Alternative Storytelling in Historical/Art Exhibitions
A 8 month long thesis project that seeks to redesign the museum labels in order to increase the interaction between visitors and the exhibition, thereby improve the overall history, ethnographic, and art exhibition.
My Role
Entire product design from research to ideation to proof of concept/usability testing.
Project Duration
8 Months
Area of Focus
Historical & Art Museums / Storytelling / Curating
Synopsis
This is a year 8 month long design thesis project that I did, while studying at Syracuse University. The topic that I chose to focus on is how can we get museum visitors to be more engaged with the art and historical exhibitions.
If you want to jump ahead to view the ideation process, testing you can click on their respective links below. On the other hand you can also click on the table of contents on the left hand side to also immediately take you to that process as well.
1. Research
2. Ideation
3. Finalized Design
4. Proof of Concept /
Usability Testing
Views on Historical and Art Museums
The image that you see below summarizes what I've heard and observed after speaking to museum visitors. I've also looked at different articles that specifically critiques on the museums themselves, especially about museum fatigue.
How might we find a way to get visitors to be more interested and engaged in an art/ethnographic museums?
Change in Direction
Initial Focus: Go High Tech!
What's the best way to allow the visitors to be more engaged with the exhibition? These ideas below drove me to want to speak to the curators behind science musuems.
Problems with these solutions
After speaking to the science museum curators and other museum tour groups I found out that these solutions:
What about going Low Tech?
Are there any alternative low tech solutions in the market?
Finalized Focus:
How do we incorporate alternative storytelling in order to promote visitor's interest and engagement within history and art exhibitions.
Brainstorming
Focused areas
Inspirations
Concepts & ideations
Final Idea: Lenticular Museum Labels
Choosing the best one
How it works: vertical & horizontal oriented labels
User Flows
Heading into the low fidelity wireframes, I've created three separate user flows that encompasses my main features.
Low Fidelity Wireframes
The wireframes below are some of the main pages for each of the flows. The program that I used for both the user flow and wireframes is Sketch.
Vertical Lenticular Examples
Horizontal Lenticular Example
Usability Testing
As part of the test, I was fortune enough to be allowed to collaborate with an exhibition curator to let me test my prototype design in his upcoming exhibition.
Conducting the Test
The images below is an reenactment of how the visitors reacted to my prototypes during user testing.
Test Results
How the solution can change the experience
Based off of the results from the test, I believe that, if my solution would be implemented at a larger scale, it could encourage visitors to explore more of the exhibition.
How curators can use this solution
Based off of what I heard from the museum curators and my experience with working with the curators themselves, I've cs to visualized how my solution would be integrated with the curation.
Example mock up designs for other exhibitions
Here are some possible examples of labels that I made for different exhibitions
