Overview

Design Process

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Project Context

Improving how people experience visual art, particularly in physical spaces.

The goal of this project was to practice the principles of HCI design. We underwent the HCI design process from idea generation to final design during the course of a semester. 

Initially, my team and I were tasked with designing for social impact. Specifically, the rubric of this project called for us to design for a problem that was relevant to our social group. As a result, we arrived at the focus on art being we all had an interest in visual art. After more discussion and brainstorming we narrowed our focus on the museum space and the barriers that consuming visual art there. 

We defined our problem as the following:

• Museums often require an elite artistic education to properly understand the work.

• Museums can be inaccessible to people without the surplus time or money to visit.

• How can we enrich the museum experience (make it more social)?
  

Upon conducting research through various methods, we realized that one thing that the museum experience lacked was interactivity; People should have the means to engage with visual art beyond just looking at it. As a solution, we designed AR-t, an augment reality system accessible through a wearable device that will allow individuals to interact and socialize with art in new and unimagined ways.

1. Generative Research

Background Research

The first step of our ideation process was to perform background research. With our focus on art experience in the museum space, we researched ways in which we could understand and design for this problem. As a result, we underwent a literature review in which we focus on the keywords of art education, museum experience, and technology in the museum.

Literature review Takeaways

Both new and old forms of technology shape the way people consume art and the cultural implications of art

-Tillander, M. (January, 2011). Creativity, Technology, Art, and Pedagogical Practices

In our design, we want to consider the “new and old forms” or the digitized and accessible version of art spaces that allow people to experience and understand traditional art in a non-traditional way.

Many museums have already begun to change the way their art is consumed using technology. The Immersion Room in New York City’s Cooper-Hewitt museum, for example, allows visitors to interact with the art by creating a design and projecting it onto the walls. This further engages visitors by providing a platform where they can become immersed in their own art.

Museums have moved from individual to crowd engagement, targeting specific social groups such as families, classes, or organizations and using the Internet of Things to tell stories through the art. Using these methods, individuals are able to learn about the art through technology, and through their peers

- Involving the Crowd in Future Museum Experience Design

Conclusion

Through this background research, we decided on two main objectives to provide easily accessible art education and to use technology to engage and connect users. We found that it is crucial to redesign viewing visual art as an experience to include an intuitive learning aspect as well as a fluid exchange of thoughts and ideas. We still want to maintain a balance between the educational reception of and the social engagement in the modernization of the museum.

Generative Methods

During this stage of the design process my team and I attempted to gauge a better understanding of our problem space through various research methods. This included surveys, contextual interviews, an ethnographic study, and bodystorming. Furthermore, we started to flush out a solution.

INTERVIEWs

We conducted 5 contextual interviews. Many of our participants were female junior and seniors. This demographic breakdown was unintentional being that these were the only people that agreed to do the interviews. Interviews ran for 30 minutes. Interviewees were questioned on how

• People learn about and experience art.

• Challenges to learning about art.

These questions allowed us to delve deeper into how people experience, engage and interact with art.

BODY STORMING

Based on the observations we collected during the ethnographic study we performed a bodystorming session. As a group, we visited the Johnson Museum for about 45 minutes. We discussed ways we could augment or improve our experiences in the space. The focus of our bodystorming session was to immerse ourselves in the museum space and take away experiences that are valuable in the process of viewing art that can then be applied and used within our solutions.

Findings

Overall Findings: Using our findings from the surveys, interviews, and ethnographic study, we identified four major insights to incorporate into our design:

1. PHYSICAL SPACE

People value physical art spaces

People value the lack of distractions, the intentional curation, and immersive nature of museums. Many, however, do not have the opportunity to go to the physical spaces and thus use online exploration as an alternative option. Participants explicitly expressed that they preferred physical spaces over online when talking about the experience itself; they do, ultimately, value the art available online as well.

2. EDUCATION

Art education is often an informal process

People rarely read textbooks or spend more than a few minutes studying an art. Instead, they converse with others, analyze the painting up close, do a brief online lookup, or even create their own art. Additionally, the museum experience can get repetitive and potentially even boring for those not necessarily looking for formal art education.

3. SOCIAL V. PERSONAL

People experience art both on their own and with others

Most people want time to digest art on their own, but also want to share thoughts and opinions with their friends. When people have conversations about art, this is also a method of informal education.

4. INTERACTIVE

People gravitate towards interactive elements at the Museum.

People are most often attracted to “unconventional” pieces of art that are not just 2D paintings. People will also interact with technology, be it their own mobile devices or technologies in the museum itself.

2. Prototype and Evaluate

Introducing AR-t, the virtual art gallery

After compiling all our notes from our various research methods we organized a brainstorming session to come up with a solution for our problem. Our focus then became Augment Reality. We decided to bring the museum experience to the virtual world through AR. We came up with the concept of AR-t, a virtual art gallery system accessed through a tech-glasses device that will allow users to curate and share virtual galleries of their own. 

