Clho

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Private and confidential

Community Participation in Defining the Connecticut History Center

The Connecticut Historical Society Museum

Results of the participatory design activities conducted by SonicRim

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Who We Are

• James Jensen, Lead Exhibit Developer, CHS

• Kate Steinway, Deputy Director for Interpretation,

CHS• Couldn’t be with us today…

• Uday Dandavate, Principal, SonicRim• Couldn’t be with us today…

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Introduction to CHS

• Located in Hartford, CT

• 7th oldest state historical society in the nation

• Museum and research library, public programs

• Actively moving to audience focused activities

since 1995

• Still has a fairly low profile in local marketplace

• Constrained by a converted mansion with little

exhibit space

• less than 8, 000 sq ft

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Introduction to the CHC

• Project to develop 120, 000 sq ft “Connecticut

History Center” began in 2001

• Move to new site

• Concept document outlines variety of experiences

for CHC

• Exhibits and programs

• Proposed exhibit sizes range from 2, 000 sq ft to

5, 000 sq ft

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Introduction to the Project

• The concepts are really just outlines• Ranging from a few paragraphs to several pages• Totally lacking in detail – content or interactives

• CHS wanted to explore potential visitors’ reactions

to the concepts outlined prior to investing

additional efforts in developing them more fully

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Need for a New Approach

• We hope the CHC will be innovative and fresh in

approach• Thought it made sense to get “WAY out of the

box” to achieve that• Traditional audience research approaches “feel”

too reactive, not proactive or “involving”• Too easy for good ideas to “die” because they are

not actually experienced

• Pen and paper survey, interviews out• We lacked sufficient detail to develop comprehensive

questions

• Focus groups out• How do you convey and test such loose ideas?• Felt showing sketches/visuals would be misleading

• So how would we test what we had?

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Who Are SonicRim?

• Provider of “design research”

• Spin-off from Fitch Inc., an international design

house.

• Multi-disciplinary teams comprising of design,

psychology, anthropology, marketing and business

strategy backgrounds.

• Brought user experience understanding to

Blockbuster Video, TCBY, Petsmart, BJ’s, Hush

Puppies.

• They’re in Columbus, OH, and also San Francisco.

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SonicRim’s Role

• Inform and inspire the conceptualization process

through innovative research

• Conceptualize tools for innovation

• Explore collective creativity

• Help understand everyday people.

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Participatory Design

• When designers need user input that can be used

in design, both for generating new themes for

design and for evaluating existing concepts, it is

most valuable to talk to the end users in a

language that they think in when they choose

new products or places

• People think in the language of experience• For example, people are more comfortable imagining

how they want to feel and what they want to find in

an environment than about how the environment

should change

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When you involve ordinary people in the design development process, you begin to see with new eyes.


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Participatory Design mindset requires respect for new principles.

Participatory Design mindset

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Implication: Use their dreams as “design seeds”

All people have dreams

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2People are creative

Implication: Give them different types of participatory tools to promote creativity in their thinking.

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Implication: Encourage people to externalize their imagination.

People will fill in what is unseen and unsaid based on their imagination.

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4 Implication: Use ambiguous visual stimuli to make the tacit explicit.

People project their needs onto ambiguous stimuli because they are driven to make meaning.

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• Searches for patterns in user needs in

experiential terms

• Focused on the potential experience as opposed

to the desired features

• In traditional research, when offered choices of

features, users react based on momentary or

limited understanding of how those features

might impact their experiences

• Design ideas developed around such momentary

considerations are more likely to fail than those

developed around experiential criteria

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• In order to cover a broad range of user

perspectives, we conducted research at the

following locations:

• Minnesota History Center, St. Paul, Minnesota

• Connecticut Historical Society, Hartford,

Connecticut

Where Did We Go?

