¡Probar! Team Clemente Strikes Gold…in Minecraft?
“¡Probar!” — means “to test” or “to try out” in Spanish
“I enjoy the moments of stillness.”
“I want to take back a piece of the museum with me.”
“What were the stories behind these items?”
These quotes from our research participants, amongst 435 other notes, have been gathered since we last wrote on our progress. We’ve been asking visitors of museums their thoughts and feelings about museum spaces, and for them to walk us through specific memories. Our investigation led us to synthesize these thoughts and emotions in an affinity diagram, wide-ranging and ever-evolving. By building upon common themes we’ve found, we’ve managed to isolate key areas in which we plan to focus our next round of research.
A particular theme we’ve noticed, both in our primary research synthesis and secondary research investigating literature, is the role of guided or narration-based experiences versus that of interactive, exploratory activities in which people have greater agency. Answering this question of narration and guidance is integral to our experience, and we’ll go into some more detail with a reminder of our time at the Clemente Museum.
When we visited the Clemente Museum, what our team saw was a collection of photographs and artifacts, each emanating a sense of significance. Yet, it was Duane’s stories that gave life to these items, and turned that sense of significance into respect, understanding, and empathy. In our research, we’ve stumbled onto 360° tours and 3D models of museums with discontinuous narration or impersonal walls of text. We’re asking ourselves how to step beyond that, and deliver an experience that is still remotely accessible but translates the rich narration behind Clemente’s life and work into an equally rich medium.
To this end, we’ve been ideating and building a pretotype that explores how much narration and agency people desire in virtual experiences. Like all pretotypes, we’ve built it for a singular research purpose: to test a core assumption (in this case, that narration is an important part of the experience). We decided to take advantage of an existing, widely popular platform, which allows for both easy crafting of environments and the agency to walk around and interact in them: Minecraft.
Upon entering our pretotype world, you’ll see three rooms separated by external paths. From the outside, these rooms look plain and ordinary. Inside, the rooms hold a variety of objects we’ve built to showcase the life of Mister Rogers. In the first space, participants are greeted with a familiar museum experience as they view artifacts and read signage.
Approaching the second room, participants find a Mister Rogers character (controlled by one of our team members), excited to share verbal stories about the artifacts in this second space. The guided narration, played from an audio file or spoken aloud by one of our team members, is our closest approximation to the physical Clemente Museum.
Lastly, participants venture into the “play zone,” our third space. Here, participants have full agency over what they look at and how they interact with artifacts. Narration is available at the push of a button, while signage is present to be read or skipped over.
Throughout this entire experience, our team plans to make observations and scribbles notes as the participant’s comical, pixelated avatar moves throughout the virtual space, and see how they respond to the quick equivalents of narration and interactivity we’ve constructed in this blocky Minecraft world.
We’ve very excited as we begin running think-aloud interviews with this pretotype, and as we see how people interact with the space.
With our research activities running full-bore, from museum expert interviews to pretotype test sessions, and late-night synthesis meetings following, our team is learning more and more about the problem space each day. The observations we’ve made have been varied; we’ve noticed possible insights and gleaned perspective from them, while other findings seem confusing, even contradictory. So our team’s going deeper. We’re returning to assumptions we’ve made or trends we’ve found, and asking: why? Why do some find the museum a quiet solace, while others see it as a vibrant social excursion? What fuels these perceptions of what a museum is?
With these questions, we’re starting to ask what defines a museum. With our Minecraft pretotype, we’re starting to challenge the constraints of the museum space itself. We’re starting to gain momentum in our discoveries, and we’re not stopping.
Until next time,
Team Clemente
