#longnightofthemuseums

We were happy to have Janina Roesch talk to us about her experience with the previous Museums Night projects that she worked on. Some of her insights were crucial to our further decision making process (and future planning process), so I’ll lay them out here:

Target Group:

highly mixed (everyone was there! Both KISD and not)

KISDies are more likely to stay longer (an hour or more even- they might spend the whole night!)

should remember that people who come later are more likely to stay longer. Those who come at the beginning want to see other exhibitions as well.

The majority of people coming in are NOT FROM KISD

Atmosphere:

we’re part of the museums night, but we are NOT a museum

It’s good to make those who were not aware see what the school can do

Topic:

entertaining and not too complex

making sure everything ‘fits the theme’ is not a top priority

Planning:

start collecting projects from possible contributors EARLY ON!

You will definitely need sponsors. Start contacting them AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE.

Have a good division of tasks when it comes to implementation

Think about visitor flow!

Possible ‘division of responsibility’:

information and text collector

copywriter and graphics

3d render (‘architect’)

lounge manager

sponsorship manager

shop manager

spaces to think about interventions:

- entry

- room 12

- room 11

- outside lounge

TOP 4 TIPS:

 Finding sponsors should be a top priority!

We should consider the HOLISTIC EXPERIENCE (not just the exhibition)

Get KISD involved early! ( talk to the Stube early, get help early!)

 It’s all about giving visitors a GOOD TIME

In any case, the examples we saw of former Museum Night KISD exhibitions was very impressive. We now feel like we have a lot of work to do to keep up! Seeing these past examples serves well for motivation: 

Interview analysis

After that we talked about how we could analyze the information we collected from user interviews. We all agreed that one of the main problems we had was remaining objective while doing so- often the interpretations seemed ad hoc and arbitrary. 

Aleks gave a short introduction to a method called CODING, which has it’s roots in grounded theory and is used by social scientists everywhere. 

Here’s a slide that sums up the steps to grounded theory:

We’ll be posting a more detailed version of our interviews and analysis by the end of this week! 

Thinking about what our potential users expect helped us in the next phase of our meeting to come to conclusions about intent, or what we ultimately want our visitors to experience, given their makeup and expectations. 

Out brainstorming session brought us to a great conclusion- that instead of thinking about the 29th as an exhibition (static, personal,introspective, serious ),  we would think about it as an event (dynamic, fun, open social). 

Our first meeting landed right on the 1st of September, with a solid crowd of 4 students, 1 professor and 2 teaching assistants attending. We’re hoping more participants will join the team after the course selection is done- we could use a few more good (wo)men!

This productive class lasted a little over 2 hours, and can be divided into 3 crucial parts, based on the 3 important issues that were discussed.

1) What are we actually doing here?

Besides working towards making a great EXPERIENCE ( not just exhibition ) for the night of the museums on the 29th of October, we concluded that we would equally be concentrating on learning goals. Primarily going through a systematic and iterative design process, as well as documenting the process in as much detail we can along the way- this very post can be seen as an example! And lets not forget personal skill growth. This is something each of us has to strive to develop on our own throught the project.

2) What do we need to consider for the success of the class and the exhibition?

A number of different things, such as the amount of time people spend at our location during the night of the museums, what they expect to see, what we can offer them and which projects we can chose to exhibit, how can we connect current topics with themes related to KISD and the principles of the school…

3) These thoughts were mapped out during our brainstorming process under the categories: VISITORS, CONTENT and EXPECTATIONS. During the brainstorming session, we individually got to express our understanding and hypothesis in these three categories. Some interesting questions that came up were as follows:

VISITORS- are visitors mainly: designers? Design students? Artists? Cultural enthusiasts? Non-designers who casually wandered in? KISD students? Friends and acquaintances of KISD students? People who live nearby?

CONTENT- Should the topic be related to: global issues? European issues? Regional issues? Should it be related to internationality? Design? Controversial?

EXPECTATIONS- Do the stakeholders expect the exhibition to be a: - school ad? A discussion trigger? An interaction facilitator? A people connector? Youthfully Different? An inspirational display of works? Fun and entertaining? Casual and relaxed atmosphere? Elegant and simple in design? Something knowledgeable and smart?

We should add that prof. Mager was at the first meeting, urging us to make it easy to make and create, not very time consuming, but at the same time effective and pleasurable.

We left with the idea in mind that we should really talk to people who had visited different museums as well as KISD before during the long night, to see what their opinions and expectations were. Primarily we understood we needed to gain clearer picture of our target audience in order to be build up our themes, topics and experiences for that specific visitor group(s). We’ll be conducting and analysing our user interviews for next time, after which we’ll be turning them into personas for discussion. Stay tuned!