By angelaquintero November 12th, 2015

Meet THE HIVE!

Hello dear readers!

We are happy, proud and really excited than we can share these feelings with you all!

After spending a lot of time on research, conceptualization, prototyping and discussion our work is rewarded. For two months now, we managed to put all the different parts of our project together, set our goals and priorities and most important use various insights and feedback efficiently. All this resulted, to the creation of our new and final (almost) product , which comes by the name THE HIVE.

Welcome THE HIVE!

We like to think of museums as bunnies, who live underground. They eat there, sleep there and in general do everything “secretely” without being visible to the rest of the forest community. Likewise, museum professionals and especially curators, design, display, research (before an exhibition becomes available to the public) inside their offices “secretely” , whereas it is almost impossible for the public/community to see this processes. In particular, what the public (visitors) observe is just an “end product” exhibition.

A museum rabbit

According to us, the solution to that, comes again from mother nature and in particular from bees. The way a beehive works is splendid, especially in terms of collaboration. Every single bee is important, when it comes to the production of their beehives, which appear as the result of a co-creation process. Having this in mind, we decided that this paradigm, could probably work also for museums nowadays, in order for them to involve the members of their community in the formulation of co-creative exhibitions (collective intelligence).

A Beehive

The Hive Official Logo (First Look)

Therefore, we gave to our co-creation concept the name THE HIVE. We strongly support and hope that through the co-creation workshops, with the use of our toolkit method cards, the activities and website, we can help and trigger museums to open their doors to the public in a different way, not just as visitors but as creators who are filled with various relevant ideas and opinions.

What is THE HIVE?

The Hive constitutes of two main products. These are: 1) The Hive toolkit (includes the activities and add on cards, the instruction manual and the game like tablecloth 2) The Hive website.

When and Where is going to be used?

The Hive, is meant for co-creation workshops, with the aim to facilitate co-creation practises between museum

professioals (curators) and the public (participants), during a workshop (co-creation workshop) for the design of upcoming museum exhibitions. In fact, The Hive can be used throughout the development process of an upcoming exhibition, during the decission making of the theme, artists and artworks/objects that will be displayed in an

upcoming exhibition, before that or after that. It is clearly a museums decision of when they would like to use it.

Likewise, place is also a museums decision. A co-creation workshop, where The Hive will be used, can take place

everywhere, suach as a place inside a museum, like an office or somewhere outside of it, like a library, an artist’s studio or even at a cafeteria.

Who is going to use The Hive?

Co-creation workshops (where The Hive will be used) are open to anyone who is interested to participate. However, in order to facilitate collaboration, engagement and ultimately good results, we suggest the participantion of eight to twelve participants for each workshop and at least one facilitator provided by your museum.

Why to use The Hive?

As noted before, The Hive is designed with the aim to invite the public to create and share their ideas, concepts,

opinions and feelings surrounding a new museum exhibition. Through the process of a co-creation workshop, community members can feel engaged with the museum in a different way and gain an important and contributory role on the design of upcoming exhibitions. Museums on the other hand, can create a new relationship with their community, one which can lead to a new social standing and a new identity on the light of their future.

What exactly is a co-creation workshop?

A co-creation workshop is one of the most common types used to facilitate co-creation processes. The rest are namely: Open Source, User-Generated Content, Crowd Sourcing and Mass Customization. During a co-creation workshop specific users are involved in brainstorm sessions to generate ideas or are being involved in concept workshops to enhance ideas. The model of a co-creation workshop was chosen among the rest, because these type of workshops are especially suitable when there is a need to gain more insights in your customers needs (museum visitors) or in order to find new ideas that are relatively easy to implement on short, middle or long term projects

(upcoming museum exhibitions). According to our research, these workshops have the potentials for museum curators to really dive into the needs of their potential visitors, understand them better through the activities that will take place and ideally get inspired and benefit from their ideas and creativity.

The model of a co-creation workshop was chosen among the rest, because these type of workshops are especially suitable when there is a need to gain more insights in your customers needs (museum visitors) or in order to find new ideas that are relatively easy to implement on short, middle or long term projects (upcoming museum exhibitions). According to our research, these workshops have the potentials for museum curators to really dive into the needs of their potential visitors, understand them better through the activities that will take place and ideally get inspired and benefit from their ideas and creativity.

How The Hive products function?

The Hive Toolkit (Activities and Add on Cards)

During the co-creation workshops, participants will make use of specifically designed toolkit cards (activity cards) in order to conduct particular activities, leading to certain outputs. The add-on cards, are different from the activity cards and are used for different purpose. These cards represent different media, analogue or digital, which participants can use in combination to their activities, by providing them valuable information about their functionality and possible benefits. Some of these cards are about Virtual Reality, Augmented Reality, Video Games and more. Both type of cards have QR codes which users can scan in order to learn more information about them through text, image or video.

All the cards, that will be used, appear as an outcome of an intensive two months research that team D.T.E conducted and a first testing with possible users. The cards are divided into four main categories namely: Design, Experience, Enrichment and Social.

However, these cards are not complete yet, while there is need for more testing and evaluation and possible incorporation of new categories.Thus, we are open to feedback and suggestions.

