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Day at the Museum

In this project, our goal was to design a museum experience with multiple digital and physical touchpoints that might be experienced in person, with reasonable accommodations for a range of participant abilities. As a group, we will choose a period of design or technology history that served as a theme for our museum exhibit. Based on this theme, we identified appropriate technologically-rich and meaningful interactions that allow patrons a sense of embodied participation in the exhibit, enabling them to learn about the period of history through immersion and participation. Our chosen theme was to focus on Disney Animation's Technology History. 

Here is our final documentation for this project.

Personal Contributions

  • Initial Research

  • Cultural Probe (v1&2)

  • Final Sketches

  • Concept Testing

  • Multimedia Component

Final Deliverables

  • Physical and Digital Touchpoints

  • Multimedia Component

  • Documentation

Research & the 6 Big Q's

Our group did initial research, one on what makes a museum exhibit good and two, on what kind of technology did Disney use.

For our research, we had six questions we wanted to be able to answer or understand more of, our six questions were:

  1. What makes a good museum? What would make someone want to visit one more than once or share the experience with someone?

  2. How can a museum be designed to be entertaining and informative to ALL ages?

  3. What physical or digital interactions help participants learn and engage with an exhibit?

  4. What motivated participants to want to engage with a museum exhibit?

  5. What are the motivations of museumgoers?

  6. How can we help people express themselves creatively? In other words, how can our exhibit be an outlet for creative expression?

What makes a museum good?

In our initial research of how to make a museum good, we found a look of information that would later be used to inform our final design decisions.

  • Allowing people to take photographs and share them on digital platforms.

  • Including museum cafes/bars or some sort of area of socialization. This increases retention, socialization, patreon participation, and all-age involvement.

  • Adding more evening hours to attract more young adults and millennial-aged visitors.

  • Offer premium guided tours (interactive, engaging, meaningful experience)

  • Had some sort of crowd control to “make it easier for people to process through museums by redesigning and maximizing viewing spaces in both permanent and temporary exhibitions.”

    • Create a continuous, seamless mobility chain.

  • Utilize a variety of mediums

What are the technologies used?

Stages of Disney

Cultural Probe

After we finished our initial research, our group decided to conduct a cultural probe activity with our users. We conducted this because we wanted to learn what our users already know about our exhibit theme and the corresponding emotions of that theme.

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With this probe, our team was able to decide on our final touchpoints and the design layout of our exhibit to highlight the technologies users didn't know or wanted more experience with.

Sample Collage
Final Questions of the Cultural Probe

For the actual process of our cultural probe we had users sit down go through collages of photos from each stage of technology and rate their knowledge and emotional impact of each collage then at the end there were five final questions about whether the user would visit a museum centered around this theme and what kind of activites they would like to see. 

Concept Testing

After we gathered all our data, sketches, and touchpoints our team decided to make a concept testing protocol for our exhibit layout and final touchpoints.
 

The goals of our concept testing were to

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  1. Identify opportunities for improvement for our final touchpoints

  2. Discover the user's preferences for our final touchpoints

  3. Identify which features of a museum exhibit enhance guest engagement and participation.

Final Exhibit Layout

Our final layout was a three-room walkthrough, where the user would start in the early stage and end in the modern stage. There is a clockwise flow to each stage but the user can walk through each stage however they choose, giving the user that freedom we found they wanted at the beginning of our research. The touchpoints we have our a digital jukebox, AI Q&A, flipbook activity, frame-by-frame activity, and a body motion activity. Each activity corresponds with the stage it is in. 

Multimedia Component

Another aspect of this project we had to include in the final deliverables was making our exhibit. We were left to decide how to create our exhibit, our team decided to create our exhibit in Minecraft. It was a fun experience creating the exhibit and I think it conveyed the type of experience we wanted our users to have in our museum.

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