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Project ideal experiences

Integrate designer concepts

Generatepersonalized concepts

Explore current experiences

•SonicRim uses a Path of Expression model for developing the research plan

and tools

•Each step along the Path of Expression uses different methods and tools to

prepare people to imagine new ideas and be able to express the ideas

•Each step along the path is described on the following slides

Our approach: The Path of Expression

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1. Ethnographic observations at museums: • We observed visitor:

– behaviors– emotions – moods– interactions – questions– frustrations

2. Short participatory workshops at museums:

• We recruited visitors at MHC and at CHS.

– We gave them a workbook and Polaroid camera to record their observations and feelings during the visit

– Invited them to join the research team for a half-hour workshop where we elicited ideas for the new museum experience

How Did We Do It? Explore

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3. Participatory workshops with recent visitors to

museums:

• Pre-recruited 24 individuals in Hartford who had

visited a museum within the past six months;

• Conducted four two-hour participatory workshops

where we tapped their creative imagination through the

Path of Expression

How Did We Do It?

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• We recruited 4 groups of users:

• Families

• Individuals in the age group of 7- to 10-years



Who Participated?

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How Did We Do It? Project

The participants were then involved in activities that

facilitated their imagining and expressing ideal

experiences at museums

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• Finally, we provided generic design components to

the participants so that they could embody a

concept of their personalized museum experience/

space

• They had the option of imagining multiple ideas to

serve multiple needs

How Did We Do It? Generate

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How Did We Do It? Integrate

• We presented the participants a visual collage and

written description of seven CHC concepts

• The collages were then projected on a screen and

the written descriptions were read to them

• They were then asked to rank the concepts on a

scale of 1 to 7

– I like it 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 I don’t like it

– I need it 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 I don’t need it

– I want it 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 I don’t want it

• The participants used the framework of their ideal

experiences (articulated in the previous step) for

comparison

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Immerse Yourself in History

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Encounters

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Ingenious Products

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How Did We Do It? Sample Prompt

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• We used multivariate scaling techniques to find patterns in people’s aspirations for experiences.

Analysis

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• Visual tools of representing information helps communicate patterns in people’s aspirations quicker than volumes of reports.

Analysis

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Findings I

• Too many to report here…• Overall, the research suggested a significant

expansion from the traditional focus of a

historical society• Documented the patterns discovered in the

experiences people want in their ideal experience

at the CHC• These patterns will serve as user-experience

criteria for design• We have a good sense of which concepts

resonate, which don’t and what we need to do to

move them forward

NowNowPastPast

Nature

Culture

Creativity

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Findings II

The Model/Framework

• Strengthen connection to the world around them.

• Cultivate a sense of comfort in who they are, in the midst of

a seemingly chaotic world.

• Discover inspiration from exploring the nature, culture, and

creativity that surrounds them.

• Understand the present with an appreciation for the

influence of the past.

• Good use of time with family.

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Findings III

• CHS now has a template/model for the site of the

new building

• CHS has a strong conceptual model for the entire

experience of visiting the CHC

• This conceptual model also ties together the

various exhibit concepts

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Implications/Impact at CHS

• We are excited and energized by the results and

what the findings mean• We are convinced that we could not have

discovered what we did using any other means• We can begin to revise and adjust concepts without

having expended a great effort to make them

“testable”• Impacting significantly how we approach the

design and development of exhibits and programs

for the existing facility too• Calling CHS a museum

• “Calling it a society is perceived as a club with

restricted membership”

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Lessons for Other Institutions

• Talking to your visitors and involving them in the

development of the products you offer is important• Helps escape “expert” syndrome; they see the

problem space with fresh eyes• It’s usually fun too!

• If you need to, do research somewhere else!• Try your local library, or other museum

• Looking outside traditional audience research

methodologies and suppliers can be useful• But doing ANY audience research is better than doing

none – interviews, surveys, focus groups are OK!

• Audience research need not be this complex or

expensive to pay real dividends• There are organizations and publications that can help

you get started

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Places to Start

• Visitor Studies Association• http://www.visitorstudies.org/

• AAM Committee on Audience Research and

Evaluation (CARE) • AAM Bookstore• AASLH Bookstore• Me!

• Call or email with questions…• 860-236-5621 ext. 257• [email protected]

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Thank You!

Clho

Technology

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