Team Member Names and Roles
Noah Nsangou: Writer, Inquirer, Ideator, Graphic Designer
Anjali Pai: Writer, Inquirer, Ideator, Graphic Designer
Will Downs: Writer, Inquirer, Ideator, Former Graphic Designer
Problem and Solution Overview
A significant number of people feel slightly out-of-place or uncomfortable in art museums. The issue we are addressing is that of feeling self-consciousness in art museums either because you feel like your opinions are not valid, or because you feel intimidated by the quiet, serious atmosphere that art museums often exude. Our proposed solution is a QR-code enabled web-app that allows museum-goers to share their emotion about an artwork through a simple panel of faces expressing different moods. The user then receives information about the number of attendees who felt either the same emotion (if there are enough people) or the number of attendees who fell in the same category of emotions. This category of similarity is widened as necessary to ensure that each person is guaranteed a validating response. The smartboard component takes all of the user-provided data and creates a mass visualization of emotions for each artwork, represented through animations of groups of people. By interacting with the smartboard, museum-goers can view and interact with comments that other people have left, thus building a sense of community founded on communal feelings.
Design Research Goals, Stakeholders, and Participants
We focused on two concepts in our design research: people with little knowledge of art, and a casual environment for expressing thoughts on art. We performed two contextual inquiries. Both of our participants had little experience with art: Arthur, a psych major and math enthusiast, had very little interest in art, while Martha, a biology and geosciences major, was interested in art but did not know much about art in general. Each inquiry was conducted in WCMA with the same structure: for the first 15 minutes, the participant shared their stream of consciousness as they walked around the museum while one inquirer asked them questions about their thoughts on paintings and whether they felt comfortable talking about the art. For the second half of the inquiry, the second inquirer offered short, candid comments on artwork in an attempt to gauge the participant’s behavior when discussing their uneducated art opinions with people who shared a similar level of art knowledge. Our inquiry methods and participants were chosen to assess the opinions of art amateurs on expressing their thoughts about art and how these opinions might change if the participants were offered a more comfortable environment in which to express these ideas.
In this vein, we pursued an alternative method of design research: a graffiti wall. We hung a painting in Paresky with a sheet of poster paper underneath it that read “Thoughts?” and had a few short sample comments to encourage participation on a short, basic level. This setup remained in place for 24 hours, during which time anyone who walked by was able to write on the paper using a sharpie hung from the wall. Like our contextual inquiries, this research method was meant to provide a casual environment for users to share any thoughts on artwork.
More at Contextual Inquiry Review
Design Research Results and Themes
There were many common themes between what we observed from our two inquiry participants and the comments left on the graffiti wall. Our inquiry participants explicitly expressed how they felt apart from art “culture”. Art amateurs understand and respect that there is a “refined” culture in art museums, but sometimes they don’t want to deal with that culture. Art museums make people feel uncultured, inferior and intimidated. These feelings are often internalized, leading to self-consciousness in museums. Luckily, there is hope for getting art amateurs more engaged in the museum experience. In both our inquiries and the graffiti wall, we observed that people enjoy finding personal connections or associations with a piece of art, and tend to relate art to familiar cultural references. People do enjoy hearing and responding to others’ opinions. Finally, people provide gut reactions and raw emotional responses when given a blank space for opinions. Given all these themes, the rest of our design process has focused on finding ways to let people express their own reactions and ideas while feeling a sense of community with people who share similar thoughts. Through our proposed designs we want art amateurs to feel like they belong in art museums and be encouraged to engage more frequently with art.
More at Contextual Inquiry Review
Answers to Task Analysis Questions
Who is going to use the design?
The design will be used by people who feel slightly uncomfortable, out of place or otherwise unwelcome in art museums. Our design is primarily directed at people between the ages of 18-35 but elements our our design (particularly the smartboard component) are accessible to people of all ages.
What tasks do they now perform?
These people don’t willingly go to art museums very often, but when they do, they often walk around aimlessly, think about the art (even if those thoughts are not necessarily fully developed, deep, or well-thought-out), and generally express feeling out of place in art museums. When they do make comments about art, those comments are usually stories, outside references or silly observations. They also are willing to express their thoughts about art anonymously by writing on a posterboard hung below a piece of artwork.
What tasks are desired?
We want these users to express their thoughts and feelings about art and interact with the ideas and feelings of other museum-goers who may not necessarily be with them during their time at the museum, but who they can still connect with. We also want them to feel a sense of community with other museum-goers.
How are the tasks learned?
These tasks are learned by having access to an easy means of expressing feelings and opinions in a private way, and receiving continued validation about those feelings. The continued process of expressing emotions and receiving validation teaches the museum-goer to feel comfortable.
Where are the tasks performed?
The tasks are performed at individual works of art in the museum or at smartboards located around the museum which serve as central gathering points for museum-goers.
What is the relationship between the person and data?
In our intended design, the person interacts most with data about other people’s feelings and a database of comments provided by other museum-goers. In this way they engage with statistics about the number of people who express different emotions.
What other tools does the person have?
The other tools these users have are their personal experiences, memories, and their feelings. Often these are the tools that most allow these people to connect with or relate to the art. In addition they have access to tools to easily share emotions and view other people’s opinions.
How do people communicate with each other?
People communicate with each other either virtually by interacting with other comments through the smartboard, or in person by starting conversations with other museum-goers inspired by the smartboard.
How often are the tasks performed?
