¡El Fin! The 21st Wraps Up Spring Semester

We last left off with discussion of our plans to work on our final deliverables for the spring research semester. Since then, our team has been hard at work and made solid progress on these deliverables. To recap, our deliverables include a research report, a project website, and a presentation. Our research report will bring together all of our work and insights we’ve made in the spring semester. Our website will showcase to the public our capstone project with an overview and progression from our research to design which will come later in the summer. And finally our presentation will highlight key elements of research to engage our clients and HCI faculty.

Prior to developing each deliverable, our team had to revisit all the research our team has done this semester. We had a myriad of insights and design recommendations to go along with them. To distill them to their purest form, the most essential or surprising criteria we needed to inform our design solution, we highlighted distinct themes of recommendations. We merged overlapping ones, and decided upon four critical design elements:

1. Feature cohesive themes that connect Roberto’s stories and artifacts with rich storytelling.
2. Present the space, artifacts, and stories in a way that encourages active interaction, not passive observation.
3. Couple content with appropriate mediums, each offering a new layer of information to build on one another.
4. Build spaces for anonymous, multimedia reflections on stories and exhibits, and enable interaction with others’ reflections asynchronously.

For each of these, we’re keeping in mind the multiple interconnected and still entirely important design recommendations inspired by our insights. As we move towards the next semester, we don’t want to lose sight of why we’re making a particular design decision.

Each one of the three deliverables required careful designing, our team spent a great amount of time developing the presentation. We had long discussions not just about the target audience and elements to highlight but how we tell our narrative. As interesting as our research process was, we didn’t want our presentation to just be about research methodologies. We hoped to bring Clemente and all his rich stories to our presentation, while staying true to our research process. We wanted people to understand our thought process and our research narrative.

At the same time, it was important to highlight the core themes that arose from our research — virtual, storytelling and social. Our presentation also incorporates interactive elements like polls and “choose your own adventure” type activities, made available with mentimeter.com, to keep the audience engaged and also, allow them to learn about aspects of Clemente that they are interested in. Our client provided us with many pictures of the Clemente museum and Clemente, featuring him as a baseball player, a father, a humanitarian and a Puerto Rican, which we included alongside the various stories of Clemente that we will tell. To convey how we’re trying to take the Clemente museum into the 21st century, we adopted a design that was modern but slightly vintage to suit the feel of the museum.

After the presentation, we will conclude our research semester and our team will now move on to the design phase in the summer. Looking forward into the summer, we have several activities coming up and plan to move full steam ahead with designing and ideating. First up, we plan to continue our conceptual prototype. While we made good progress and were able to conduct several sessions with our storyboards, our first steps starting in the summer will be to recruit more participants for a final round of testing, and synthesize our findings. Shortly after we conclude and synthesize our findings from the conceptual prototype, we’ll reconvene as a team to settle on a working project idea to iterate on throughout the summer — we plan to have a lofi prototype running and tested by the end of June, so that we’re on track to deliver a final product by August. Starting in the summer, we will transition from working on this part-time to full time, so as a team we’ll also begin to adapt our processes, tools, and meeting schedules to tackle a more intense workload.

Tentative summer schedule

The research phase was a tremendous learning experience for our team and a great opportunity to explore the problem space which will build the strong foundation for our design phase. Reflecting back, our team learned so much talking to the clients, prior museum patrons, domain experts, and young adult participants. Compared to our first day, we have a much deeper understanding of the museum space, its potential, as well as the Clemente Museum and Roberto Clemente.

Additionally, our team has grown so much over the past few months. We were not only able to practice key research methodologies in real-world context but to think quickly but thoroughly about our intent at every step of the way. What research question are we trying to answer? What is our hypothesis? How do the findings impact our next steps? What does this mean for the Clemente Museum? These are the types of questions we asked ourselves non-stop which prompted us to engage in discussions after discussion. We hope to carry this curiosity and persistence through the next semester.

We would like to end this semester with a sincere thank you to the faculty, clients, participants, and everyone who has supported us throughout the process. It was impossible without the support and gentle push to take risk and dive deep into the research. We are excited for our well deserved break and to come back, recharged, to ideate and make the visions and ideas into a concrete prototype.