Acitivy Card

Add on Card

The Instruction Manual

The instruction manual, includes all the information about the cards, but also additional information including tips, methods, ideas for the curators/facilitators, on how to prepare a good co-creation workshop.

The Hive Website

Our website will have multiple functionalities. First, it will be used as a database for curators to log in with their personal account during a co-creation workshop in order to keep track of the activities taking place. Second, participants can use it to upload text and images related to specific activities during the workshop. Further, curators can use it after the workshop to analyse all the information gathered, use insights and ideas that they find relevant. In short, the main goal is for the website to work as a database for people to exchange ideas, open also for non participants ( see results of the workshops without log in) like museums interested to start with co-creation. We aim to create a virtual community which can be transformed into a real one as time passes.

The Meeting

Some hours ago, we presented The Hive to different stakeholders of the cultural sector, including a representative of Amsterdam Museum who invited us to test our product within the museum. They were all interested to our creation, providing us with valuable suggestions for the future. We are really happy for this first step of The Hive and we will try our best for many more.

Even if The Hive is not complete yet, we have a strong basis that we can work and move forward with. Let us know what you think about it!

Check our very first user scene video!

Till next time Hivers!

Angela, Constantine, Angelo

By constatinedranganas October 30th, 2015

THE CO-CREATION ALLY

According to Jon Wilkins, one of the founders of Naked Communications (Londons leading Creative Marketing & Branding Agency) there are three C’s in modern creativity: Communication, Crowdsourcing and Co-creation.

Unfortunately, we cannot do much with crouwdsourcing yet (the time will come) but the rest two C’s are aspects that we focus on through our work and will continue to do till the end of our “mission”. Hence, this week and for Sprint number 3 we decided to work more on how we can communicate co-creation through meaningufl activities. For this reason, we started this process by doing the combinations between the card categories that we use for our concept and most important by leaving outside those categories which we consider inapropriate and able to lead in good experiences/activities.

Regarding that, it was time for us to share our “accepted” concept, along with our ideas and creation process with someone who works under the same topic and whose feedback could be valuable for us. WAAG SOCIETY it is!

I think you may remember from a previous blogpost entitled “The Twist” the coincidence which occured between our concept and the one of Waag Society, both aiming to foster co-creation for cultural heritage institutions. Back then, it seemed like a disaster, but after some weeks with hard work and belief to our ideas and skills we made a personal difference. Hence, it was the right moment for us to meet with them once again, so to inform them about our concept and while we were also more than interested to see how far they have gone with their own (RICHES).

This meeting started with a presentation of our concept to them, during which we showcased our ideas surrounding it, the process we followed to formulate it, the methods we used and the outcome we hope to achieve through its possible use from cultural institutions. The feedback we got from Robin van Westen and Dick van Dijk was really valuable, while they found our idea/concept very interesting. Thus, they highlighted some aspects that we need to take into account according to their perspective, for possible improvement:

Provide more information about the process of our activities, in a sense that visitors will be able to understand why they are using this toolkit. Now our activities are mainly based on the play with specific elements (e.g. music).
It would be interesting to connect every/some activity/ies with an object or a story from the museum’s collection.
It would be surprising to combine different type of categories/activities. This might bring about new insights and activities.
Our activities seem predefined with no freedom for the visitors to either change the activity or propose their own activities. Maybe the incorporation of more open/free activities can bring better results and a better engagement for visitors within the co-creation workshops. Also a Joker card or something similar could be used from visitors so to change the activity or add something new.
Maybe we can bring curators in a dialogue with visitors during and after the co-creation workshops. For example, newsletter, website or blog could be used from the curators in order to provide information about the elements that he chose or not to include in the exhibition and why. At the same time, people can give their replies and have a valuable dialogue together.
Bringing the whole experience (workshop) outside the museum space and also creating our game without direct reference to the museum content (exclude the representation of museum space on the maquette) could bring community engagement, diverse opinions and perspectives and could function as an alternative way of involving people into museum related activities.

Their overall impression from our idea/concept is that it can really work, but it can benefit with a more open-free approach when it comes to the activities, the representation of the game and most important the location where it can take place. According to them, this can avoid misunderstandings during the process and frustration for the participants who may have various questions related to the activities (Why I am doing this? Why I have to choose this specifically?) and the whole idea of co-creation. Moreover, it is possible that we can create a new understanding about museums within a community if we bring a museum related activity outside museums walls (co-creation workshops in cafes, libraries etc.) Furthermore, they seemed interested for a possible combination of our concepts ( their toolkit is able to work as the preface for the use of our toolkit).

: Meeting at Waag Society

Next, Robin and Dick presented to us their concept which comes by the name RICHES. The main idea around RICHES, is that in our modern times, there are various changes in our societies economic, demographic, ethnographic etc. Further, everything around us is becoming more digitalized and we turn to become as people more and more individualists. RICHES takes this as a starting point and investigates these aspects, from the perspective of heritage institutions and cultural heritage in general (How I respond to these changes as a heritage institution?)

The method/possible solution according to them, lies on co-creation. This notion can be used according to them as a method for cultural institutions to learn their audiences better, understand them and identify different types of stakeholders that could get involved with them.

