This was a course project in Experience Design taught by Professor Jeff Bardzell. We were asked to design an interactive installation at a museum that is educational, entertaining and universally accessible. This was a four-week project, and I was in a team of three.

Museum Visits

We started by gathering our museum visit experiences by showing the pictures and telling the stories. Then we as a team went for some museum trips together to gather new experiences. Our goal was to experience the museum installations by ourselves through different lens that we gained from the class, and tried to get some inspirations. Among the museums we went to were the Museum of Science in Boston, and the Wonderlab in Bloomington, Indiana. We captured some interesting visual notes.

The educational purpose for children can be seen from every detail in the museum. For instance, one can see the inside of the elevator by passing by it, which may trigger the curiosity about how an elevator works.

Here is an example of playful installations, as you can see in the short vedio clip, children ran to compete with the "light". Installations like this would not only involve the children into an engaging atmosphere to play, but also would stimulate their thoughts about the phenomenon afterwards.

Here in the images respectively it shows the sensory experiences of touch, smell, hear and see. Exposing knowledge in all senses within human's reach is a powerful way to engage and educate them.

Creating an engaging interactive environment can enhance the user's experience. Creative interfaces would involve them more actively into the interactions with the installations.

Disability Simulation

To better design an experience with accessibility issues in mind, each of us in the team simulated a disability for at least an hour, as shown in the pictures: loss of a dominant arm, speech and hearing impairment and OCD.

After each simulation, we brought together the notes we took during the process and debriefed together to gain insights.

• Sense of Space
  
We want the users to have their own space, both physical and emotional, to explore the interaction

• Practice of Patience
  
We want to make the interactions attuned to the users' pace, so as not to damage the atmosphere for learning and play.
• Multi-sensory Feedback
  
We want to provide multisensory feedback to help the users experience the installation in a rich way.

Brainstorming

After a long discussion about the possible topics for this project, we ended up with teaching children about music, which we were all passionate about. We defined a problem in music theory learning for children, which is that the process of learning music theory is boring to children who are lacking patience and abilities to understand abstract ideas. So we were aiming for an engaging yet educational solution to this problem.

We built up ideas based on each other's, from the stomp as a kind of street culture to the imagination of form and visualiztion of music, from children loving to build stuff to the tangible objects they could paly with. We used metaphors to help lead and inspire us to go further, like the grammar elements of a language structured in a sentence to the notes structured in the score. We ended up with a concept that to make the music notes tangible so that children could experience and learn music in a different way.

The installation consists of two major components: a wall and balls. The digital wall is the "score" and the balls are the "notes". The score starts moving after the ball hits the wall. The children can adjust the positions of the balls as they play. The color and sound feedback would let children be aware of the causal relationships between the position of the ball and the respective tone. By playing and experimenting with the installation, children would learn about music in an engaging atmosphere. The music piece finishes by the little "composers" can be taken away as their own pieces of work.

Prototyping

To create a complete experience for children, we designed the beginning, middle and the end part of this experience. The beginning of the experience is the hallway of composers, walking along the pictures of famous composers in the world and ending with a mirror reflecting the child herself. This will create a surprising effect which will get more interest from the participants to play. The middle part is the whole interaction and the end part is the result of the music composing.

Testing

After the participants finishing the "composing", they each chose five cards to describe their experience using the product reaction cards. (The analysis of their feedback can be found in the final video report.)

Final Video Report