Community Exhibitions
TEAM
Charlotte Doo, Harvey Li , Muhan Huang, Terence Xu
ROLES
User Research, Interface Design, Video Editng
Over the course of a semester, the team partnered with Vancouver Art Gallery to analyze their business to find a potential pain point and create a solution. In this project, we focused on user research methods and how we can better understand user needs to create well situated solutions.
Located in the heart of Downtown Vancouver, Vancouver Art Gallery is a non-profit organization. Their mission is to use art to foster community engagement, share perspectives, and shape our collective future. The museum also hosts temporary exhibitions and educational programs, making it a vibrant cultural institution in Vancouver.
CONTEXT
To start this project, we began with primary research through three different sources. We did a full day of onsite interviews with people visiting the Vancouver Art Gallery, an online survey asking previous visitors about their experience, and finally a sit down interview with stakeholders from Vancouver Art Gallery. This data was used to give us a better understanding of Vancouver Art Gallery’s goals, public perception, and any pain points visitors may have.
ETHNOGRAPHIC RESEARCH
After our research, we created three personas based on our synthesized data each focused on a different type of visitor: the regular, the first-timer, and the educator.
Following a discussion with our stakeholders, we decided to focus on Layla and Marcus, as the Vancouver Art Gallery felt they already had a robust education program that did not need intervention.
OUR USERS
After our initial research, we came up with the following design focus:
How can we create a sense of community within the Vancouver Art Gallery that can be felt by regular and first-time visitors?
INITIAL FRAMING
Inviting 5 participants who have previously visited Vancouver Art Gallery before, we conducted a workshop with 3 different activities to gain better insights on how we might build a sense of community within the Vancouver Art Gallery, as per our design focus. The workshop was also meant to help strengthen and better clarify our design focus.
PARTICIPATORY WORKSHOP
REFRAMING DESIGN FOCUS
Once we completed the workshop analysis, we revisited our design focus to:
How can we create a community space focused around the exchange of ideas for art enthusiasts based around the exhibitions within the Vancouver Art Gallery for visitors?
Based on our new design focus, we created the two following concepts: Community Impressions and Community Exhibitions. Community Impressions allowed visitors to comment on each artwork in a digital forum environment. Community Exhibitions allowed visitors to take part in the creation of a exhibition through submitting artwork and voting on pieces.
INITIAL CONCEPTS
We pushed Community Exhibitions as our final concept, as we had received good feedback from our fellow classmates who would be interested in submitting artwork if it existed.
Community Exhibitions is a monthly event where local artists can submit artwork based on a rotating theme. Submitted artworks are then voted on, with the selected artworks displayed as an exhibitions for a month.
FINAL CONCEPT
Community Exhibitions Demo
Looking back, I do believe that Community Impressions was a better fit for our problem statement. Because we received overall better feedback for Community Exhibitions, we pushed forward with it, without taking a step back and truly thinking about our design focus. This was a good learning experience to realize that we know our project the best and to be confident with our choices instead of being swayed by other opinions.
REFLECTION