Overall, RICHES focuses on aspects such as location-communication-collaboration under the general notion of co-creation, and consists of two parts, a website and a toolkit.

WEBSITE: Their website includes information about ten important and highly recommended examples of co-creation that have taken place in different countries (museums) globally. These cases function as inspiration for the museum professionals who want to learn more about co-creation (informations included on the website) and want to explore some successful examples. Their website further, works as a strategic/methodological source for co-creation, providing important methods/links/material, aim to create a conversation around co-creation before moving on with the use of their toolkit.

TOOLKIT: The next and most important part on their project is their toolkit which is still on a developing stage. However, we had the opportunity to see some pictures and a sample of the cards that will be used.

So, after getting inspired by the website, museum professionals will use this analog toolkit, which has the form of a table clock. This toolkit constitutes of different circles which represent a specific category. The whole activity starts from a starting point where the institute needs to define its mission and goal (e.g. I want to involve younger people). Then there are three other circles including the following categories:

Commitment: Between the institute and stakeholders-visitors
Process: Collaborative Creation
Impact: List of institute’s values.

There are five questions attached to every category which need to be answered with the use of 20-23 method cards. During this process, participants chose the way they feel comfortable to participate and decide also for each other (feel comfortable but also try new ways of communication).

For example there is a question asking: What type of organization aim I ?

For this question, you can reply by using a card with the symbol of an umbrella (institutionalized museum), volcano (innovative), brick (build experiences step by step). Furthermore, there will be the opportunity for the participants to draw personas on small papers about the people who they believe can benefit from their actions, those that should be involved and things that they can offer to and get back from them.

All in all, it was a very constructive and relevant meeting for both sides with new insights that we aim to discuss and think about during this Sprint and the following ones.This meeting was the first step of many, while we are moving on with the aim to share our ideas with professionals and non, in order to learn from each and subsequently inform different communities about the potentials of co-creation and the methods for its sucessful application in the cultural sector. Searching for more co-creation allies! 🙂

Thank you once again for reading!

For any recommendations do not hesitate to contact us!

Have a nice weekend!

From Constantine, Angela and Angelo

By angelaquintero October 23rd, 2015

TRIUMPH

Hello dear readers (real or fictional)! After one week without a post, team D.E.S is back! I think, that from the title of this post, you can easily understand that what follows, is “maybe” about something positive that occurred, during this or the previous week.

You are right once again, and we are really happy to share with you the new data that exist on our project today.

The last thing we informed you about, was that we were kind of shocked after the “overlap” between our project and the one of Waag Society. However, as we said on the previous blogpost, this event motivated us to move forward and try our best in order to make a difference. This started, with the smart guide that we made, entitled “A smart guide for co-creating a museum experience”. This guide functioned literally as a guide for us and was the one which helped us on the formation of our new concept. All the data that we have been collecting so far around important notions directly linked to our project (co-creation and experience design) found their place, organised and nicely combined with illustrations in this guide. Even if this guide took us about two weeks to get prepared, it mirrored in the best way the new possibilities that co-creation can bring for cultural institutions. We had to succeed into two goals during this second sprint and we are happy and proud that we made it.

First Goal

Create a smart guide based on co-creation (curators-visitors) for upcoming museum exhibitions. Including also information for Experience Design.

Second Goal

Based on this guide, come up with a new concept, which will appear as an outcome of the research conducted for the formulation of this guide. If possible create a first model or prototype of your new concept.

Method

For the completion of the smart guide, we used questions in order to build upon our research. Some of these questions were:

What is co-creation?

Why use co-creation?

What is an experience?

Why design for an experience?

How can you apply co-creation?

How to make co-creation successful?

The benefits of creating an experience?

How to collect data from the co-creation process?

How to translate collected data into useful data for exhibition making?

These questions, included also many sub questions which we also researched in order to have better and more concrete results. Following this, we decided to use the method “Photo Safari” in order to understand what visitors consider important and what represents for them a museum experience. Based on this, we visited the exhibition (Angelo) of Amsterdam Museum “Graffiti: New York meets the Dam” and we asked visitors to capture with their phones, whatever for them makes unique a visit to an exhibition. Every picture came along with some sentences, as an explanation of their choice and its importance to them.

While we explored the one side (visitors) we also included information from the 1 on 1 interviews that we conducted with museum professionals during our first Sprint. Focusing on the aspects of co-creation and experience design, we could compare both sides and see differences or similarities on their approaches. The rest of the content of the guide includes information from literature study and review, making also connections with other fields in order to see how co-creation has been explored/expressed so far. This boundary shifting, combined also with the examination of a theme park case (Efteling) allowed us to explored both Experience Design and Co-Creation through the various approaches that they can take.

Further, through this guide we realised the broadness of these notions (co-creation and experience design) and the need for us to make , an easy to use end product, without much complexity both for visitors and mainly for the curators. While co-creation especially, is a new term within the cultural field, our new concept aims to lead to the creation of a toolkit which will be easy to use, educational for both visitors and curators (on co-creation, collaboration and participation) and enjoyable to use.

