#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 Croes
Angela Quintero
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!