BrightME Community: Empowering Museum Education
Time flies! We arrived at the final sprint of our project. The past five months have been a roller coaster ride of new methodologies, skills, and approaches. We are proud of our achievements and are excited to introduce the world to our final product during the showcase.
Our challenge for this project was to find a way to democratize knowledge using modern technology and to transform museum education. We tackled this challenge by focusing on communities and facilitating the possibility of co-creation online. Through collaborations with schools, museums, and research institutions, we aimed to enable this in a new constitution of stakeholders.
The Concept
During the sprints, we brainstormed, researched, designed and made prototypes. Through desk research, user research and sparring meetings with NEMO, we saw a lack of available communication channels among museums, schools and research institutions.
These results lead us to tackle the network gap first: stakeholders need to feel connected. Our desk research showed how a common identity is needed, so we came up with “BrightME” as the community name and designed a logo.
In the next sprints, we were dedicated to developing and testing the concept functionalities. At the end of the program, we proudly presented the BrightME online community. We encouraged museum educators to share expertise and skills among community members. In return, they received valuable feedback, knowledge and resources. We empowered teachers to discover skills-based and visual ways of teaching to enrich the learning process of their students. Lastly, we motivated researchers to bring their academic findings to a wider audience, using the expertise of teachers and museum educators to translate their research.
User-centered approach
We applied a user-centered approach in both our research and design. We aimed to deeply understand the users through research. To communicate this research among the team, we created three personas that reflect the needs, actual behavior, goals and motivation of teachers, museum educators and researchers.
To make the step from brainstorming and thinking to the development of the community, we designed a paper prototype to bring our concepts to life and to be able to test them. The next step was the design of a digital and clickable wireframe, to simulate the use of our online community. A wireframe represents the skeletal framework of our initial website. This process was a great learning opportunity for the team and allowed for the development of new skills.
We aimed to make BrightME very user-friendly regarding both functions and navigation, as the platform should be easy to incorporate into the daily workflow. Therefore, it was designed as a platform that connects three different groups of users: museum educators, teachers and researchers. By offering three functionalities — Request, Showcase and Co-create — users can ask questions, exchange ideas, co-create a project or showcase results and finished projects.
Final Product and Showcase
After Christmas, we started full-on brainstorming about our approach to the showcase. During the showcase, we presented our project to not only other DSS members but also other interested parties. We designed posters and content that would engage visitors and explain our concept behind BrightME. We also developed prototype logos and connected the branding of our showcase to match the web design we developed.
The first prototype the team made back in September, the conversation cube, was also represented. Rapid prototyping approached a problem creatively and the conversation cubes represented our first ideas around co-creating and community. We wanted to catch this process in a tangible prototype: to make the online community physical. The cubes directed visitors to interact with each other or with the team.
We not only promoted our concept, branding, and design but wanted to add something extra. Since our emphasis lay on the user experience, we wanted visitors to fully empathize with prospective users. We designed a special digital game for visitors to experience our community. Visitors could pick which user role they wanted to explore and experience the features of our community through simple tasks.
The tasks visitors had to do through the game were based on user scenarios we developed from the data of our user research. The three different stories explain in what way BrightME transforms the current workflow.
After our killer one minute pitch, we spend our time talking to the people interested in our product and the process behind it. It was inspiring to receive feedback from our potential users and hear about their different experiences. We were humbled by the amount of interest from the visitors and the one question that came back: “when is this community going live?”.
The showcase was a great ending to our 20 week DSS experience. Besides everyone who supported the project in general, we want to specifically thank Dimitrios Vlachopoulos for initiating this project and Youngji for being our coach.
The Digital Society School is a growing community of learners, creators and designers who create meaningful impact on society and its global digital transformation. Check us out at digitalsocietyschool.org.
