Understanding the Museum Visitor & Framing The Concept
The Future of Museums
In the digital age, as our sources of knowledge are ubiquitious, accessible and affordable, museums in the future assume the role of being a place of making meaning, enagaging in democratic dialogue and participatory, immersive experiences. In the advent of other sources of information and history that are ubiquitous.
How do we as interaction designers envision experiences that augment experiential learning for visitors and make the CMNH a destination for introspection and seeing natural History beyond the Anthoprocene.
Project Context:
Background Museums play an important role in society, as illustrated by the Smithsonian’s vision “…to engage and to inspire more people, where they are, with greater impact, while catalyzing critical conversation on issues affecting our nation and the world.” Today, many museums are also facing the challenge of transitioning from rigid institutions to experiential and flexible spaces. This is driven by such factors as expanding collections, increased competition for visitors, and visitor expectations for greater engagement. Museums are turning to virtual reality, apps, and interactive experiences to keep tech-savvy visitors engaged.
Client “Carnegie Museum of Natural History, one of the four Carnegie Museums of Pittsburgh, is among the top natural history museums in the country. It maintains, preserves, and interprets an extraordinary collection of artifacts, objects, and scientific specimens used to broaden understanding of evolution, conservation, and biodiversity. Carnegie Museum of Natural History generates new scientific knowledge, advances science literacy, and inspire visitors of all ages to become passionate about science, nature, and world cultures.”
In 2029, you have been hired by the museum to improve the user experience of the museum, which has remained relatively static for the past decade. You have been charged with hearing directly from their current visitors to understand what is successful and what can be improved, as well as learning from interactive experiences around the world. The museum has no prescribed form and/or scope for this project — they are looking to you as thoughtful interaction designers to argue the value of your proposal.
The natural History Museum Audience
The CMNH enjoys a uniquely diverse audience, given that it’s situated in a museum complex alongside the Museum of Art. Because of this setting, its audience is not only looking for science and education at the Natural History Museum but also visitors interested in Art and Culture who visit are looking for more and more engaging experiences rather than a traditional journey of finding more information.
Social interaction For example, how can visitors interact with each other, either in person, online or asynchronously?
Keywords Multi-sensory, immersive, responsive
Visitor Archetype and Who we’re designing for
We started off with picked an archetype of facilitator + experience seeker and/or explorer based on our personal experiences and inistial observations at the museum.
As the concept exists today, it caters to explorers primarily, but may also cater to experience seekers and rechargers as opposed ot just facilitators.
The museum is seen as an indoor space that allows social meeting, interactions and spending time doing something together.
Inspired by this relationsip and attirbute observed in the visitors, our concept highlights a social experience eventhough it is not the most important experience lever for us.
The Power to the plants experience focuses of information browsing and experiential learning through interactions with the different touchpoints of the experience. Interactions are used to create an understanding of intangible phenomena such a deep time and communicate the resilience of a species like plants that have grown and changed over time.
Stage 1: Concept
We observed that people visit the museum in groups and are usually in a mixed group. Rather than designing for a specific user group, we designed for archetypes and behaviors based on from John Falk’s book.
Stage 2: Final Concept
We converged from a generic museum-wide experience to a set of curated experiences that offered a particular lens for museum visitors. Given that much of the audience to the museum are repeat users, the idea is for each of these experiences to show the same old museum in a new light, new perspective through a new lens.
The Power to The Plants experience is one of several possible experiences through which natural history is shown through the lens of deeptime and users are introduced to a world of the Plant Kingdom.
The main message we wanted to communicate through the experience was to encourage a view for the museum visitors that was beyond the Anthropocene.
This experience was designed for a non-specific age of visitors (but not children) for explorers, rechargers and experience seekers.
