This is our original Design Review submission. Our revised submission is further down this page.
Our previous design concepts differed in hardware implementation but heavily overlapped in actual UI and task implementations. We have chosen to combine different elements form our original three designs rather than refine the details of one specific design. Our chosen design features both large touch-interactive screens (one per art exhibit) and a minimal web-app accessible by mobile phone. The primary focus is on the large touch screens because of their communal aspect and enhanced visual capabilities, but minimal optional mobile functionality offers users additional convenience and privacy.
Leaving comments is one of the most important tasks in addressing our problem of museum self-consciousness. By leaving comments, users can express any of their thoughts on the art they see, thus engaging with the art around them and leaving ideas for other art amateurs to consider. Users can hover their phone’s camera over an embedded QR-code in a piece of art, directing the user to a web page where they can leave a brief comment on the art piece. This mobile commenting functionality offers privacy to the user, a key aspect for users who may be self-conscious about expressing their thoughts publicly. All comments are displayed anonymously on the wall-mounted screens. Each screen features an interface where users can rotate around a panorama of the exhibit and select specific pieces of art. From here, users can see existing comments clustered by calculated similarity, reply to existing comments, or leave a new comment. Comments can be typed or handwritten on the screen, and are limited to a certain number of characters when typed. With multiple options for leaving comments, this design lets users express their thoughts no matter their shyness. Thus this design effectively accommodates any self-consciousness users may have, directly addressing our primary problem.
Receiving validation makes users feel like they are part of a community and encourages users to both use this product more and generally engage more with art. When a user submits a comment either on a wall-mounted screen or on their phone, they are automatically shown comments that are determined to be similar by an algorithm. The user can thus see that other people share similar ideas without requiring people to directly respond to the user’s own comment. Users should still receive validation when no similar comment is found. In this scenario, an encouraging message is displayed that conveys genuine appreciation for the user’s comment. Beyond specifically related ideas, users should also be able to see comments that are at a similarly low “art intelligence”. Given the results our graffiti wall experiment, we believe that limiting comment length and encouraging users to express any ideas will yield comments that are low-level or superficial. Thus users will be able to easily find comments of low sophistication, validating amateur opinions. The interface for viewing comments on the large screen will easily allow the basic exploration needed to find these types of comments.
Overall, our new design facilitates the above tasks better than any of our original designs and directly allows us to address our main problem of museum self-consciousness.
Storyboard One: Leaving a Comment
Storyboard Two: Receiving Validation
Revised Design Review
Given feedback that these designs were too similar, we tried to take the good components from each design and combine them into a single better design. This design took the form of large interactive touch-screens in art exhibits combined with a basic mobile interface to let people comment on individual art pieces and see comments from people with similar ideas. Moreo n information on this design can be read at Project Design Review. However, this design proved too generic and insufficient for making people feel a sense of social belonging. Thus, we set out to refine our tasks and design with the goal of fostering social belonging in creative and interesting ways.
In refining the tasks we decided to further pursue, our primary consideration was combining tasks that were similar in nature to accommodate for new tasks that arose as we began to refine our design. Compared to previous iterations, we combined “leave comments” with the task of “sharing stories and experiences” because we discovered through the storyboarding process, that those tasks seemed to have significant overlap. A new task that seemed valuable to include in place of “leave comments” was “share emotions”, especially given that many of the responses we saw both in our contextual inquiries and our graffiti wall experiment showed a desire to express instinctive or gut emotional responses.
The design we chose to pursue moving forward is a slight variation on the phone + smartboard design, but it takes elements from all three of our initial designs. Our chosen design features both large touch-interactive screens (one per art exhibit) and a web-app accessible by mobile phone. The web-app helps fulfill three of our primary tasks: expressing emotions, sharing comments, and receiving validation. After opting in via a QR code or something similar at the start of their visit, while walking from painting to painting, the user is prompted with emotion/mood-board selector to specify their emotional response. They are then showed a visualization of people who feel similarly, and are then given the option to expand upon their feeling through a comment. These actions are performed on a phone to enable privacy for the user. The smartboard conglomerates the comments and emotions expressed by users into a larger graphic that shows emotions and comments associated with each painting in a room. In this way, that board creates a sense of community both virtually, and in person when multiple people visit the board at a time. People can also interact with other people’s comments on the board. We decided that this interaction could take place more publicly since interacting with others is a public activity. The combination of the web-app and smartboard help the user feel more comfortable expressing their opinions, especially when those contributions become a part of something larger (like the smartboard visualization). The idea to refocus the design around “emotions” instead of comments stems from the theory of social belonging. The theory is that social belonging is tied significantly to feeling like you belong in a community, which is often achieved through showing people that others in the community feel the same way as them (as described here). Our system of displaying comments from people who feel the same way as a user is a way of achieving this social belonging.
Written Scenarios - “1x2”
Task: Users can share an emotional reaction to an artwork.
The user walks through the museum, wandering from artwork to artwork. Having a particular emotional reaction to an artwork, the user opens their phone to the web-app they previously navigated to through the QR codes placed at numerous locations around the museum. The web-app, sensing the artwork that the user is closest in proximity to, prompts the user to select the face/emoji/avatar closest to their emotional reaction to the piece. Upon doing so, the user has the option to elaborate on their reaction with text, prompted by a visualization.
Task: Users receive validation for their feelings and opinions about art, no matter how trivial or silly those opinions may seem
The user used the web app to share their emotion about a certain artwork, but they still feel nervous about their opinion being invalid. The user will be able to receive validation in two ways. Immediate validation comes from the web app, where, after they choose the emotion they associate with the painting, they are redirected to a visualization of a group of cartoon faces that represent the group of people that feel the same way as the user. If the group of users who expressed that exact emotion is small, the visualization will instead display a group of users who expressed “similar” emotions. Along with each of these visualizations is text of the form “X users felt the same way as you!” This gives immediate validation. Validation can also be achieved through the smartboard, which will have a similar display, but which will show a broader range of emotions, but will also show people who feel similarly to the user.
Storyboards of the Selected Design
Task: EMOTION - Users will be able to share an emotional reaction to an artwork.
Task: VALIDATION - Users receive validation about their feelings and opinions about art, no matter how trivial or silly those opinions may seem
