A Day at the Museum

For this project, my team was tasked with creating a museum exhibit about a period of design or technology history that contained 3 digital touch points that would facilitate the exhibit's learning goals.

Role: Exhibit designer, Model creator

Timeline: Oct-Dec 2023

Class: Learning Studio 2 (CGT 27108)

In learning studios we learn tools and methods, then apply those skills through 1-2 month group projects and short exercises. Learning Studio 2 is normally taken Sophomore year.

Project Goals

The goal of this project is to design an interactive museum exhibit with a theme of design or technological history, featuring at least 3 different interactive touch points to create an immersive and informational experience.

The theme of our exhibit was Victorian era methods of communication, creating an entertaining and engaging experience as patrons experience the Victorian life style. This exhibit prompts patrons to reflect on the evolution of communication as they interact with telegraphs, floriography, letter writing and more.

Background Research

Victorian Communication

Our first step in this project was to learn for ourselves what communication in the Victorian era looked like. We used a digital post-it board to collect all of the methods of communication we found for later reference.

To organize this data into something usable for our project, we grouped these communication methods into groups that could help us organize our exhibit. We realized that these different groups could represent different rooms in a house, and that our exhibit could be formatted like a walk through of a victorian house to immerse our museum-goers.

Below is an image of one our first iterations of the room system. Patrons progress through the rooms (green notes), learning abotu different methods of communication (yelow notes), and are immersed in the time period by sounds and visuals (blue notes).

To create a successful exhibit, we needed to learn more about how they are structured, and how we could optimize the experience for patrons. We decided to conduct observations of museum-related exhibitions currently occurring on Purdue's campus to learn more about what we should and should not implement in our final design.

We conducted observations in both the Robert L. Ringel, and Patti & Rusty Rueff Galleries. At the time, these galleries were displaying an exhibit on indigo fabrics, and a showcase of student work from Purdue's graphic design classes. Through our observation of these exhibits, we learned a few applicable takeaways.

Museum Exhibits

Key takaways:

Make it clear what parts of exhibits you can and can't touch
AR experiences can be cool, but these required downloading an app and took more than 5 minutes of work to view the AR version of the poster which would discourage patrons from using them

Cultural Probe

Pen Pal Letters

After our background research, we had an idea of what our exhibit would look like, but we weren't sure how our patrons would connect to the information. We decided to create a cultural probe focusing on one of our methods of communication, letter writing, to look at the differences between modern communication and Victorian communication.

A prompting letter was sent out to friends and family with the instructions to write three letters back as if they were communicating with a pen pal to see what average, modern people would write about in letter-based interpersonal communication.

We received 15 letters from 5 participants in total. We found that all of our participants wrote letters that were noticably polite and well-wishing. None of our participants wrote negative or rude letters and we hypothesized that ince letter writing is a more formal method of communication in the modern day, people chose to be civil and positive in their writings.

Emaline Frey

Projects