlighted above.

Once we had honed in on a solution we wanted to focus on, my team started ideating to flesh out the details of what our game would actually entail.

We demonstrated our idea using a lo-fi Wizard-of-Oz prototype and the poster below. Employees from the museum viewed it and gave us feedback about how they thought it would work in practice.

View proposal

Were it in the scope of the project, we would have liked to implement a higher-fidelity, but low-cost and low-risk version of our prototype at the Burke Museum and observe how people interacted it with it, so we could refine it further. We would also need to work very closely with exhibit curators to generate the content and narratives of our games.

• Structured brainstorming is extremely productive. Going into a brainstorming session prepared and with clear goals of what you want out of it is a foolproof way to have a good brainstorming session. Having a ‘third-party’ moderate and time the session also greatly helped. I have been a part of brainstorming sessions that were done just for the sake of it and were not nearly as successful as the ones we engaged in during this class. Brainstorming is a useful for tool not only for coming with solutions, but questions and problems as well.

• Divide and conquer. This is a great way to gather loads of qualitative data and analyze it quickly. Since we had a lot of people in our class, we were able to branch out and explore different museums and workplaces to observe people, and subsequently to analyze the resulting data. Since workplaces usually have smaller teams and not a lot of time, this approach could also be useful as preliminary exercise to gather a lot of generative research rapidly.