the Art Institute of chicago Online
Reimagining the average art museum visit and takeaways through a mobile application.
The Art Institute of Chicago, founded in 1879, is one of the oldest and largest art museums in the world. The museum has a permanent collection of nearly 300,000 works of art that are augmented by more than 30 special exhibitions mounted yearly. As students of the institution, Michelle Esbensen, Miran Hassan, Sharanya Khemka, and I took to reimagining what a museum app could look like to enhance our visitor experiences and be more accessible to those with little prior-knowledge of the art world.
Currently, the Art Institute has an app that merges location-aware technology with audio storytelling, to act as a pocket-sized guide to the collection, letting the art speak to you. The app offers features engaging audio tours—including exhibition tours—featuring behind-the-scenes stories and a variety of expert voices, a “Look It Up” feature that allows you learn more about specific artworks, an interactive map to help you navigate the galleries and the museum’s amenities, and features to help plan visits.
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Given the state of the world in an almost-post-pandemic 2022, where everything was online while our systems and institutions were under fire for being inherently racist and discriminatory, we questioned what the role of a museum in society was. Further, we looked at how people interacted with artworks displayed in museums and what the key takeaway of a museum visit was. With a strong predecessor and an ever evolving museum market, my teammates and I wanted to create an ideal museum app that credited the social and cultural history of a piece, the linage of handlers and the significant motifs and materials that made up said piece.
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On a mundane Friday afternoon, we surveyed museum ticket buyers to conclude that the average museum-goer profile was predominantly white and the diverse populations were mainly tourists. Pain points we identified in the various evergreen galleries included the lack of information on non-western art, the treatment of cultural galleries as cabinets of curiosities as well as the lack of context on cultural artifacts. So in re-imagining a museum app, we focused on re-imagining a visitor’s interactions with an artwork, their approach to the tombstone and other information related to the work as well as what their takeaways from a museum visit are and further what they could be.
Our user profile focused on a younger audience, who did not have much museum or cultural exposure and were intrigued by the art world. Having a target audience with little-to-no knowledge of art but plenty of exposure to technology allowed us to incorporate augmented reality (AR) into our designs. The goal was to have the camera lens and user’s point of view dictate the learning process with a fixed field of interest around each object and a consistent, reliable hierarchy of information within it.
Site map. Right: Prior site map iterations.
Through user testing and rapid iteration, we landed on a user journey that simply requested permission to use live location technology along with access to the device’s camera and speaker before the app dives into a quick walk through of the information hierarchy. Right to pull up so and so information, left for blank, zoom into details to learn more about their significance, up for this and down for that. We added features such as audio recordings, a video of the piece in context with a curator commentary, and even the ability to like an artwork.
User interface variations
The interface was focused and designed around the camera lens with features tucked to the sides, easily accessible by the user’s thumbs. The name of the piece, origin and date were contained in a band toward the bottom of the screen as to not interfere with the camera lens. We went through iterations of how the art work in focus was highlighted and landed on a thin white outline as our solution. In hindsight, the outline is not the most accessible detail and prior iterations might have worked better.
We had the radical idea to allow visitors to take a piece from the museum home with them. In the form of a digital 3D model, users could place saved artworks on a flat surface at home and interact with them just like in the museum. This meant they could be unobstructed by others in their learning process and play the audio/video recordings out loud. The feature was particularly designed with our user profile in mind. Students often have to reference information from the web after their museum visit and no longer have access to the insightful information a museum curator might provide. It also promotes continued learning for children and professionals outside an institutional space and incentivizes visitors to return to the museum and take more pieces home since we devised a 3-piece limit on saved work.
While creating a prototype for the app, I visited the museum on three occasions and created 3D scans for the artworks we wanted to demo. We picked pieces that were showcased in the cultural exhibits, areas of the museum that are frequently overlooked by visitors. To create a 3D scan, I took multiple videos and photos of each object. While circling the piece and taking notes on my phone, I noticed other visitors were curious about my interactions and someone even came up to ask me if I was seeing something more than them. This lead to the happy confirmation that our idea would engage visitors further at the museum and lead to a deeper learning experience. In conclusion, the app was a great thought experiment on the potential future of a museum app.