2020.9-2021.5 Thesis Design Project Team of 1
How to make museum visiting engaging, interactive, social-able, fun, and meaningful with the devices that visitors already owned.
A Mobile App that utilizing gamification, social media, and the concept Community of Practice, to propose a new way of learning in the museum.
The final prototype —- ARTICE, a mobile app for museum visitors to discover arts and social.
The final prototype —- ARTICE, a mobile app for museum visitors to discover arts and social.
The National Endowment for the Arts reports attendance at art museums dropped 16.8 percent from 2002 to 2015, even as the population grew by more than 33 million. “Arts Consumption Through Electronic Media” in the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA, 2012) shows that 71 percent of Americans participate in the arts electronically compared with 49 percent who participate in the visual and performing arts in person.
For those who visit the museum with a learning purpose, museums are not always good at providing customized learning paths. It is not rare to see people “lost in a museum”, or simply couldn’t take away much of their visit. At the same time, museum educators have long been facilitating different means of interactions including basic text labels, audio guides, guided tours, interactive multimedia equipment (such as touching screens); but the contents are normally viewed as “not fun” and the equipment is not accessible for all visitors all the time.
In this project, I try to tackle the challenge based on social learning theory, with the design of social media and gamification.
A Landscape Analysis on Museum Learning Mobile Apps & Games
There are three design directions or highlights of this mobile application.
First, the ability to view, comment and collect artworks. When the learner encounters an artwork, they will be able to collect them into their collections and categorize them later. There will also be functions to add comments by voice or by text. The most upvoted comments will be displayed beneath the artwork. The learners will also share artworks by collections and host their virtual art exhibitions with customized backgrounds
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/4Xow-ZxmsxLnqLVZ7fpnHgREibD0lrxK-jsE47WXMviAFyRhdwVbQ3xuftrAhb0WgFb-6lm7SinJyeoT23N8pK8keC6_DQ1KHbOSRbp5XgqfHaGB_Q15OMiQnYaevHhJvXGw-RRk=s0
Second, group visitor game, or gamification. The learners will be put into a group of four and each of them will play a character (Horse M, Owl M, Dog H, or Racoon L). Each character will have its personality and will be given its responsibility to make the group visit successful. For example, if the learner chooses to be Horse M, he/she will be responsible for planning the visiting route for the whole team.
https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/64iLNAeWMOYDzFfJSurJsHh4ZUn2ZJZSld8M14RiI1-mg5UUfn1oLcYrmr2Cy6dKk70BPhEbcPsYEn_5cWnpktPx4EkY6t9C3qOagu0jS4T45C-qKTefSJgbtifOUmNynWsCh8_2=s0
Third, map and traffic indicator. Because of the collection function, the application should be able to automatically generate visiting maps using the museum API. In each collection, there will be a button that says “generating a map” and you will be given a visiting route that is one-way and contains all the artwork in that collection. The traffic indicator is an add-on function for the map which uses color to indicate the traffic in front of each artwork/on your route so that you can decide to go to which artwork next.
https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/X3fyFTvjTRvJfvX9dvn2X0SsgPH3nMGCAj0wmcS430PWMeSgSlL_vq3nSX3tUZI-T0KIdu_5aXhFuT-XiQwxLhPVd6g3xFC0vszNRV-MlZ1TcyT-WRb-DoTuroAzY4BtfztD3Iac=s0
I designed a survey with 15 questions in the concept testing phase.