Forewords
In the Internet age, museums are gradually adopting a combination of online websites and physical museums to serve people. User experience design, as the most important criteria to verify the success of a project, tends to promote the development of the museum itself if applies properly (Huang and Liu, 2021).
In the Macro UX project-Silk Road, Asia, my group designed an educational and interactive experience with V&A collections, allowing the online visitors to experience multiple senses in both the physical and virtual worlds. From this study, I realized that online visiting does provide a more convenient and detailed experience for the users, but it can not compensate for the communication between visitors and exhibits that happens in onsite visiting. Browsing the exhibition through a layer of screens seems to miss the intention of building a museum, which is "experience".
Therefore, in this final project, I hope to design an interactive system that connects the users to the exhibits by combining online and offline modes, allowing users to explore the museum from "pre-visit", "visit" to "post-visit".Two girls have the same interests in museum experience design, Manali has also collaborated with V&A in Macro UX, and she wants to study in this area deeper as well as I do. Zhaolu wants to design playful and educational exhibition patterns in the contemporary context. So, here we are!
Explorations in museums
However, what is it/ who is it for/ Where does it, those important questions, we could not draw any certainties yet, so we decided to explore museums at first, then see what can we do for them. Those are the museums and exhibitions we have visited: Imperial War Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, Science museum, Natural History Museum and Ryoji Ikeda.
Imperial War Museum, Sorting by Svaney
VICTORIA & ALBERT museum of art, design and performance, Sorting by Svaney
Science Museum, Sorting by Svaney
Main Findings
After visiting so many museums in London, we started to organize the main findings we discovered on tours, try to find clues from chaotic information. We analysed the current interesting interaction patterns between visitors and artefacts. They can be divided into big parts: physical exhibits and digital devices.
The comparison of digital and physical aspects, Sorting by T
We found there are many experiences that are targeting children, for those exhibits, such as digital games, big projectors, physical objects etc. They were designed to be easy to understand or interact with. Our area of interest is to build an experience targeting special needs for learning.
Accessible Facilities in London
Museums in London impressed me a lot. Apart from the rich collection and interesting interactions, I found that museums were designed to be accessible to all. The museums offer multiple services for making sure they are accessible to the widest number of visitors, such as wheelchair reservations, hearing aids, access guide dogs etc. In fact, I found that inclusive design is accessible everywhere in London, from wheelchair access to buses to auditory cues on pedestrian signals, from tactile pavements to free assistants in train stations, and not to mention to so many dog parks. Those details of these designs really impressed me, the environments here are friendly to all kinds of people. I think, this is what user experience design could be about. Consider wider users, then design wider experiences that are friendly to all.
Inclusive Design
The notion of inclusive design recognizes that people have multiple forms of identity and difference, including age, ability, language fluency, socioeconomic status, and cultural background. However, measuring those differences does not mean making everyone the same, (Lupton and Lipps, 2018, p.25), rather, this enables every individual to participate in activities equally, confidently, and independently.
Mental Disabilities inclusivity
However, I found that the accessible designs so far have considered physical disabled people but rarely included mental disabilities. Although some museums offer sensory maps or quiet rooms for visitors who need special needs, those designs can't help them fundamentally. While we observing in Science Museum, we found that there was a boy with autism who couldn't understand the environment and had unexpected behaviours, and his parents were trying to communicate and make him relaxed in a new environment. At that moment, I realised that museums are not just a place for knowledge, they are also a space for family activities. According to Wen and Ngmuseums, while learning is an important motivation, museums can be seen as a form of social design to address social exclusion as well (Wen and Ng, 2020).
The Design Aim
All these thoughts made me more intrigued towards knowing about current scenarios of museums and exhibitions happening for children with autism and other neuro-disability. We envisioned creating a user-design output that could be understood easily and make autistic people feel welcomed while visiting museums. This final major project will design a multisensory museum experience for children with a mild learning disabilities (Autism) in the aspects of learning and socialization. For that, we made the plan and started research about autism and the museum.
References
Huang, D., Li, M. and Liu, Z., 2021, July. User Experience Design Study of Museum Website Based on TRIZ Theory: A Case of Heyuan Dinosaur Museum. In International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (pp. 467-482). Springer, Cham.
Wen, Q., Ng, S., 2020. Inclusive Design Museums and Social Design. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.268