Sound
Museum
OVERVIEW
This was my first proper design process, completed in a unit at the University of Sydney called the ‘UX Studio’.
The design brief/problem area was provided by the Chau Chak Wing Museum – a museum located on campus.
The brief revolved around the need to make museum spaces ‘timeless’, upon decreased visits due to COVID lockdowns (this was when classes were becoming in-person again after the pandemic first hit, but months before the delta lockdown in Sydney).
ROLES/SKILLS
TOOLS
User research, Prototyping, Asset creation
Adobe Illustrator, Miro, After Effects, Premiere
PERIOD
TEAM
Feb 2021 – May 2021
(13 weeks)
Farhan Khan (Myself), Kaeden Dunton, Martin Kapr, Robbie McHugh
GRADES
DECO2014 – 81 (Distinction)
Discover
Introduction
Covid had changed the museum experience significantly:
International visitors haven’t been able to visit.
COVID safe practices need to be maintained.
Mobile sign-ins are the first touch point.
Interactive touchscreens have been closed off.
This highlights a need to ‘future-proof’ the museum.
The brief also asked us to consider how experience and technology mediate the existing space, guiding visitors through the many collections and creating connections with particular objects.
Our research question for this studio is…
How can we create a timeless museum experience which fosters a strong connection
between visitors and objects?
The Chau Chak Wing museum also asked us to embrace the theme of serendipity in our solution. We kept this in mind during the ideation phase.
Kicking off research
We wanted to grasp a comprehensive understanding of the contemporary museum experience. So, we began by doing some ethnographic research of the Chau Chak Wing Museum itself. Over a number of days, we observed visitors and their behaviours and noticed most of them to be an older demographic.
There were fewer visibly younger people, and children would always attend with their parents. This was noteworthy because the museum was located inside of campus, and yet student activity was not particularly significant.
It made sense to target younger demographics. We focused on high school leavers and first year university students in particular. Strengthening young people’s connection with artifacts can help make museum spaces timeless.
We followed up our ethnography with workshops (focus groups). We ran 2 workshops, each with 4 participants. Prior to the day of the workshops, we asked our participants to complete sensitising activities over a week in order to get them thinking about their experiences with museums in the past.
This was done to to stimulate more deeper responses from our generative sessions on the day they were being conducted. We piloted these tasks on students outside of our participant seleciton.
Our context-mapping techniques gained insights into how these younger audiences felt about the museum experience. They were selected in order to find the more tacit, and latent feelings of younger audiences. From an informal interview, asking why these spaces were ‘boring’ or ‘uninteresting’ didn’t identify the root cause for their disinterest in these spaces.
Our participants had become co-designers in our research phase, saying what they could not express through words initially, through the artefacts they constructed. In reviewing what they had made, they were able to relay genuine recounts and emotions from experiences in the past, and project the ones they had of the future.
Define
Findings & Insights
We organised a lot of the themes and observations into statement cards to categorise these responses under themes. We summarized our key findings visually in an infographic. My role involved writing the summaries, organising the information and order of each stage. I assisted with some iconography at the very end.
The main insights:
Insight 1/3: Interactivity and engaging exhibits are strongly favoured.
The overwhelming consensus was that interactive and engaging exhibitions led to a more enjoyable experience. There was some mention to digitally driven interactions being exciting, however there was a main focus on tactile experiences. While contextually informed exhibits and the way information is presented to visitors is important and valuable, museums need to do more than just explain their exhibits; they need to fully immerse their visitors.
Insight 2/3: Overly structured visits negatively affect young people’s impressions of museums in the future.
Most of the negative experiences discussed by participants during the generative sessions referred to their previous museum visits during highschool excursions. The enforced linear structure that many excursions employed, while perhaps logistically necessary for school organisers, left many students feeling unappreciative of museums. Negative impressions were long-lasting and profound. Students were appreciative of moments where independence was granted and self-direction led them to engage more enthusiastically with the exhibits. To ensure that future generations don’t harbor resentment or disinterest later in life, the ways that school groups engage with museums needs to be addressed.
Insight 3/3: The museum experience is strongly influenced by a fast changing world.
Some mention was made to a digitally evolving modern world, and how changes in recent years, namely the dominance of social media, have affected how visitors engage with exhibits. There were also notes made on COVID-19, and how this restricted museum visits. To future-proof museum engagements, attention needs to be paid toward creating an adaptive and accessible museum experience.
Develop
We aim to make young adults realise and develop a rooted, existing fascination for museum exhibits. By adding interaction, we attempt to deliver an immersive experience that we hope creates a deeper and more engaging connection to objects, which traditionally wouldn’t appeal to users. Advancing technology allows us for many potential pathways of destroying this limited, constrained perception of these objects, and ‘removes the glass case’ so that users can realise their fascination for objects.
Our research found that past negative experiences from high school have formed an impression that persists until now. High school leavers are even able to acknowledge their fascination for these spaces and objects today, which is a surprise due to their lack of visit to museums in comparison to older demographics. Therefore, our ideas revolved around creating museum experiences for school students, providing a pleasurable first impression which shapes their perception of these spaces into adulthood.
Both Kaeden and I did one Crazy 8 each, selected what we deemed to be our most effective concepts, and improved on them. We used Decision matrices to filter out the most effective idea.
Shout out to Kaeden for the awesome concept and sketch!
Deliver
Helping young adults maintain a rooted fascination for the museum experience, by improving their engagement at a school age. Providing a memorable way of navigating the CCWM that fosters independent learning early on, we can create special museum-visitor relationships that stand the test of time.
This museum provides an alternative exploration of history through a sensory social experience. Users wear a proximity-based headset which enables a unique way of interacting with artefacts and museum spaces. The Sound Museum is a soundscape of time and space.
