To The Moon - A Museum Experience
The Challenge:
During this 4 week project, my team and I designed an interactive museum exhibit where children, ages 8- 15, could experience what it feels like to travel from Earth to the Moon.
An Added Constraint:
Exhibit should exist within a 30x30 ft space, with no vertical limit
Duration:
One month class project
at Indiana University
My Role:
Usability Testing
Sketching
Video Editing
Prototyping the set
Wireframing
Storyboarding
The Design
Our design focused on what it would be like to be an astronaut on a mission to the moon. This museum exhibit focuses on 3 stages of a mission like this: astronaut training and education, rocket launch and space travel, and experiencing the moon. This design is primarily for kids, ages 8-15, because we found that most educational materials and kid's interests lie with space around this age.
The Research:
We started by finding exemplars of museum experiences. We found images, maps, videos, blueprints and talked about our own experiences with museum exhibits. Using Post-Its we each wrote down keywords or phrases to help us focus on an area. An affinity diagram helped us realize that from what we had written, we all had a shared interest in space, even recalling past experiences with space exhibits that we each had heard of and visited. With "space" as our topic, we started looking at existing space exhibits, comparing and contrasting the content of them.
From here we started interviewing parents and their children with the goal in mind to find out what people valued in museum exhibits. Interviews gave us very rich information from people's own experiences with museums. An insight we extracted from these interviews was people highly valued fun, educational experiences that kept them wanting more.
We also used a semi-open card sort where cards were predetermined with no categories. We chose to use this method because it allowed us to see how people grouped and labeled information with complete freedom, with some brief follow-up questions as to why they did what they did. We looked at the labels that from each sort and took values from them. We found that people valued rocket technology and flight, space travel, and the experience of being in space (e.g. weightlessness, solitude, missions, etc.).
Core Methods:
Sketching
Sketching sessions were done both individually and together as a group. Both in-group and out of group, timers would be set for 10 minutes, where we would try to explore multiple options quickly for a possible design. This is where we would go get a chance to go crazy and really imagine outside the box opportunities. Sketching allowed us to get our ideas out of our heads and on paper, making it easier to build upon them. This way there was never a label, like "yours" or "mine"; it became "ours". Sketching was also used to keep the team on the same page, clearing up any confusion that anyone may have had.
Storyboarding
Storyboarding was an instrumental tool that we used to map how the experience of our exhibit was going to be. The planning and the layout of our exhibit was done through storyboarding. Using this method also helped us immerse ourselves in the experience of the flow of the exhibit, helping with the construction of the prototype as well.
Prototyping
Using a cardboard box, some spray paint, an egg carton, a lot of paper, and BST (blood, sweat, and tears), we prototyped our museum experience. We used a box because we wanted to be able to shoot a video that would capture the experience we were trying to create, while still looking like an enclosed space. Working with cardboard is a mixed experience. On one hand cardboard is sturdy material and relatively inexpensive and abundant where there are printers (used a paper box found on campus). The downside to it is that cardboard isn't very flexible material; it really has to be worked over (e.g. rolled, crumpled, hammered, stomped on, etc.) to be able to manipulate it.
Usability Testing
It was important to get feedback from people along the way and we used body storming and concept testing to help us refine our experience. Body storming helped us understand the spatial requirements by using our own bodies as musuem props. We did this method specifically for the elevator part of our exhibit because we this was the most clausterphobic part of the museum exhibit and this helped us understand how people would feel. We also showed storyboards to people, walking them through our concept, generating feedback on what was on track and what needed to be rethought and reconsidered. This helped us streamline the experience of the exhibit.
My Reflection:
Often times we would find ourselves with time to spare. Taking advantage of this, we would assign individual and group sketching sessions and would try to build ideas up and then decide as a team what to incorporate into our exhibit when we met to discuss them. We wanted our exhibit experience to be both playful and educational, so matching our trajectory to what was being discussed was really helpful in solidifying our design path and decision making. Evaluating designs constantly and checking to see if that matches what we were aiming for helped keep us on track to making this the best possible experience for the kids coming through it.
