ARt Treasure Hunt
Designing for families in museum environments
Challenge
This project seeks to answer the question of “How MAR technologies in museums affect shared experiences and extend interactions with artworks for families with younger children?” by reporting an observational study of a MAR treasure hunt prototype use in Moderna Museet in Stockholm.
“ARt Treasure Hunt”
The concept of a treasure trail inside the artwork with several, sequential stations was applied to the design of the application. Treasure trails instruct users to find objects and complete certain tasks, which implies movements, gazing and engaging in different ways with museum exhibits.
The prototype has 4 stations, one of them being an introductory one – the story of the artwork character, the zoom in station, the sound exploration station and “make a collage” station.
System map
Wireframes
Screen designs
Process
Pre-study
The data for the pre-study was gathered with the help of semi-structured interviews with 5 museum workers from Moderna, ArkDes, Hallwylska, Waldemarsudde and Naturhistoriska, including curators of education, gallery educators and museum pedagogues, on the topics of children and parent art experience, family experience, museum approaches on working with children and families and technology incorporation into museum settings.
Other than that, three observations of family museum Sunday tours and art school lessons at Moderna and ArkDes were made.
The interviews and observations have been transcribed and analyzed, using several approaches, as Saturate and Group, Composite Character (Personas) Composition and Point-Of- View-Madlibs from Design thinking approach of d.school (Hasso Plattner Institute of Design at Stanford), to develop a deeper understanding of the design space and the user profiles and activities.
As the pre-studies data analysis was fully completed, it showed a more structured picture of the domain which made it possible to formulate three approaches for a family art interaction with MAR to base the designed artifact on – informative, explorative and creative.
Informative
Informative approach implies the use of data about the artist and the artwork, including short texts, pictures, animations or videos.
Explorative
Explorative approach implies less facts and “dry” data about the artist and the artwork and more focus on exploration of the artwork itself – materials, colors, shapes, objects or peculiar details.
Creative
Creative approach implies the modification of the art work on the go, by adding user ́s own creative content, like some lines, shapes, objects on the top of the existing artwork, or creating his/her own artwork by using some interactive details “borrowed” from the artwork.
Implementation
Sketch and Illustrator has been used for the wireframes and screen designs of the application. Vuforia library in Unity 3D has been used for creating the augmented reality prototype. The main part of it is the image target or “marker” function. The designer/curator can upload an image and define it as a marker and place all the information planned to be shown after reading the marker, to a position relative to it. The graphical content of the application was designed in Adobe Illustrator. Photos of the artwork, audio files and texts created by a museum curator of education were also used in the design of the prototype.
Results
The data gathered from observations helped to point out some particular models and patterns of family groups ́ physical and bodily interactions, social interactions in the museum space and user-artwork interactions by means of AR on a mobile device.