Project Scope: Service Design Project at Purdue
Project Team: Maham Ghazanfar, Anam Nasim, Abdul Moeed Asad
Designated Role: Ideation and research, sketching, prototyping
Tools Used: Miro, Figma, paper prototyping, physical prototyping
As museums broaden their missions and seek to attract new audiences, they are recognizing the need to create experiences that are meaningful, accessible, and relevant to a wide range of learners. They are experimenting with new ways of imparting knowledge through interactive exhibits and mobile apps, participatory storytelling, collaborative participation and are exploring technology like AR/VR/MR to enhance the visitor experience.
For our project, our main goal was to assist museums in harnessing technology to create innovative solutions that cater to the needs and interests of specifically middle school students. We propose an enhanced and meaningful visit for them. With our proposed solution, we wanted museums become more inclusive and effective educational spaces by providing tailored solutions.
In order to make the project more relatable and to focus on a context with significant room for improvement, we decided to focus our scope to a museum in South Asia. Based on our personal experience and research, we found that museums in this region often lack interactivity, making them unengaging for visitors, and also suffer from poor management.
After careful consideration and consulting with a museum expert from Pakistan, we chose the Taxila Museum in Pakistan as our project context. This museum houses a significant and diverse collection of Gandharan art dating from the 1st to the 7th centuries CE. Many of the objects in the collection were excavated from the ruins of ancient Taxila. Furthermore, the museum is surrounded by a number of historical sites, providing visitors with a rich cultural experience.
The project involved multiple rounds of diverging and converging of ideas. We used sketching as our primary tool to explore and evaluate ideas after every “burst of research”. The process consisted of iterations of exploring opportunities and evaluating them via sketching and collective sense making respectively. In this way we were able to establish focus into narrower scopes in-depth.
The first stage involved broad brainstorming to understand what could be done to make museum experiences more immersive for students, followed by affinity diagramming to identify the most promising ideas. In the second stage, we made sketches that specifically dealt with themes of learning, games/crafts, and immersion through AR/VR/MR technology.
we first explored the differenthistorical museums in Pakistan that are open to the public and offer a variety of differentexperiences that could be explored as part of the museum going experience. The three
most popular museums in Pakistan are the following:
Additionally we analyzed another museum, the Met for kids as an early exploration of possible ways in which we could go about curating a museum experience since the Met specifically and effectively focuses on making the museum going experience both fun and educational for children
Key features and pros and cons highlighted for each museum
After our initial research and exploratory interview we did a sketching exercise from which each of us generated around ten ideas. In order to systematically make sense of the data we did a thematic analysis. From the thematic analysis we identified seven areas we could look into. From this exercise we choose to chose to dive deeper into the areas of AR, games, crafts, and general immersive experiences.
Initial wireframes based on the concept of a centralized dashboard showing key employee and office information
From this exercise we choose to chose to dive deeper into the themes of AR, games, crafts, and general immersive experiences.
In our exploration of immersive experiences we discussed creating experiences that provided a sensorial experience of historical experiences.
In our discussion of crafts we focused on creating a space that was focused on active learning. Museums should create environments that encourage reflection but also creation
We considered how we might add another dimension of information to artifacts in the museum. Mixed reality seemed like a worthwhile endeavor to add contextually relevant information in ways that are easy to understand.
Why does pokemon go make for an enjoyable walking experience? Is it possible to create compelling museum experiences leveraging the artifacts in the museum? We think about these questions withour focus on creating a scavenger hunt.
After finalizing the ideas that we wanted to incorporate into the service for the museum school field trip, we decided to make a looks-like prototype to envision how the different elements would work with the actual museum. Thus, we then made some sketches that showed how the museum layout would be used and modified for the proposed service design as we based the design on the actual map of Taxila Museum.
This sketch shows how the layout of the museum would change for the craft room and an additional room created for the Immersive room
This sketch focused more on the initial proposed pathway of the tour. As found during our research, having a defined one-way path helps in understanding the story and is particularly important with a field trip since managing the students becomes important
In this final prototype, we also added the placement for the holographic projections in the three main gallery sections of the museum, showed a basic version of what the crafts and activity room could look like, along with the scannable artifacts for the scavenger hunt.
Our next steps could possibly include the following considerations