Our design is a forum for users to share short-form comments on art pieces they’ve observed. This casual message board environment would be most popular with people who have experience with smartphones and some-to-no exposure / interest in art. These attributes would probably be most common in young to middle-aged adults. Three types of interviewee capture this range of characteristics and would be available in the next week:

  • A Williams college student who appreciates art occasionally, but does not go to art museums or consume art regularly.
  • A Williams college student who has virtually no exposure or interest in art.
  • An adult museumgoer who doesn’t usually go to museums.

We will observe each of these participants in WCMA as they view art. Many people fit each of the above descriptions. It will be easy to get a hold of the Williams students. The adults will be more challenging; presumably we would have the most luck asking people already visiting WCMA to participate, but it may be difficult to persuade people to participate for the desired length of approximately half an hour. One alternative would be to interview multiple people for 5 to 10 minutes each while hopefully still gaining good observations of how people interact and react with art.

We will observe our participants as they interact with art pieces in WCMA. We will specifically ask them about their thoughts on different pieces as they go through the museum. We are tackling the problem of self-consciousness in museums, so we would like our participants to be as comfortable as possible expressing any thoughts that come to mind about the art. This is an essential part of any contextual inquiry, but we need to take particular care. We will make sure that participants know that they can say anything that comes to mind, and will try to offer passive encouragement for participants to speak up as we go through the inquiry process. We fill follow up on this process at the end of the inquiry by asking participants if they enjoyed having this encouragement and validation, again tackling the problem of self-consciousness in art museums. When people offer their thoughts on art, we will also ask them if they think other people would share these thoughts. By doing so, we hope to address the problem of people feeling that their opinions on art are less valid than others’ because they may be less sophisticated.