As i mentioned before, we managed to succeed on both our goals for this sprint, while we presented both a complete guide and also a prototype (cards and a maquette) for our new concept. We decided that we would like to go for something physical which is possible to have some small digital implementations (extensions). Our new concept derives from the insights of our guide, from the valuable elements we kept from our previous concepts and also from part of the research conducted at CREATE IT. The cards we made represent only some of the sixty categories that will be used during a co-creation workshop, for the formulation of upcoming exhibitions. Every card will have a different color which represents the category which it comes from. The main categories are six: Layout, Aesthetics, Ambient, Flow, Media and Social. There will be two card versions, one for the visitors and one for the curators, with specific instructions for both.

For example the first card that we made is about Music, which belongs to general category of Ambient (green color). Every card starts with a small quote on the topic, continues with the activity that needs to be done based on the topic, a small tip, what is needed for the completion of the activity and what the output should be.

Through these method cards, we aim to bring together the public with the museum professionals inside a common space (co-creation workshop) for a common understanding during a creative process. The co-creation workshop was chosen among the other categories of co-creation because as we found through our research during this users are involved in brainstorm sessions in order to generate ideas or involved in concept workshops to enhance ideas. Co-creation workshop are especially suitable to gain more insight in the needs of your customers or to find ideas that are relatively easy to implement on short or middle long term. Through the activities, participants will be able to add their own ideas and content for the design of a new exhibition in the form of feedback that curators can use efficiently in order to serve their needs.

How the feedback will be collected?

In order to make it easy both for visitors and mainly for curators we decided that every activity will be mirrored on a physical maquette (model) which will function as a feedback platform. This model will represent the space of the upcoming exhibition that visitors can use in order to make sense of the space and visualize how the exhibition can be.

Physical connection is possible to make them provide better feedback compared to just using the cards that we will provide them. Also if we succeed on incorporating some digital elements on this model, we can make it also further interesting and inspiring for them.

Phy-gital (aka Internet of Things)

Phygital is a new term of great interest globally, which is also explored for new ways to approach the future of museums. This concept supports the belief that physicality with some digital extensions holds the keys for further engagement and interactivity for visitors in cultural institutions. We hope that our concept will add something more to this this “exploration” in cultural institutions, while as you can see through our prototype we will try to work under this new and interesting topic.

In order to understand our concept better, check our video

Hopefully both people (colleagues and coaches) from MediaLAB and most important our stakeholders (Bernadette Schrandt and Don Blaauw) really liked our new concept (FINALLY) and it is THE ONE that we can work with from now and develop it as much as we can, till our deadline. We are really happy about it and we aim to try our best in order to make something enjoyable and most important useful for as many museums as possible. Thank you once again for reading! We will keep you informed for the next steps of our project, but now with more information about our upcoming product.

We feel like true Winners this week!!!

Have a nice weekend!!!!

Angela, Angelo and Constantine

By constatinedranganas October 9th, 2015

The Reboot

Hello dearies! First of all, I found out that I am psychic! Why? Because all my blogpost titles are prophetic since they foresee in a a mysterious way every new upcoming event. You will understand what I mean exactly, just keep in mind that last week’s title was “The Twist”.

Well, this week started with a big surprise! Warning: Don’t rush into making assumptions (it wasn’t a nice present or anything like that).

Last Monday, we had a Sprint Session meeting with our coach Bernadette Schrandt to define our second Sprint’s goal. Again, after a lot of discussion mainly focusing on the insights, experiences and feedback that we gained during our first Sprint, we came to realize that what is most needed at this point of our project is a guide. This guide will include more cohesive information around the notions that we research in our project since we didn’t have the chance to organize properly so far, making them less broad and complex. Our coach was really into that, because she believes that this could be really helpful. First of all for our team to move further with the creation of a new concept and second for the curators who are not familiar with terms such as co-creation, to learn how to possibly apply it in their exhibitions.

The decisions we made, matched perfectly with the talk session that we attended at Waag Society later on this day. Waag Society is an Amsterdam based institute for Art, Science and Technology , which conducts various projects in collaboration with institutes from other European countries, around the aforementioned topics. By the way, it is also the place where I conducted my Master’s internship some months ago. The talk was entitled “Hacking Heritage: The audience” and it revolved around Co-creation, which is considered a powerful strategy used by various fields, able to build new relationships. Due to the fact that it is of great interest lately also in the museum sector, museum professionals through this talk, discussed the potential benefits that could be gained if they decide to work co-creatively with their audiences.

Hacking Heritage: The Audience. Waag Society

The Waag is depicted in Rembrandt’s 1632 painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicoales Tulp

At this point, in order to better understand what Co-creation in the museum context is about, I will use Waag’s definition and thoughts around it:

“Co-creation starts from the idea that everyone is an expert on one issue or another, first and foremost on their own life. Co-creation may not be a new thing, but it can bring something new to museum practices: it can enrich the stories a museum tells, it can enhance the understanding between the different worlds we inhabit or it can change the way a museum programs its future events. The approaches presented at this day, are a strategic choice, an opportunity for institutions to build long term relationships with their visitors. Enabling a museum to create more layered and nuanced exhibitions and events, and to build relationships with their local communities, with new visitors, with younger people or with people from diverse cultural backgrounds groups. Relationships that exist well beyond the scope of a project.” (Waag Society Official Website/Blog)

