Design is Around You: Highlighting Design's Role In Everyday Life

Solution

An Exhibition Framework

Our final solution offers a versatile framework for future exhibits at the Design Museum of Chicago, centered around interactive elements that encourage visitors to reflect on design's impact in their daily lives.

framework application example

Design is Around You Campaign

By utilizing our Exhibition Framework, we devised an interactive campaign featuring five game kiosks strategically placed throughout Chicago. These kiosks are intended to inspire individuals to reflect on the importance of design in their everyday experiences.

By posing simple questions like "which potato peeler is preferred?" or "who is the inventor of the Rubik's Cube?", the kiosks prompt players to reflect on design's impact on their surroundings.

Upon answering, players receive a collectible card, and collecting all five cards entitles them to exchange for a Golden Card at the Design Museum of Chicago. This incentivizes players to explore all kiosks, ensuring full engagement with the campaign, while also offering an immersive experience of design at the museum.

How does the campaign contribute to attracting visitors to the museum?

The Design is Around You campaign employs an end-to-end user journey that effectively attracts visitors to the museum:

1. Pre-visit: The brightly colored, eye-catching kiosk grabs the attention of passersby, creating interest in design-related concepts.

2. Passive Experience: As users interact with the kiosk, they undergo a passive exploration stage, fostering curiosity and engagement.

3. Continued Exploration: Encouraging users to collect all five cards encourages continued exploration, sustaining their interest and motivating them to visit the museum.

4. Museum Visit

5. Post-visit: After the museum visit, visitors are equipped with the skills to identify and question designs in their everyday lives, creating a lasting impact and potential for return visits and word-of-mouth promotion.

Why was a framework chosen as a solution for attracting visitors to the museum?

We chose a framework as a solution because the Design Museum of Chicago presents rotating exhibits regularly, and we needed a consistent way to attract visitors continually. By implementing the framework, the museum establishes its unique identity, providing visitors with clear expectations while also enticing them with the element of surprise that new exhibitions bring.

This approach helps visitors look forward to an enjoyable and memorable experience during each visit, ultimately fostering repeat attendance and positive word-of-mouth recommendations.

How did we validate our solution?

The solution was thoroughly validated through a user-centered approach. The framework was developed based on extensive user research and interviews with the chosen target audience, middle-aged, non-designer Chicago residents. This research provided valuable insights into their perceptions of visiting museums and the design museum specifically.

Throughout the development process, the kiosk underwent three rounds of testing and refinement. User feedback from each round was carefully analyzed and incorporated into the final version of the kiosk. In the last round of testing, the kiosk was placed unattended, and an impressive 42% of passersby interacted with it. Moreover, the overall feedback from users was positive, with many expressing a strong interest in continuing to interact with the kiosk and collecting all the cards.

This comprehensive validation process ensures that the framework and the interactive campaign effectively resonate with the target audience, attract visitor engagement, and provide a memorable and positive experience at the museum. The high level of interest and positive feedback from users demonstrate the success of the solution in achieving its intended goals of attracting and engaging visitors.

“I think it was cool! The kiosk asked me about design preferences I had never considered before, like the different versions of a potato peeler.”

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- Round 3 Test Participant (Random Passerby)

“Thanks to [the team's] smart combination of gamification and generative design, we'll greet a wider and more diverse public at the DMoC doorstep. And we'll fulfill our mission to help visitors better understand the power of design—so that together we can use that power to fundamentally improve the human condition.”

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- Tanner Woodford, Executive Director, Design Museum of Chicago

Process

01 DEFINE

As the initial step of our process, we visited the Design Museum of Chicago to observe the exhibition space and gain insights into the typical display practices.

Additionally, we determined our target audience to be 25-45 year old non-designer Chicago residents. This choice was influenced by several factors, including their status as the largest demographic in Chicago, their significant influence over younger and older generations, their transition to remote work, and their current interest in seeking experiences outside their homes. Engaging this group of non-designers also presents an opportunity to expand the museum's audience and attract new visitors.

02 Research

As the second step of our process, we conducted a comprehensive survey on NextDoor to assess the current awareness levels of the Design Museum of Chicago and the concept of design among our target audience.

Following this, we proceeded with in-depth user interviews to delve into their interests and motivations, which helped us formulate specific design principles for our campaign. These interviews revealed that a significant portion of our target audience still lacks a complete understanding of the essence of design and its impact on their lives, highlighting the need for our campaign to address this awareness gap effectively.

03 RE-Define

After carefully analyzing the research insights, we redefined our primary objective as follows:

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"How might the Design Museum of Chicago facilitate a better understanding of design's influence on the lives of non-designers?"

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This reframing aimed to address the identified awareness gap and focus on empowering the target audience to grasp the significance of design in their daily experiences. This also helped us in creating more focused design principles which later guide our ideation process.

04 ideate

In the final step of our process, we utilized the established design principles to generate various concepts for the interactive campaign.

05 Create And Validate

Following this, we conducted a thorough three-round prototyping and testing phase, where user feedback was continuously incorporated to enhance the campaign.

The first round involved a low-fidelity prototype, utilizing materials like paper and cardboard, which was tested among friends and colleagues.

The second round progressed to a mid-fidelity prototype, with the kiosk partially built and tested on the first floor of our design campus.

For the ultimate round, a high-fidelity prototype was developed and tested in a real-world scenario, left unattended in the student union building to simulate authentic user interaction.

Through these iterative testing rounds, we fine-tuned the interactive game kiosk experience, ensuring its effectiveness in engaging the target audience and fostering a deeper understanding of design's impact on their lives.

Gallery

Team

Organization

Institute of Design (ID) at Illinois Tech
in partnership with Design Museum of Chicago

Collaborators

Ayaka Uriu
Palak Shah
Sujith Samuel
Yiqi Zhong

Supervisor

Anijo Mathew