Ecology of Care in Museum

Designing for care and connection between visitors and cultural artifacts

Collaborated with Kristin Eriksson, Louisa Helen Hirvonen, Amina-Kamra Maglić
Supervised by Arjun Menon
Workbook | Video Prototype

How can we design museum experiences that foster emotional and ethical connections between visitors and artifacts, rather than just passive observation? Traditional museum experiences often position visitors as observers and artifacts as objects inside the glass walls. Working with the concept of interdependence, this project focus on how visitors and artifacts mutually shape each other through encounter and attention to explored how museum interactions could embody an "ecology of care".

Design Process

We followed the Double Diamond process, beginning with understanding the problem space. First handed were collected through interviews and museum diaries, where we coded, clustered, and ranked the themes to discover that visitors had diverse exploration styles and wanted more personal, meaningful engagement with artifacts. We also conducted a literature review on cultural user experience and learning to ground our understanding of how people interact and form connections in museum contexts.

During ideation and development phase, we explored various approaches through drawing different sketches, where we finalized on a system that can summarize the users' visit while allowing them to engage with artifacts they engage with.

Design Concept

The final design is a system where visitors could use a wristband to scan artifacts they find interesting throughout their visit. At the end, a Visit Visualizer machine would generate a post-card like physical personalized report highlighting the origins and ethical dimensions of their selected artifacts, creating a moment of reflection on what drew their attention and the ethical implications those artifact might involve.

The system aimed to be unobtrusive during the visit while creating a meaningful takeaway that extended reflection beyond the museum space. It also caters to different exploration styles (e.g. linear and non-linear, solo and multi-user), as it preserve the visitors' agency and social interaction with others.

Prototypeing & User Testing

We made a prototype of the touchscreen interface of the Visit Visualizer station and conducted user testing with prototype of the wristband and scanner in a mock up museum. There are also mock up of the physical personalized report and instruction pamphlet. Additional to the mockup prototype, we also created a video prototype to illustrate the user experience of the system in a museum context.

We conducted user testing with Wizard of Oz method and the mockup prototype. The results shows that having a tangible report created a bridge between the museum experience and visitors' ongoing thinking and make the connections and questions they had formed about ethical responsibilities toward the artifacts and cultures visible.