Twelve heritage professionals took the stage and through inspiring presentations brought about discussions on language, creativity, equality, modern craftsmanship, innovation, cultural identity and strategy, all agreeing on the fact that museums should be transformed into inclusive safe spaces for their audiences. The speakers included amongst others Hannah Fox from Derby Silk Mill, Wayne Modest and Laura van Broekhoven from Wereldculturen, Merel van der Vaart from Allard Pierson Museum, Lisa Kleeven from FOAM, Theo Meerenboer from the Makermuseum and a representative from Imagine IC. The main aim of this event was to inform the public for the upcoming launch (May 2016) of a publication and toolkit, resulting from the two year EU-project RICHES, that Waag has been working on along with eight other countries. This publication will include valuable resources, methods and information for heritage professionals willing to explore Co-creation.

Suddenly we felt like we were struck by lighting (of course I am exaggerating)!!! To be honest, it was a bit of a shock to see that our guide and mainly our whole project had the same focus with the people at Waag. This is not necessarily something bad (while at first we thought so) while it triggers us to move ahead and try to make a difference under the same thematic umbrella. Following this, we conducted an “emergency” meeting with our coach Bernadette Schrandt, where she calmed us down and we decided all together that we should continue with our guide, which will be helpful for us anyway, so to make a difference through our project.

The next day, inspiration knocked on our door, while we attended a talk (part of the opening of the Makers Space of Hogeschool van Amsterdam) given by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager authors of “Invent to Learn” a magnificent publication for those interested on the Makers Culture. Subsequently, Marco van Hout who is working for MediaLAB Amsterdam conducted the same day a workshop based on User Experience and Content, touching upon how we can design better user experiences and identify better our users to satisfy their needs.

Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager. Talk during the opening of Makers Space (HvA)

Vrijdag today (in Dutch Friday means Free Day), and we think that something bright new is ahead of us, while we are working on the formulation of our guide. Too bad that we cannot reveal more information! You know…every time that we did that, it changed completely so….! Until next time! (Check our Flickr)

Have a nice weekend!

Thank you for reading! Angela, Constantine, Angelo.

By constatinedranganas October 2nd, 2015

The Twist

Life is like photography. You use the negatives to develop!

Departing from these words of widsdom another blogpost commences. Anticipation is over! It is time to inform you about the outcome of our Peer Pitches at MediaLAB and most important of our presentation/meeting with our stakeholders. But before that, there are tasty things that prevailed!

Every Monday one team is responsible to make lunch for everyone working in MediaLAB. Guess what, this week it was our turn! We are glad that we have a Colombian in our team (Angela), while we had the opportunity to make something unique and “exotic”. Her initial idea was to make an inspired Latin dish called Burritos Vegetarianos which included tortillas, avocado, paprika, cucumber and the special sauce called Pico De Gallo (tomato, onions, olive oil, lemon and koriander). Along with the tortillas we served nachos and Mexican sauce. The reactions to our lunch were overwhelming and we think that everyone was satisfied (at least thats what they’ve told us). I believe cooking brings people together and exploring cuisines from other cultures is an interesting way to know them better. After this cooking lesson, it is time to get serious (just kidding)!

The Peer Pitches

On our previous blogpost i forgot to mention that this week, except from the meeting with our stakeholders which was on Thrusday. we also had our Peer Pitches on Wednesday. Peer Pitches are a form of presentations used in MediaLAB before the end of every sprint (3 weeks), which includes results, possible protoypes and is used mainly as a way for the teams to collect feedback from the MediaLAB experts-coaches to move further with their projects and make changes. More precisely it should include:

1) A short reminder of what your project is about

2) The structure of your Translate sheet: Sprint goal, user stories, objectives, methods and results

3) Explain which results led to which insights and what they meant for your deliverable or how you are taking them with you to the next sprint.

4) Lessons Learned

5) Whats next? Questions you have/ challenges you are phasing

After every presentation which lasted 10 mintues, every team received questions from other team members and coaches which were divided into teams of expertises including Design, Strategy, Interaction and User. These questions created fruitful discussions which brought about new insights and approaches for every team, valuable for our next sprints which starts next Monday.

As for the team Designing the Experience, we are really happy with the feedback we gained. Everyone enjoyed the fact that we presented a clickable prototype of our application which was combined with paper cubes (designed by Angela) which mirrored the idea of the 3D mapping projection on the physical interface. Through that, it was easier for the audience to understand better our idea while through the use of storytelling we created a story around the use of our product. The questions that followed, especially from Loes Bogers (project manager at MediaLAB), where very beneficial while she highlighted some new research aspects such as: content, evaluation tools, feedback tools, decission making, relevant for us to dive in and explore. Following this, our coach and stakeholder Bernadette Schrandt congratulated us for our presentation and informed us about some things that we should incorporate in our presentation important to our stakeholders along with possible questions that we should be prepared to answer. Thus, you understand that both Tuesday and Wednesday were two days full of preparation, decision making and conversations, which is something that we really enjoy as a team.

