AMNH Sponsored Project, UX Design, AR Design Museum AR- Afrotopia Recontextualizing the museum and creating new dialogues through AR meta-layers and workshops
Conducted user research, defined POV and designed mobile AR, brochures, and exhibition experience.
Impact
Contributed to the museum experience in the Hall of African People in AMNH. The project is featured and will be presented at the 4S conference in Cholula, Mexico.
Design process
Overview
About AMNH
Partnering with the American Natural History Museum in New York City, the project aims to prototype ways to contextualize and understand the "Man in Africa" Hall, which has participated in a range of conflicts and debates about the people and places that created the hall. Globally, museums are increasingly tasked with re-contextualizing themselves and their historic entanglements with racism, colonialism, homophobia and other forms of oppression. As museums try to craft new narratives they must wrestle with the question: What happens when the museum itself becomes an artifact? How can problematic histories be made visible, and how might justice be served? What new narratives can be crafted, and to what ends? What could they be? What forms do they take?
Problem
How to bring in hidden narratives and discussions on ancient artifacts in modern museums?
Goal
Revitalizing the past image of African People : redesign historical moments in African culture with AR. Revealing hidden narratives : encourage learning, understanding, and communications between communities.
Design Preview
I. Afrotopia Reimagine The Future Through AR Collaging + Tagging
Over the four month, our group designed an AR mobile experience that invites audiences to create collages on top of the old dioramas. The intention is to re-contextualize existing material by adding visual layers.
1. Find and scan stickers to start AR Experience Users can find stickers in front of the four dioramas in the Hall of African Peoples. Long press on the sticker show on screen leads to the history page about the diorama.
2. AR Collaging - Imagine the future Creating AR meta collages on the top of dioramas with objects from Afrofuturism novels and songs.
3. Responds and reflects on old dioramas Four prompts are given to inspire thinking, reflections and communications. Audiences can write, draw and type responses towards prompts.
4. Live update: Conversations between audiences All audiences can look at all collages and written responses. They can like their favorite pieces by giving a thumbs up emoji and also leave comments.
II. Workshop Read & Think Like An Afrofuturist
Besides the AR experience, the workshop is designed for teens, high school and college students to understand Afrofuturism. The workshop consists of three sections: reading, writing and sharing.
Read Participants will examine the works of prominent Afrofuturism artists and writers, including Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson and Tochi Onyebuchi. Write Under the context of Afrofuturism, participants will create their unique journey in forms of creative writings, including poetry, fiction, letters and more. Discuss Participants will receive feedback from writing teacher and published author of science fiction and short stories.
Styleguide
Design Process
Museum AR Experience User Journey
01 Workshop
02 Front desk
03 Hall AR Experience
Sign up workshop in advance Understand and learn about Afrotopia in workshops led by invited artists, writers and professors
Scan the QR code from the signage Open and use the application in browser
Follow instructions in the application to start the AR experience and learn more about the hall besides displayed artifacts and dioramas
Exhibition AR Experience User Journey
01 Hall Entrance
02 Diorama 1
03 Diorama 2
04 Dioramas 3
05 Dioramas 4
06 Hall Exit
Open application in the default browser Open AR Afrotopia section to find stickers on dioramas
Long press the sticker on the diorama Read
Long press the sticker on the diorama
Long press the sticker on the diorama
Long press the sticker on the diorama
Save and share the live updates online
User Research
Research and Findings
Our group collected audience's comments and interview results from online review platforms, questionnaires, articles and AMNH museum. Due to the difficulties to have an on-site research, we uses mainly online resources, such as online rating platforms and google map and resources and information provided by AMNH.
92% of the respondents view AMNH as highly credible sources of information
72% of the respondents expects regular updates on artifacts and displayed information
The collected reviews from questionaries show visitors of the museums are highly convinced by the materials presented by the museum.
The collected comments from the hall shows complaints about outdated information and inappropriate display of the artifacts in the museum.
63% of respondents prefers an interactive museum experience
45% of respondents wish to include voices in the museum
The collected comments from the museum shows audiences shows strong interests in having AR and VR experiences in halls.
The collected comments from the museum shows audiences want to include their voices in halls in additional to displayed information and artifacts.
Our group further analyzed AMNH's current exhibition layout and artifacts in the Hall of African Peoples to better identify what is lacked and how we can improve the museum experience. Our goal is to revitalize the past image of Africa with AR, reveal hidden narratives to encourage learning, understanding, and communications between communities.
Intervention
Our design approach is to use Afrofuturism as an added lens in the Hall of African peoples to imagine an Afrocentric future, revitalize the past image of African People.
Design POV
I. Design Principles
Our group developed five design principles to better define the designed experience.
01
02
03
04
Our design should be inclusive, innovative and accessible.
Embrace absent voices, including the narratives from African Americans and visitors.
Pose questions to visitors to promote actions, thinking and reflections.
Avoid coloniality in technology.
II. Design Questions
Our group also uses five design questions to help us better understand the refine the problems while pushing forward our design.
01 Values
02 Practices
03 Narratives
04 Sites
05 Pedagogies
What values do we encode and reproduce in the objects and systems that we design?
Who gets to do design? How do we move toward community control of design processes and practices?
What stories do we tell about how things are designed? How do we scope design challenges and frame design problems?
Where do we do design? How do we make design sites accessible to those who will be most impacted by design processes? What design sites are privileged and what sites are ignored or marginalized?
How do we teach and learn about design justice?
Ideation
Sketches and Mapping
Based on the primary research, our team created a series of sketches for different design concepts/directions. We tried to add another information layer to reframe & reinterpret African cultural heritages, and to connecting the past, the present, and the future to reverse the stereotype that Africa is behind and stuck in the past.
Design &Prototype
Afrotopia AR Experience Interface
Interactive AR Experience (Under Construction)
Reflection
The project is fun to provide a possible solution to a current problem in the museum. While in the final review, our group further realize the difficulties to implement the actual design in the museum due to conflicts between different parties in the museum. Meanwhile, it is important to consider financial issues and accessibility while designing a full project.
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