How might our design be rooted to reality?
How Museum of Solutions designs experiences that are rooted to reality
We live in a world where 150 million people are homeless and 790 million people do not have access to clean drinking water. We live in a world where human beings have the power to change the earth’s climate. There’s no better time to be rooted in reality than now. Through this article I’m going to talk about why children need to be introduced to real world problems and find their way to solutions. I’m also going to touch upon some key insights and design questions to be kept in mind while designing a space that is rooted to reality.
Why Rooted to reality?
Wicked Problems: The most significant challenges facing the world in the 21st Century are ‘wicked’ problems. These are messy real-world challenges, like climate change, which are highly complex and uncertain. Wicked issues are different because traditional processes can’t resolve them, according to Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. At MuSo, we want to encourage children to find these methods and solutions that aren’t traditionally carried out and are out of the box. We want children to step out of their comfort zone to feel empowered to solve problems.
Children Centred Designing: A human-centred approach fuels the creation of spaces that resonate more deeply with an audience (in our case — children) ultimately driving engagement and growth. Through this process we are able to make connections with people around us, our city and really go into depth of things that might bother children, things they like/dislike, what kind of spaces children want in a city and sometimes even why they are obsessed with the word ‘fart’? (trust me, they really really are).
Creating meaningful exhibits & spaces
While on the exhibit design team for MuSo, being rooted to reality has been one of our design principles and a pillar that has driven big big decisions. We believe that the world around us is the inspiration to learn from and experiment with. MuSo exhibits and activities enable children to understand the workings of their environment and allow them to engage with real world problems. A lot of times design principles are well written in theory but pretty difficult to incorporate in the process of creation. To create meaningful experiences and activities that are rooted to reality here are some things you might hear us talking about:
- Have we checked for our biases?: If you’re human, you have unconscious biases; we all do. We tend to remember and pay more attention to information that confirms our preexisting beliefs. The first step is to understand what your biases are. Quick assumption mapping always helps.
2. Different people, different realities: Our realities are not the same as everyone else. Everyone has a different context, perspective on things and how they view a situation. As a designer it is important to understand and create experiences that lend itself to participation from multiple groups of people. The context of a theme /topic and real world experiences will be different for everyone. What are some common moments or points that we can weave narratives through while giving everyone a chance to take away something from it?
3. What’s relevant today and tomorrow?: When we create exhibits or activities we try to understand the trends around the topic/content touch points. For example, if we are trying to talk about the subject of “marine pollution” it’s also important to look at case studies, local scenarios around the subject. It’s also been helpful for us to understand what children study in school.
3. Local → Global: While introducing a subject to children especially, it’s always easier to start closer to home. Again, if we are talking about Marine Pollution getting children to ask questions like what is your relationship with water? What are the most polluted water bodies in your city? How are you polluting the city? Are questions that help in setting context. Interviewing the people of your local city and knowing their stories have always helped in establishing a local connection too!
What inspires content?
When we started working on content for the galleries in the museum, we wanted to look into development in the future that will have a long-term and lasting effect, something that remains relevant. We look up to the UN Sustainability Goals for inspiration. The Sustainable Development Goals are the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all. They address the global challenges we face, including poverty, inequality, climate change, environmental degradation, peace and justice.
A known fact is that change is possible when we act as an international community. When governments, businesses, and citizens work together and put resources and determination behind a goal, change happens. The SDGs are goals created for and by everyone from governments, large corporations to citizens. With the SDGs children are able to see new perspectives and understand that we are all a part of a bigger community. MuSo aims to create a mindset shift. We encourage children to have a question asking mindset, we support children in being able to dream big and become proactive problem solvers. Taking these goals as a starting point through stories, experiences and programs we decided to explore how we can create opportunities for children to become active citizens and contributors towards betterment of our society
SDGs To Galleries — HOW?
In the process of We dissected each goal and picked out keywords that became our content touch points. Here is an example of how we went about our process
- Studying UN Sustainability Goals: This was the first step. Here we dug deep into the goals and read their subparts very carefully. We started to map them to our pillars (Boldy-childled, Rooted to reality & Radically inclusive) and began to shortlist certain goals.
- Identifying key words and phrases: Next we started picking out some key phrases that could further help us in the process of creating content for children. These were content keywords like marine pollution, ocean acidification, overfishing, etc.
4. Creating content briefs and questions: To move ahead, we began to create design questions and also started to map areas where our content could flow. We began the process of marrying MuSo design principles to content to create design questions. For example, one of our design principles is “Create wow factor, spark a thought through the experiences design” which helped us frame a question like “How might we talk about marine pollution while creating a wow factor and the sense of wonder”.
5. Mapping content to forms of exhibits: Before starting the process of content mapping or in simple words — what MuSo is going to talk about, there were several sprints conducted on the form and physicality's of the exhibits — What exhibits will look like, is it a big screen? Is it a narrow table? Could we have a live size quiz? (We will be writing a blog on the exhibit process as well soon). In the last stage of content mapping, we began to layer the exhibits with content.
Case study: People and their stories (children’s panel)
Design process at MuSo is boldly child-led. As referred to in our earlier blogs, MuSo team conducted 10 testing and co-creation panels in 2019 (until the pandemic, duh). One such panel was called “people we live with”.
Through this panel, children were able to “meet” real world people through stories and meaningful objects. Children were also able to step into the role of a storyteller, and interviewer and a listener. We also had self reflection built into the workshop to understand how children feel when they are exposed to stories of people from their communities.
This panel touched upon various content question:
- What are some issues people are facing in Mumbai?
- What are some problems that bother children?
- How can we create a safe space for children to self reflect and create moments of emotional awareness?
- How might we encourage children to interact and empathise with a wide range of voices which reflects the cultural diversity of Mumbai
- What are ways to create awareness about everyday choices and how they have profound effects on people’s lives around us?
Through this process we were beginning to see how children dealt and interacted with their surroundings. The testing panel helped the design team create experiences of value that actually understand real people and real issues. All experiences at MuSo are inspired by issues that are rooted to reality. Now, its your turn.
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