Furthermore, as you have realized so far, every week we give a promise to you for our next blog post (inform you about something new) and of course we keep it. If you remember the title of last week’s post was “From concept to CONCEPT” (came to foresee the future) which mirrored mainly the stages we passed in order to come up with a concept, with the hope that our stakeholders will like it (while we loved it). Lets see what happened after all.

Curator and Visitors

User Stories and Product Requirements

Evaluation Form_Peer Pitches

The Meeting

Coming from a very good presentation, taking into account and incorporating our coaches recommendations, we entered the room really confident about our concept. However, we had seconds thoughts about it to be honest and thus we were looking forward to our stakeholders feedback. There we presented in front of our coach Bernadette Schrandt, the Crossmedia professor Harry van Vliet and the researcher Wouter Groot. After presenting our concept and findings so far, it was obvious that a TWIST was ahead of us. The case was not that they did not like our concept or that they rejected it completely, but there were aspects of it that were not suitable for our design process .

Using the title of our project as a stepping stone “Designing the Experience” they made us realize that the two main factors/topics that we need to focus on more are Design and Experience. The following images depict in the best way where our focus will be centered from now on and which questions we will try to give answer to during our second sprint. The new concept we are assigned to create will be based on physical materials, inspired also from our visit to Play the City two weeks ago, including the principles of co-creation but directing our attention towards the creation of a feedback evaluation tool.

All in all, even if our concept was “rejected” somehow, the smile on our faces after the meeting was an obvious contrast. This was mainly because, first we were proud for what we achieved in the past three weeks (less with workshops, meeting etc.), second that we had a fruitful discussion which brought about new ideas and third that now we are triggered to push ourselvers further and broaden our horizons.

It is Friday today and we think that it is a day that we can relax at work, enjoy the bright sun (something you dont experience that much in Amsterdam) and give us some time during the weekend to think what we want to do from Monday and on, with the beginning of our next Sprint. We will keep you updated of course! Till the next blogpost you can always check our Flick page for visual material.

Concept 2.0

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SUN 😀

Thank you for reading!

From Angela, Constantine and Angelo!

By constatinedranganas September 28th, 2015

From concept to CONCEPT

We welcome you once again to a fresh new blog post. On our previous post we kept a promise, which was to let you know what happened during the first meeting with our partner No More Mondays. So let’s start from that!

The Meeting

We had the great pleasure to meet Gert-jan Brok and Don Blaauw and present to them (through a presentation) ourselves and most important our ideas so far around the project we are working on. On this meeting, there was also present our coach and stakeholder Bernadette Schrandt, while it was important for her also to see which are the findings, approach, and results of our work so far. In general our main idea was centered around an interesting and valuable publication we found by the scholar Nina Simon, entitled The Participatory Museum (2010) which we think was quite relevant and interesting to examine. Simon formulates her thinking around the incorporation of elements from social media and mainly from Web 2.0 into the museum content, which is possible to lead on the creation of Museum 2.0 as she calls it. Museum 2.0 will allow more participation for the visitors, while it is engaging them into a meaning making creative process which they become part of, through ideas and activities based on co-creation and co-curating. Having this in mind, we made a sketch of our ideas surrounding The Participatory Museum and how these ideas can be applied to our project.

Folllowing our presentation, we had a fruitful discussion all together about the possibilities we have around our creation, with our coach Bernadette Schrandt making clear that our end product needs to be useful for the curators mainly, while our approach so far has been more visitors centered. With this in mind, along with the ideas that both Gert and Don provided us springing from their long working experience and collaboration with museums, by creating games and applications for them, we left this meeting all together in order to move to a different place, which came to be a new source of inspiration.

Old concept used during the presentation to our partner.

Old Concept-Presentation

Presentation to our partner No More Mondays

Time for Play

Bernadette has informed us that we will visit an urban planning/gaming company by the name Play the City, but she didn’t gave us more information about their work, or what we were supposed to do there. At the end, it proved to be a great “surprise” after all. Play the City, is an Amsterdam based company which uses gaming in order to engage multiple stakeholders in resolving complex urban challenges. They believe that is the real alternative to standard formats of public consultation in the 21st century. Their method has been acknowledged internationally and has been implemented for large-scale projects in Amsterdam, Istanbul, Brussels and Cape Town.

Entering the room, you found three tables made from crates on the top of which you could see plenty (sealed) envelopes with different numbers. Every crate table had a different profile, so you could choose one between them (based on construction choices). After choosing, you had to follow the information and rules your choice was giving. Following this, we moved to the main gaming room. There, after a brief presentation of the company’s role and achievements so far along with information about the rules of the game, we were allowed to open our “secret” envelopes. Inside these envelopes there were money specially designed for this game. The game was taking place on a big table, which had a designed interface (imagine a big sticker on a table) of a landscape in Almere, which they want to develop. All around the table there were shelves- stands from which you could buy any kind of buildings, agriculture, water supply, electricity supply etc. all in the form of small miniatures. Depending on your money and profile , you had specific choices that you could make. Thus, it was always possible to collaborate with your neighboors or ask their help when you couldnt buy something solely.

