Design Thinking for Invercargill Transport World
“One man’s passion started it all — and this is your chance to experience a family legacy that has become the largest automotive museum of its type in the world. But if you think it’s strictly for petrolheads, think again. Here you’ll discover something for everyone.” – from Bill Richardson Transport World Invercargill
One of the largest vehicle collections of its kind in the world, there are over 300 vintage vehicles in the Bill Richardson transport world museum. Since 1967, Southland businessman Bill Richardson has started to collect old trucks, petrol pumps, and other transport related memorabilia such as signs and toy models. When he passed away, his family decided to open up their family collection to the public. In November 2015, the 15,000 square meters truck museum was opened in Invercargill.
Apart from the rare vintage cars in exhibition, the truck museum premise also features
· LEGO Room. An entire room dedicated to LEGO with thousands of pieces for hands-on building.
· Cadbury Chocolate Room. A small-scale version of a Cadbury factory showing how the chocolate is made.
· Wearable Art. Functional art used in clothing pieces that are worth a look.
· Interactive exhibits.
· Café Grille. Qualify and diverse choice of food and relaxing areas for all types of visitors.
· Shop and conference areas
For more information, you can visit: https://www.transportworld.co.nz/.
Since its opening, the Invercargill truck museum has become a popular place for local families, tourists, and businesses. COVID-19 forced New Zealand to shut the border and restricted domestic travel, wrecking the tourism industry. With a local population of less than 100,000 (Stats NZ, 2018), the museum has seen a decline in its visitors and a losing engagement with local community. With the border opening to all visitors across the world from July 2022 and life gradually resumes to normal, the question to the truck museum remains as how to enhance visitor engagement.
As per a paper conducted by Silvers et al. (2013), museums have been slow to keep pace with the expectations and interests of visitors, who increasingly expect experiences, services, and products that are intuitive, responsive, and well designed. This gap presents an immense opportunity to introduce Design Thinking into museum practice in order to better identify and respond to visitors’ needs.
“Design Thinking isn’t just a method, it fundamentally changes the fabric of your organization and your business.” — from David Kelly, founder of Stanford University’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design
As per Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO, Design Thinking is a human-centred approach to innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success (IDEO, n.d). Therefore, Design Thinking is evaluated and commended as an adaptable approach for Invercargill truck museum to enhance its visitor engagement.
Design thinking is a process for framing and solving problems and discovering new opportunities. Inherently, there are five iterative process: Empathy with the user to understand their needs, Definition of the problem, Ideation of the solutions, Prototyping and Testing of the solutions (invisiblestudio, 2017). For Invercargill truck museum, We’d like to propose how to use the Design Thinking process to design and execute potential service initiatives to improve visitor engagement with the aim to spark some truly innovative outcomes.
Internal alignment
Before we reach out to external community, it’s critical to align internal stakeholders. Design thinking first and foremost is a collaborative practice carried out by multidisciplinary teams. In this sense, internal stakeholders refer to all the team members working in the truck museum, from administrative office to corporate event team.
We recommend:
1. Engage an awesome facilitator.
It’s recommended that a reputable Design Thinking consultant is engaged to plan and facilitate a series of workshops with internal team to introduce the concept and framework of Design Thinking and the benefits it can bring. A good facilitator can ensure the program is conducted in a controlled manner with tracking progress. Coming from external also provides a fresh perspective and mitigate the familiarity from within.
Note that it is important to have senior leader of the business to kick off the introduction and be involved along the whole process, as this sends a strong message of business commitment from the top. It is also preferred that the initial workshops are arranged in an offsite venue to create a fresh and non-distracting environment for the team.
2. Find a buddy.
It is not realistic to change one’s mindset and behaviour overnight, let alone a well-established institution. The truck museum has been operating for over 6 years with systems and processes already in place. It is encouraged that the museum staff pair with one another during and after the workshops to reinforce the new ways of working and thinking, making the whole processes and practices both effective and fun. Forming an inclusive environment can also help on board sceptical team members.
Empathize
The IDEO Human-centred design toolkit explains empathy as a deep understanding of the problems of the people who you are designing for. Learn about the difficulties people face, understand what they need, what environment they are working in, and their interactions with the environment (IDEO, n.d). This process implies observing and interviewing truck museum visitors to understand them as a person and their needs, so that we can obtain deeper individual insights for the next phase.
We recommend:
1. Observe and interview visitors
It’s good for the paired teams to spread across the museum and quietly observe visitors such as their age and gender group, how long they stop for exhibits/entertainments, any confusion or loss of interest, ect. After the observation, it’s encouraged that the team members come up to have an open-end, qualitative interview with the visitors to confirm or calibrate their observations. Observation and interview notes should be shared in follow-up workshops and clustered in main groups.
2. Reach out to non-museum visitors
Invercargill, Southland is a small region, yet the community is quite tight. Locals love to support local businesses. It is recommended that the staff go to popular locations such as Queens park, Splash Palace (swimming pool), and main streets over the weekend for interviews.
3. Putting yourself in visitors’ shoes
To walk the same path of the museum visitors can help deepen the understanding of the desires and pain points of the visitors. This means to do role play as a visitor (e.g. a busy truck-loving dad who only has time to be with his two young kids over the weekend), and mimic the entire visitor journey in the museum, from the ticket sale to the exit of the souvenir store.
