YUJIA ZHAO Interaction Design

Challenge

Design a museum installation that is educational, entertaining and accessible.

Exploration

We started by visiting museums to look for inspiration and immerse ourselves into the project settings both physically and emotionally. The Wonderlab children’s museum made us realize that high level of interaction and full body engagement is a good way to enhance the enjoyment of experience and facilitate education. We chose the life of bees as our installation theme in a children’s museum.

In order to narrow down to a specific aspect we would like to address, we did lots of research about bees. This included interviewing a beekeeper, reading encyclopedias and comics, and watching related videos and TV programs. We were impressed by the important role that bees play in our ecosystem. We want to communicate these feelings to the audience through our exhibit's design to let them develop the empathy for the bee and appreciate its inconspicuous but important existence.
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Experience Prototype

One of our main goals was accessibility, which relies heavily on empathy and understanding toward people with disabilities. Experience prototyping is a suitable method to develop such empthy and understanding. Each of us designed a one-hour disability experience prototype plan for another to try out. The disabilities we experienced were the loss of one arm, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder(OCD), and visual impairment. We learned that people with disabilities:

• are surprisingly capable to adapt
• their other normal senses are sharper
• they don’t want to draw too much attention and aid from the crowd

We as designers should provide opportunities for them to experience through multiple senses and at the same time assist them in a subtle and considerable manner.
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Concept Development

With inspirations from the museum, knowledge of bees, our core focus, and the insights from experience prototype in mind we brainstormed lots of concepts including a 4-D movie, a bee car, a honey lab, etc. However, we felt these concepts did’t reflect the experiential goal very well, which was to let people appreciate the inconspicuous yet important existence of bees and develop empathy for this small creature. We noticed that the importance of the bee was intensively reflected through the relation between bees and plants. Specifically, bees pollinate flowers while collecting nectar which produces fruits. We decided to focus on cross-pollination to develop concepts, and from this we got our initial design.

Prototypes and iterations

We built prototypes using paperboards, foam, color papers, post-it notes and glue. We used post-it notes to represent projected pollen dots. We conducted user evaluations and realized that users were not clear where to start and where to go, and using post-it notes to represent pollen were too distracting. We also didn't fully consider accessible design issues. Thus, we made the following changes:

• add cartoon bee images on the floor to lead directions
• add voice instructions
• casting lights through a piece of paper with holes to represent pollen dots projection.

We conducted another round of evaluations that led to the following changes to improve user experience:

• Add candies to represent nectar in order to provide incentives for children to go from flower to flower
• Changed prototype to distinguish male and female flowers
• Add written instructions

Reflection

Experience prototyping is a powerful way to develop understanding and empathy for another group of people because you’re not just studying the person's situation but also feeling it yourself. Accessible design is not the only area where experience prototype applies. It is a useful technique to develop user-centeredness in general. Designing experience prototypes is a very interesting and creative process, and is itself an experience design.

Experience design is very difficult to prototype and evaluate, especially this kind of large-scale museum exhibition. In prototyping, it is important to make the right judgment of what aspects should be prototyped in a detailed and high-fidelity way, and what aspects can be ignored. The prototyping strategy will directly impact the evaluation result. There are also many constraints on the prototype such as technical limitations and budget.
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