¡Descubrir! Team Clemente Hits a Double (Insight)
“¡Descubrir!” — means “discover!” in Spanish
Gary Hamel once said, “Discovery is the journey and insight is the destination.” Never has this quote resonated so strongly with our team until now. Over the past few weeks, our team has worked endlessly, leading conversations with participants and probing our findings to better understand storytelling. Our efforts have identified recurring themes in empathy and virtual spaces, from which we forged several insights that will shape the direction of our Clemente experience. But that’s enough exposition.
Insight 1: People want to empathize, and be empathized with.
To investigate rich stories, we’ve dug into core motivators that fuel expressive, engaging, and empathetic experiences, both in the museum and beyond it. We revisited our museum participants and engaged them in new conversations that delved further. Why do people enjoy narratives? Why do some experiences fall flat into boredom, while others whisk visitors away to another time and place, fostering rich introspection and discussion?
From these conversations we found that, despite the thematic and sometimes very specific focus of museums, people still try to connect exhibits to themselves, their own histories and emotions. Rather than view photos or stories as simple information, museum visitors might also imagine the perspective of historical figures, to know what motivated an artist or how their past shaped them. These findings extend to nearly all narratives, and the best experiences help inspire this inquisitive empathy.
With this, we’ve connected the experience museums offer to the core human desire of being understood.
Wisdom From an Expert
To accompany our interviews of museum visitors, we spoke to museum experts who have intimate knowledge with virtualization and storytelling. Kevin Park, a professor at NYU and NYIT, and previously the senior UX design manager at The Met.
Upon meeting Kevin, we were surprised by his very first points. Rather than dive into his extensive experience with AR or VR, he started by asking us about the basic motivation visitors have engaging with the Clemente Museum. Our time together wasn’t defined by discussion over emerging technologies he was excited about, but the immediate advice he offered:
“Tell the story … it’s more about narrative.”
Our conversation with Kevin offered new ideas and detailed advice, but that quote stuck with us, reinforcing the appeal of offering a narrative from a human perspective. To have a specialist in emerging technology, an obvious proponent of technical solutions, remind us that these experiences are but conduits for the stories helped corroborate our research. Our preotype, crafted in Minecraft, would only do so further.
Unexpected Finds in a Blocky World
Initially, we envisioned our pretotype to investigate interactivity and narration. Yet, the medium through which we built it, Minecraft, afforded players agency and a level of virtualization. This colorful blend of immersive ingredients fostered surprising behavior in our participants. One person ended up accidentally knocking a trolley off its tracks, backing away saying they had “done something wrong” and that they should leave. Another noted that the steps we had built an exhibit on, simple and undecorated blocks within the Minecraft world, suggested a pedestal, and thus held the artifact in higher (and thus untouchable) regard.
To collate and forge insight from these observations, our team met and built an affinity diagram (in-person, for the first time!). The surreal feeling of writing ideas on a physical sticky note was accompanied by the expansiveness of the map, which illuminated several themes and findings. After intense discussion and the “5 Whys” activity, we forged them into insights.
Insight 2: We carry real-world habits with us into virtual spaces.
Our team found that material practices, habits of the real world, are extended into virtual space. These material practices include both learned behavior and instinctive behavior. Learned behavior manifests itself in social norms, leading people to respect museum spaces and artifacts, even virtual ones. Instinctive behavior was observed as research participants employed their virtual agency to take a step back from artifacts, angling for multiple perspectives, and searching for the ‘front’ of exhibits, all natural behaviors that would arise in a physical environment.
These are incredibly relevant considerations for virtualizing Roberto Clemente’s artifacts, as it provides direction for their presentation and interaction. How do we feature artifacts so that people can intuit what interactions are possible with real-world parallels? How do we present these artifacts and stories in a space that fosters interaction and investigation, rather than distant fact-consumption? How might we even ‘break’ these norms in ways that leave people feeling empowered and free rather than guilty and embarrassed?
In addition, our team found further evidence for the empathetic insight of storytelling touched upon earlier. Participants would often wonder aloud what the connection between artifacts and exhibits were, surmising different storylines while in truth, our team chose items to present arbitrarily. Participants imagined the motivations behind an artifact, such as why its owner used it or chose it, and how it related to the others in the room.
The Journey Continues
The strongest insights from our last sprint, hard-won and forged in battle (read: long, long talks), each speak to an aspect of our virtual experience. One, that people carry their habits of the physical world into virtual spaces, relate to the medium. The other, that humans want to empathize and be empathized with, relates to the content. Both are intimately tied to the traditional museum experience, and at the same time, not at all. They’re certainly not unique to them.
Our team is riding wave after wave of activity, unsullied and unabated. We have a whole host of research coming next, from a social pretotype to interviews with previous patrons of the Clemente Museum and tours with new ones. Yet, amidst the foam and the brine, each wave recedes to reveal a glimmer of promise, slowly forming just beneath the surface. Each member of this team is happy to be adrift together, exploring unexpected directions as they’re revealed to us. We can’t wait to see what we find next.
Signing Off,
Team Clemente