The nature of the above-mentioned steps is to design with the visitor in mind. The empathy approach is crucial to observing and engaging with the visitors, through which we can deduce pain points and uncover hidden problems. By speaking with museum visitors and the wider communities, the staff can gather first-hand stories to develop insights about how to improve engagement with existing and potential visitors. With these insights, we’re well equipped to move to the second phase: definition.
“If I had 20 days to solve a problem, I would take 19 to define it.” — from Albert Einstein
Define
Design Thinking, as a thought process, is also “problem-framing”. During this phase, team members process, discuss, categorize, reflect on, and make sense of the data they accumulated in the field. A compelling problem statement becomes the critical starting point for designing solutions and experiences (Silvers et al., 2013).
We recommend:
1. Draw an empathy map
An empathy map is a simple, easy-to-digest visual that captures knowledge about a user’s behaviours and attitudes (Brown, 2018). Based on the insights to the current and potential museum visitors out of the first step, the team can fill in an empathy map to unpack the interviews and understand the problems hidden behind the visitor’s feelings.
2. Develop a good problem statement
A problem statement provides a focus on the specific needs that you have uncovered out of your visitors (Dam & Siang, n.d). The below traits are what’s important to make a good problem statement.
· Human-centered: frame the problem statement according to the findings from the specific users in the empathies phase.
· Broad enough for creative freedom: not to focus on specific method or technical requirements.
· Narrow enough to make it manageable: include sufficient constraints to make the implementation manageable.
This phase is critical in the Design Thinking process as it provides direction and scope for the team to work towards. As mentioned above, engaging an awesome facilitator of Design Thinking can help ensure the team get this process on the right track.
Ideate
This is the phase where the team can think without restrictions. It is a step where quantity and diversity of ideas (even crazy ideas) is encouraged to address the insights identified from the previous phases. Brainstorming is an effective way. For the truck museum team, there are a few tips to conduct an effective brainstorming session.
We recommend:
1. Use “How might we” questions.
As outlined in the “Design Thinking Playbook” (Lewrick et al., 2018), the “How might we” questions are powerful tools to take the problem statement developed in the Define phase to the next level — effective solution.
For example: how might we help the twenty-something interact with the car collections with their friends at the museum?
2. Brainstorm inside the truck museum
Ask the museum staff to continue their role play being all types of existing and potential visitors. Arrange an area around the exhibits for the brainstorm session. Immersing themselves in the exhibits acting as visitors, the team may come up with more innovative ideas and the “pretending to be someone else” may spark more conversation among staff.
3. Take note of some rules.
· Not judgement in the ideation phase
· Aim for quantity than quality
· Always use “yes, and” towards other team member’s ideas
· Go crazy is allowed!
· Draw, write, paint, scribble…do whatever you think is good to visualise your ideas
· Ask every museum staff to have a say.
Prototype and test
Prototyping and testing is one of the most powerful tools museums can employ to foster innovation and avoid expensive mistakes. Prototyping means making examples of the solution proposed to interact with museum visitors in order to understand quickly if the idea works and which problems should be addressed to improve it (invisiblestudio, 2017).
We recommend:
1. Remember low-fidelity
We tend to make things look better when they are to be presented to other people. This is especially not needed in the porotype and test phase. Too much investment (time and efforts) may mean too much emotional attachment.
2. Set time constraints
Deliberately setting a time limit will force the team members to focus on only the main features of the solution, without worrying too much about the presentation style. Quick prototypes means quick feedback and quick improvement on the next prototype.
3. To be cheap
To change the team mindset about perfection and fidelity, and to do things in a fast turnaround time, it’s good to use cheap materials to make prototypes. Materials such as cardboards, tapes, and colour pens are useful.
One thing to note is that the 5 phases of Design Thinking is not linear. Instead, they are iterative. It is a continuous cycle of prototyping, testing, improving based on feedback and prototyping again. Being iterative can help us capture visitor feedback earlier, measure the prototype viability effectively, and gain more efficiency as we’re basically designing, fixing, and implementing as we go. Remember the golden rule: fail fast, succeed sooner.
By providing a pathway to collaborate internally with staff and externally with visitors and wider community, Design Thinking can help the truck museum embed a creative culture, encourage a more cohesive team across different departments, and improve engagement with visitors and wider community.
References:
Brown, J. L. (2018). Empathy Mapping: A Guide to Getting Inside a User’s Head. https://www.uxbooth.com/articles/empathy-mapping-a-guide-to-getting-inside-a-users-head/
Dam, R. F., & Siang, T. Y. (n.d). Stage 2 in the Design Thinking Process: Define the Problem and Interpret the Results. https://www.interaction-design.org/literature/article/stage-2-in-the-design-thinking-process-define-the-problem-and-interpret-the-results
IDEO. (n.d). https://designthinking.ideo.com/faq/whats-the-difference-between-human-centered-design-and-design-thinking
invisiblestudio. (2017). Why we use Design Thinking for Museums. https://www.invisiblestudio.net/post/design-thinking-for-museums
Lewrick, M., Link, P., & Leifer, L. (2018). Design Thinking Playbook.
Silvers, D. M., Wilson, M., & Rogers, M. (2013). Design Thinking for Visitor Engagement: Tackling One Museum’s Big Challenge through Human-centered Design. https://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/design-thinking/
Stats NZ. (2018). https://www.stats.govt.nz/tools/2018-census-place-summaries/southland-region