From our team, Angela decided to build a students residence, while I decided to build an Art Factory that could host artists so to experiment and make theirs creations. However, Angelo went towards a more “kinky” direction by creating a big “Vegas type” of area, where people could have fun in many ways. (Unfortunately, at the end he didn’t finished his idea while he was left broke). All in all, it was a really inspiring experience and the people working for the company were very kind and helpful with our questions and struggles we faced during the game. The main thing we realized through this experience is how you can simplify big problems with the use of gaming platforms and gaming thinking (Gamification). Something similar is what we have to achieve for our project, while the needs of both curators and visitors are so many globally, which makes the problem we need to solve, big as well.

Translate Session and New Concept

After this meeting, the next days that followed were all about work, work and work, including a lot of discussion around possible concepts. Wednesday was an important day which came to make our concept clearer. During our first Translate session with Bernadette Schrandt, we discussed our findings so far, what still needs to be done and possible goals for our next sprint session. After our meeting, we had a clearer idea of what we would like to do. Felipe Escobar who is working for MediaLab as an industrial and multimedia designer, helped us a lot on the definition of a clear concept, by showing us some very interesting videos based on 3D project mapping and Augmented Reality with the use of cards. After this, we start thinking how these concepts could be applied to our own. Also it was really helpful for us in order to define our stakeholders better along with our concept a workshop we attended entitled Define Interventions provided by Charlie Mulholland.

Translate Session

Define Interventions Workshop

Define Interventions Workshop

As you can see from the images that follow, we decided that we would like to create a 3D mapping projection on a physical interface that can be placed inside a museum. Through the use of an application that visitors will use on screens places in front of this interface, they will be able to make their choices for the design of an upcoming exhibition. Their choices then will become visualized on the physical interaface through the use of a projector, an activity that will be taking place in real time and in the same space. This will provide them a visualization of their ideas/choices but on the same time their actions-choices will be transfered- after being translated into data- to the curator, who will be able to see the audiences preferences so to work better on the creation of a new exhibition.

New concept Storyboard Part 1

New Concept Storyboard Part 2

Concept Explained

For the formualtion of this concept, we worked all together as a team following the tasks that we have divided in the begining of our Sprint. Angela created an online survey for the public, in order to understand better their needs and preferenes around museums/exhibitions (ditigal or physical, modern or classic art etc.) and along with research that she conducted on visitors studies she created the visitors personas. I conducted four interviews with curators from different museums including FOAM, Het Ship, Het Nieuwe Instituut and Amsterdam Museum, along with research around their profession and decision making for exhibitions, including also their preferences, which helped me to formulate the curators personas. As for Angelo, he was the one who made a clickable prototype for the application that could be used as part of our project, but also formulated our user stories and value proposition always taking account our opinion and final goal.

Unfortunately, the first feedback from Don when we sent him our idea was not what we were expecting, while he characterized it rather broad, with many words and questions for visitors to reply (quite time consuming) and with a need for further explanation, without rejecting it though. On the other hand, our coach Bernadette-after explaining to her better our concept- seemed interested on it, giving us valuable feedback and highlighting aspects that she would like us to give a further focus.

To conclude, we are happy that before the end of our first Sprint we have a concept, one that many need further development, but at least is a first concept that we can work with. On the 1^st of October we have a very important meeting with our stakeholders, where we need to present them the results of our research, along with our concept. So far, we have been moving from concept to concept which is quite normal, while we are still in the beginning of our creative journey. We hope that this time our concept will be THE CONCEPT except for us, but also for our stakeholders. Want to know what happened after all? Just wait for our next blog post!! Till then you can always check our Flickr account for visual material. Thank you once again for reading!

Angelo, Angela and Constantine!

By constatinedranganas September 16th, 2015

Designing The Experience So Far

#Hoi-Hola-Γεια#

Welcome to our first blogpost! Every week, we will upload new information about the progress of our project and you are more than welcome to follow our creative journey! Our team consists of the Communication and Multimedia Designer Angelo Croes (NL), the Industrial Designer Angela Quintero (CO) and the Comparative Arts and Media Researcher Constantine Dranganas (GR). The name of our team, as we like to call it, is “Constantine’s Angels“. The project that we work for, is Designing the Experience and our goal is to create (or at least try) a digital toolkit or model able to suggest or create new, diverging museum experiences. This toolkit should be able to simulate impressions of these experiences and facilitate co-creation processes to involve all stakeholders in the design process. In other words, our mission and goal is to introduce a new way of experiecing a visit to a cultural institution, useful both for curators and their audience, while it could possibly foster a collaborative relationship amongst them. Designing the Experience is part of a bigger project named Designing Experience Scapes by the applied researcher center (part of Amsterdams Creative Industries and Hogeschool van Amsterdam) CREATE IT which is one of our stakeholders. Our partner No More Mondays is an Amsterdam based interactive experience design company for cultural institutions. In the following paragraphs you will find some information about what we have done so far.

Angelo CroesAngela Quintero konstantinos Constantine Dranganas

Week 1

Our journey started in the morning of the 2nd of September in Medialab, with our PechaKucha presentations. This gave us a first glimpse of the skills of our team members and afterwards we had the opportunity to make questions to each other to know us better. Following this, the next day we had our first workshop on User’s Scene and its methods, in order to understand who our user is and how we can serve his possible needs. This was the first step of the many that will follow, since we had to deliver (Tuesday 8th of September) a movie scene, poster, trailer etc. with our projects user.