Other solution

• Limit the AR glasses to the museum space. People can use the AR glasses when they visit the museum to access and interact with virtual content layered on the physical painting in the museum.

Ultimately we decided on the virtual museum system because in essence, we wanted users to be able to “bring the museum home with them.” This is purported by our finding that many people often don’t have the time to visit physical museums. 

Low-Fidelity Prototype

Mockups & Sketches

Mid-fidelity Prototype

This prototype was a simulated gallery that was set up in a classroom. The “virtual”' space is the class room itself, and the virtual paintings were printed and hand drawn pictures that were posted along the walls of the classroom. To test this prototype a user enactment was performed with four participants.

USER ENACTMENTS

We recruited four participants to conduct a user enactment. Participants were to use the prototype to perform multiple tasks given out by the instructor (one of the team members)

Once the participants arrived, over a span of 45 minutes, they were given 3 scenarios to perform using the prototype. Participants were each given a card with sticky notes which represented the different functionalities of the AR device. For example, participants could write comments on sticky notes and tag them to a image to represent virtual comments

The scenarios for the user enactment included:

• You are a group of elementary schoolers doing a report on “Perspective.” Explore the museum and gather information on perspective.

• You are high school students. Explore the space and leave tags (comments) on a piece for your friends to read.

• You are a group of college students who are curating your own custom digital gallery.

These tasks allow us to explore the various facets of interactivity, engagement, and social experience that we found necessary in art education and art immersion.

Findings

• While users thought that the interactive elements were cool, still wanted a basic informational feature about art style

• People were very attracted experiencing art in full projection

• Users enjoyed experiencing the glasses as a group  (same view) 

• Overall, users expressed that they were excited for our solution and enjoyed executing the different tasks we laid out for them.

3. Final Design

Introducing…AR-T,

the is an augmented reality glasses that “Brings the Museum Experience Home.” Once a user puts on the AR-t glasses, they can experience and view digital artifacts & renditions of visual art wherever they are. They can interact with these artifacts through digital manipulation, image exploration, and gallery curation.

High-fidelity InVISION Prototype

FInal Design Functionalities

Search for art “explore”

Our solution aims to make it easy to find art without a deep knowledge. Users can search on a category, “perspective,” for example, and be shown a wide range of visual art pieces. The search will provide a breadth of art, presenting pieces from different platforms, such as Instagram, museums, independent creators, etc. Users will not be required to have knowledge about specific pieces in order to get results.

Save Image

From their searches, users can save a piece of art. This allows you to take the art with you wherever you go and access it anytime. They can then use this to curate their own gallery.

Scan Art to Learn More

People were heavily interested in the idea about learning about art and art process itself. Usually, placard just summarize what the piece is about, but our participants expressed that they also wanted to also learn about the how. In our solution, a user can hover over an art piece, tap on it and they can get augmented insights into the who, what, and the how of the art.

Manipulate Art

People applied principles that they learned about the art to the art when curating the gallery. For example, when asked to “deconstruct pop culture,” they used the knowledge they gained about Warhol and Mariyln to manipulate the art. In our findings, people liked to interact with art, and also learned about art by mimicking it.

360 Image View

An immersive art experience where you can see and learn about the art in granular detail. A user will choose to project a piece of art, and the art will project itself on all four augmented walls of the glasses. For example if you are viewing a painting of a room through the glasses the virtual room of the painting will be superimposed over the physical room in the real world.

Our solution is heavily refined and supported by our user enactments. Through our user enactments, we were able to remove features that users did not seem to find important/appealing and flesh out features that they were attracted to. For example, we initially likened our system to a social media system where users could tag friends and leave comments on art pieces. Through our user enactments, we realized that our system would actually facilitate users to physically come together and socialize, and so we did not have to compensate for socializing in another form.

Other Designs

This was our initial design solution for AR-t. These are application menus screen that users would see through the wearable glasses. One thing that differentiates this design from our final solution is the background and menu. This was a problem since it made the screens very flat and 2-dimensional failing to deliver a 3D AR experience. We wanted users to manipulate virtual images in the context of the real world and the blue background and app-like (menus and headers) do not do much to help with this. Therefore we opted for a better AR view with real-world elements, such as the walls of the room you are in, being the background of the screens.

Discussion

Throughout the process, we did struggle with ensuring that our design was fully committing to our design question. We realized that the issue of art education is not an isolated issue; people also want to be entertained. Once we recognized these concentric values, it was easier to come up with a design solution. Throughout the process, we encountered feature creep; performing the user enactments really helped us envisage our final design and cut out all unnecessary features. Our design solution does assume that we are allowed to collect different pieces from a number of sources and digitize them as artifacts. We wish that we could have fleshed out this assumption further to make our design more plausible.

Conclusion

Overall, our research proposes reimagining the museum going experience; users can gain control over the experience, curating and viewing art they want to see and in the format they choose or create.

As technologies evolve, traditional physical art spaces will as well. By wearing our glasses, users will have the opportunity to interact with and socialize with art in new and unimagined ways, all the while educating themselves on visual arts.

FInal Demo