Tasks are performed as frequently or infrequently as the user wants. They have the option to share emotions and opinions about artwork whenever they feel compelled to. They can see and interact with other people’s opinions at time during their museum visit.
What are the time constraints on the tasks?
The option to provide an opinion about an artwork is only available within a certain radius of the painting, therefore the time constraint on performing that task is the time spent around a painting.
What happens when things go wrong?
One way things could go wrong is if someone has an emotional response to a painting that is not shared by a large number of people. In this case, they may feel dejected. To prevent that dejection, in those cases, the user would be shown the group of people who had feelings similar to theirs, instead of the exact same. In general, there would also be some way of screening or censoring comments so that highly negative comments are removed.
Proposed Design Sketches - “3x4”
More at Project Design Check-In
Our original 3 proposed designs were very similar in concept: interfaces where users could leave comments and read other people’s comments, with an algorithm designed to show similar comments to the user’s. These designs all focused on the tasks of leaving comments, seeing and responding to others’ comments, sharing personal experiences or stories about art, and feeling validation for opinions or community with people who share similar opinions.
First Design: Mobile App
Second Design: Interactive Smartboard Installations
Task 1: Leave a comment or thought about art!
Task 2: See/Respond to someone else’s thoughts or comments
Task 3: Share personal stories or experiences linked to artwork
### Task 4: View comments from and feel community with people who share your ideas
Third Design:
Task 1: Leave a comment or thought about art!
Task 2: See/Respond to someone else’s thoughts or comments
Task 3: Share personal stories or experiences linked to artwork
Task 4: View comments from and feel community with people who share your ideas
More on these 3 designs at Project Design Check-In.
Given feedback that these designs were too similar, we tried to take the good components from each design and combine them into a single better design. This design took the form of large interactive touch-screens in art exhibits combined with a basic mobile interface to let people comment on individual art pieces and see comments from people with similar ideas. Moreo n information on this design can be read at Project Design Review. However, this design proved too generic and insufficient for making people feel a sense of social belonging. Thus, we set out to refine our tasks and design with the goal of fostering social belonging in creative and interesting ways.
In refining the tasks we decided to further pursue, our primary consideration was combining tasks that were similar in nature to accommodate for new tasks that arose as we began to refine our design. Compared to previous iterations, we combined “leave comments” with the task of “sharing stories and experiences” because we discovered through the storyboarding process, that those tasks seemed to have significant overlap. A new task that seemed valuable to include in place of “leave comments” was “share emotions”, especially given that many of the responses we saw both in our contextual inquiries and our graffiti wall experiment showed a desire to express instinctive or gut emotional responses.
The design we chose to pursue moving forward is a slight variation on the phone + smartboard design, but it takes elements from all three of our initial designs. Our chosen design features both large touch-interactive screens (one per art exhibit) and a web-app accessible by mobile phone. The web-app helps fulfill three of our primary tasks: expressing emotions, sharing comments, and receiving validation. After opting in via a QR code or something similar at the start of their visit, while walking from painting to painting, the user is prompted with emotion/mood-board selector to specify their emotional response. They are then showed a visualization of people who feel similarly, and are then given the option to expand upon their feeling through a comment. These actions are performed on a phone to enable privacy for the user. The smartboard conglomerates the comments and emotions expressed by users into a larger graphic that shows emotions and comments associated with each painting in a room. In this way, that board creates a sense of community both virtually, and in person when multiple people visit the board at a time. People can also interact with other people’s comments on the board. We decided that this interaction could take place more publicly since interacting with others is a public activity. The combination of the web-app and smartboard help the user feel more comfortable expressing their opinions, especially when those contributions become a part of something larger (like the smartboard visualization). The idea to refocus the design around “emotions” instead of comments stems from the theory of social belonging. The theory is that social belonging is tied significantly to feeling like you belong in a community, which is often achieved through showing people that others in the community feel the same way as them (as described here). Our system of displaying comments from people who feel the same way as a user is a way of achieving this social belonging.
Written Scenarios - “1x2”
Task: Users can share an emotional reaction to an artwork.
The user walks through the museum, wandering from artwork to artwork. Having a particular emotional reaction to an artwork, the user opens their phone to the web-app they previously navigated to through the QR codes placed at numerous locations around the museum. The web-app, sensing the artwork that the user is closest in proximity to, prompts the user to select the face/emoji/avatar closest to their emotional reaction to the piece. Upon doing so, the user has the option to elaborate on their reaction with text, prompted by a visualization.
Task: Users receive validation for their feelings and opinions about art, no matter how trivial or silly those opinions may seem
The user used the web app to share their emotion about a certain artwork, but they still feel nervous about their opinion being invalid. The user will be able to receive validation in two ways. Immediate validation comes from the web app, where, after they choose the emotion they associate with the painting, they are redirected to a visualization of a group of cartoon faces that represent the group of people that feel the same way as the user. If the group of users who expressed that exact emotion is small, the visualization will instead display a group of users who expressed “similar” emotions. Along with each of these visualizations is text of the form “X users felt the same way as you!” This gives immediate validation. Validation can also be achieved through the smartboard, which will have a similar display, but which will show a broader range of emotions, but will also show people who feel similarly to the user.
Storyboards of the Selected Design
Task: EMOTION - Users will be able to share an emotional reaction to an artwork.
Task: VALIDATION - Users receive validation about their feelings and opinions about art, no matter how trivial or silly those opinions may seem