After a brainstorming tornado, sketching and fruitful discussion with our coach and stakeholder Bernadette Schrandt we had our final idea for a trailer. We decided on a story about two users, a curator and a visitor, with a focus on the second one, in order to best mirror through this video the disengagement between them and the struggle of the first to serve the needs of the second . For this video we had the great opportunity to film inside Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and we would like to thanks Sara Leemans for this opporutnity. Moreover, it was really helpful for us in order to formulate better our ideas and understand our user, the meeting we had (arranged by our coach) with Merel van der Vaart who is working for the Allard Pierson Museum, so we would like to thank her as well. The outcome of our video can be found on this link and we are very happy and satisfied with what we achieved.

Still from Users Scene

Week 2

After submiting our video on Tuesday morning, receiving good feedback from our colleagues and coach in Medialab, we attended a dual workshop, on Tinkering and Prototyping. On the Tinkering part, we had to choose an object amognst many and try to think which is its functionality and how it could be applied in our project but also on other teams projects. The object we chose was a red button, which at first seemed easy to use. It’s name was Bt.tn and as we found out it is a internet interface able to function as a router, or a mean to make posts on your Facebook, cell phone, Twitter etc. However, even if we were really excited about it, we didnt succeded on making it work, but that was not the main purpose of this workshop. Following this, the second part of this workshop was to create a prototype. Our prototype included ideas and parts of our project, while we created colorful cubes which visitors could fill in with votes of the same colour with the choices boring, inspiring or curious. It was really nice that we tested our idea (with one possible user from MediaLab) within a museum scene that we created by using objects like fruits, chains etc.

On the next day (Wednesday 9th of September) , we attended a Masterclass and a workshop both really interesting for our project and for a better collaboration between us and our colleagues. Cross Cultural Communication Masterclass provided by Marian McLaughlin taught us the importance of understanding cultural differences and also how we can solve possible communicative problems. Under this light, we moved on with the Scrum workshop. Scrum is an iterative and incremental process for the design and development of products and services, and it has a very specific way of organizing a team. Tasks are achieved faster and with higher quality when using the Scrum-Framework. This is made possible because of the high self-motivation of the team, which chooses itself how tasks will be executed. The project assigner’s demands will be iteratively prioritized and quickly realized. At MediaLAB Amsterdam, the flow of the design process is embedded in a sprint-based schedule, supported by Scrum roles, rituals, sessions and artifacts that support the process. Due to the fact that, this is the process that we will follow during the duration of our intersnhip at MediaLab, doing in total six Scrum sprints, it was important for us to learn and understand it in order to best apply it.

On Thurdsay,(10th of September) while all the other teams had a meeting with their partner (ours will take place tomorrow 17th of September) our coach organised a workshop just for us. While it is important for our project to understand better the role of curators and how they make decisions for the design of an exhibtion, we functioned as curators, desiging a maquette for an exhibition. It was a fun, inspiring and creative way to gain knowledge and the result satisfied both us and our coach. Afterwards, we had a constructive discussion with her and she provided us with some further insights on how curators’ work and make decisions.

On the final day of the second week, it was time for us to attend Search and Select workshop and Blog-Process Book. The first one was centered on methods of conducting a good research by using search enginees and tools efficiently, so to have relevant results. The second one, was about the use of our teams blog and how to use it (Yes the one that i am writing for you now :P) but also for the use of Flickr, Vimeo, Youtube and other platforms. Along with these platforms, we also learned how to use our process book in which we can keep track of our actions throughout our project using post it, sketeches, text etc.

Bt.tn button-Tinkering Workshop

Prototyping Workshop-Process

Curating Workshop-Process

Curating Workshop-Our maquette

Week 3

Back on Monday and a new week full of new activities was ahead of us. In the morning, we started preparing our ideas about which our concept could be until the time we had to meet with our coach-stakeholder-product owner and discuss everything with her. Together we started building on our Scrum board, putting tasks and goals for our first sprint. For the next three weeks as a team we will take many actions, like interviews, surveys, we will create our user stories and personas and our value proposition in order to reach at the end, our sprints goal “Have A Clear Concept”. Our four hours meeting was very constructive and we are at a point where day after day we are moving closer to a final concept which hopefully will be able to help both visitors and curators to better understand each other and work towards a new concept for the future of museums.

Scrum Board-Meeting with our coach and stakeholder

Scrum Board

To sum up, more or less this is our journey so far, towards our common goal: Design the Experience. Tomorrow, we have a first meeting with our partner No More Mondays, where we will present our ideas and get to know what they think about them. We are really excited and looking forward to it. Do you want to know how our meeting went? The only thing you need to do is wait for the next blogpost which will come really soon! For more pictures you can always visit our Flickr account.Thank you for reading !

Angelo, Angela and Constantine!

CREATING TOMORROW

Just another MediaLAB Amsterdam Sites site

Team

Commissioner:

Description

Meet THE HIVE!

THE CO-CREATION ALLY

TRIUMPH

The Reboot

The Twist

From concept to CONCEPT

Designing The Experience So Far

#Hoi-Hola-Γεια#

Week 1

Week 2