Design Choice
We have chosen a design which is a mobile app that works in conjunction with kiosks located throughout the museum to support the tasks of planning, saving, and sharing bespoke route maps, which visitors can design themselves or with the help of prompts on the app and/or kiosks. Combining these designs eliminates possible problems for visitors in their museum experiences – by stationing kiosks in the reading room, by the entrance, and by couches in areas in between exhibition halls, visitors will be able to focus fully on works when they are viewing exhibitions and can interact with the collection as a whole and the creative route building process when they are in between galleries. This will prevent people from being glued to their screens while enjoying the museum, which we foresee as a potential pitfall of using only a mobile app. It will also afford many new possibilities in terms of accomplishing our tasks of increasing agency in one’s museum experience and giving the opportunity to learn about the curator’s perspective and vision for the exhibits, as the use of more versatile technology expands the boundaries of typical museum engagement. We feel that giving visitors more agency in their experiences captures the type of experience we are aiming to give our users: we want each museum visit to be meaningful and memorable in a way that is specific to an individual visitor. Enriching visitors’ understanding of the vision and perspectives of curators will make them better equipped to fully utilize their newfound agency and will also contribute to making the museum experience more personally significant and memorable. By affording new functionalities such as designing, printing, or digitally saving custom route maps of their museum visits as well as learning more about the collection from the kiosks, visitors will have complete control over their visit, will be able to bring home a unique souvenir designed especially for them and by them, and will have immediate access to information that will enrich their experience.
Agency in one’s museum experience
This scenario demonstrates how the mobile app and kiosks would be used in tandem to personalize the user’s visit. Upon arriving at the museum the user would open the app so that their route would be tracked as they move through the exhibits. As they make their way through the exhibits, users will use the camera in the app to “take pictures” of pieces they liked. In between exhibits, they could stop at kiosks strategically placed in areas absent of art, where they would be able to upload their route and “likes” by scanning a QR code on their phone. From this information, the kiosk would develop more personalized suggestions of other pieces to view, which the user could choose to access. Notably, this feature is tied to the kiosk so that users are forced to only directly interact with the technology outside of exhibits so that it doesn’t distract from the art. At the end of the visit, the user will stop at the final kiosk where they’ll have the option to share or save their route, as well as print a souvenir postcard of their favorite piece of the day.
Learning about the curator’s perspective and vision for the exhibit
This scenario shows the path of a user as they attempt to learn more about the curation steps and processes used in WCMA’s exhibits. It begins with a user arriving to the museum and opening the SWCMA app. They can choose to “Enable Curator Notifications” in their app or do so by scanning a QR code at kiosks located at the gallery entrances – this will provide them with fun facts related to their current location in the museum that appear when they pause at any point throughout the exhibitions. As they travel through the galleries, they will be rewarded with virtual badges commemorating milestones related to their wayfinding and interactions with art and info!