PROJECT DETAILS

Interaction Design Studio, Fall 2019 (6 weeks)

COLLABORATORS

3 Designers - Christianne Francovich, Diana Chun, Sanika Sahasrabuddhe

ROLE

Field Research, Concept Ideation, Physical prototype, Infographics, Video Production

TOOLS

Illustrator, Photoshop, Adobe XD, AfterEffects, Premiere Pro, Audition, Spark AR, Arduino IDE, SketchUp 3d

category

Experience Design   |   Product Design

OVERVIEW

In a time surrounded by information, museums face the challenge of becoming passive repositories of information. This highlights the need to adapt and re-imagine their role in society. 

the context

Carnegie Mellon Natural History Museum, Pittsburgh

CMNH is one of Pittsburgh's top 4 visited museums and offers a wide range of exhibits and collections. Given its diverse audience, it can be instrumental in effecting behavior change by creating experiences that motivate visitors for environmentally sustainable actions.

the challenge and opportunity

The evolution of all living beings is interconnected!

The story of plants, birds, insects, animals, microbes, and humans is connected with each other. Even though the dioramas are beautifully crafted, this interconnection remains unclear across the exhibits. Building a cohesive narrative across all exhibits would allow the visitors to deeply engage with the idea of 'co-existence' and potentially create the impetus for long-term behavior change.

the outcome

An immersive and participatory experience that unfolds the meta-narrative of co-existence of humans with other life forms. 

Power to the Plants highlights the idea of co-existence through plant evolution and the impact of human activities on them. It highlights, and visualizes, their accelerated evolution in the Anthropocene by utilizing 'Deep Time' thereby calling attention to the cascading effect of our actions. After all, natural history is more than just dinosaurs!

Check out the Project video below ↴

Why Plants?

Plants are a resilient species, yet form the backdrop to the animal world. Despite the 5 mass extinctions in the last 542 million years, most of the species of plants have survived to impact the ecosystem in diverse ways. While their accelerated evolution is a sign of the perilous nature of the Anthropocene, their resilience is a powerful symbol of hope and survival.

VISITOR JOURNEY AND EXPERIENCE

Ticketing & Onboarding

Individuals visiting in a group scan the same QR code to form a team and onboard by choosing between 3 different experiences: Birds of a Feather, Marvellous Mammals, and Power to the Plants.

Collection

Visitors look for AR image markers throughout the museum to collect plants they like.

Finale: Plant Time Walk

As a grand finale, all members of the team come together to scan their collection in Botany Hall....

...and walk through 542 million years of evolution through a visual and audio journey of their personalized plant collection.

Reflection

The Plant time walk culminates in a projection controlled through a physical dial. Visitors interact with the dial to see the evolution of their personalized collection over a period of 200 years.

 Power to the Plants

enables

Scroll down for an overview of the process👇🏽

or

design process

field observations

01.

During our very first visit to the museum, we noticed that the visitor engagement declined after the dinosaur fossil section. The sections that followed, like the dimly lit mammal dioramas and the Botany Hall had either information hidden inside booklets next to the dioramas or didn’t have one at all. Additionally, the plants are a part of all the mammal dioramas but animals are not included in the plant dioramas. It seemed odd to see only plants and no other forms of life as a part of the ecosystem. This made us wonder,

if, and how, is the botany hall exhibit connected to the rest of the museum exhibits?

02.

While thinking of groups, we felt that visitors like to continuously diverge and converge during their journey. We saw value in this process because it allowed people to see what they were interested in and reflect while also being a part of a group. 

secondary research

While thinking about the specific way to intervene in the museum space, we were simultaneously also trying to understand the different types of museum visitors. We knew that we didn’t want to limit our understanding of age group segregation. Hence instead of designing for the specific user group, we looked at different archetypes of museum visitors as described by John Falk in the paper ‘Understanding Museum Visitors’ Motivations’. We designed keeping in mind the following archetypes because of overlapping expectations:

EXPLORER

Curiosity-driven musuem goer

RECHARGER

Treats museum as a refuge, restorative/ spiritual space

EXPERIENCE SEEKER

sees museum as a destination, cares for ‘been there done that’

defining objectives and ideation

Our ideas, in the beginning, varied from a museum-wide experience of self-curated experiences to creating social interactions using navigation. It took us a little time and lots of articulation to realize that what was important to us was that visitors curate their own experiences in some way to ensure that they were engaged in active learning and had clear takeaways. Personalized experiences would have easily attracted the experience seekers as well.

Additionally, consecutive visits to the museum helped us realize the 'Explorers' and 'Rechargers' diverged and converged during their museum journey, which made them the perfect audience for a combined experience of self-curation and social interaction.

concept

As we did more research on the exhibits themselves, we learned that everything in the dioramas is accurate. This shouldn't have been surprising, except that it hadn't dawned on us that these dioramas were not just something beautiful to look at, but were actually trying to tell more about the animals and their ecosystems. Yet, the logic of curation is not obvious, and the story across the exhibits is not divulged in a cohesive manner. Humans are connected to all other living beings: plants, birds, insects, animals, microbes through Evolution.                       

Humans are connected to all other living beings: plants, birds, insects, animals, microbes through Evolution.

...and

Deep Time is a powerful tool to tell the story of this interconnectedness and human impact on all ecosystems.

prototyping tangible interactions

Immersive technology exploration - part of the brief was to make it a multi-sensory experience, we explored different technologies that could aid in achieving this: Virtual Reality (VR), Projection Mapping, and Augmented Reality (AR). We ended up settling for a combination of projection mapping and AR because we felt VR was too anti-social.

Projection Mapping

Arduino, RFID and Acrylic casing

From Left to Right: Soldering the loose connection on RFID, RFID circuitry in acrylic casing, testing RFID circuit

From Lef to Right: Micro-sanding of the clear acrylic, Spraying the clear acrylic to hide the circuitry, Interactive Dial

The prototypes were placed on the outer case of studio recycle bins and cost a total of $10.

video Production

We wanted our video to be as realistic and not fake micro-interactions, as much as possible! Shooting the collection part in the museum was easy, but since the grand finale included a redesign of space and the addition of new elements, it wasn’t possible to shoot it in the museum. This meant that we had to recreate the space as close to reality as possible. Plus, since neither of us had made movies of this nature in the past, we had to go through an iterative process to understand the suitable light quality for shooting projections. This was the trickiest part of our production process.

It took 5 re-shoots, setting up in 2 different spaces, and 3.5 days to shoot the final video. Our physical prototype survived these multiple takes and was dismantled months later.

Take 1 to 4: In the dark dungeon that is the Photo Lab

Take 5: In a well lit classroom

My learnings and reflections

Scoping an open-ended brief

The major challenge was that the project brief didn't have any constraints except for the site. Scoping of the project was driven by a combination of field observations and thinking of the broader picture of the role of museums.

Thinking of the System

Concepts like Anthropocene are hard to visualize because they exist on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. Building this narrative and the visualization enriched my own understanding of exploring systemic interconnections.

Social Experience

In developing the other lenses, the social aspect of the whole experience could be improved. by allowing multiple groups of visitors to enjoy the experience simultaneously.