Forms in Context: Hybrid Exhibit Environments
Environments Mini Project 1 | Fall 2020
Key takeaways from Beverly Serrell museum design UX article:
- People like to read labels and paragraphs less than 50 words
- People always start with the shortest paragraph
- Labels should not assume reader has read all previous information
- Labels should start specific to immediate content and reveal background information as necessary
- Visitor’s instincts/intuition is always correct—it’s the designers' fault
- sight lines, existing people, location (in a walkway?), competition from other exhibits nearby, lighting, can all affect retention/attention
- must have “Big Idea”—What is this exhibit about? → connecting thread
- ask open-ended questions: gave new ideas? reminded you of…? didn’t know about…? inspired you to…? → establish emotional connection
Possible topics related to climate change:
- Climate-induced mass migrations (maybe narrow by region?)
- Water scarcity/water stress
- Intensifying weather/natural disasters across SE America
- Spread of disease-carrying mosquitoes into North America
Topic/Big Idea: Climate change will create trans-border human mass migrations at never before seen scales.
Issues to solve: How do we relate it to Pittsburgh/campus community? What action should the exhibit seek to inspire? How do you make them take a meaningful step to change through the interactions in the exhibit?
Possible Approaches/Ideas to connect with CMU audience:
- Pittsburgh as a historic destination for refugees → looking at steel industry, demographics of movement in past century & future
- Carnegie Mellon as an international institution, pushing for equal legal protections for our diverse student body → still have to make related to legislation, refugee status
- Personal disasters (floods, fire, etc.) connect us with the plight of climate migrants → looking at individual empathy, what can we do if we are put into a similar situation?
- Pittsburgh’s carbon footprint legacy, analyzing emissions of steel industry and our climate privelidge as factors to push obligation for creating legislation to include climate refugees
I ended up researching about Pittsburgh’s carbon emissions from the past century and found quite a few academic papers that had information related to my topic. Some had estimates of historic emissions output, more accurate greenhouse gas inventories from recent years, or the inherently political conflict in defining international responsibilities for climate impacts and migrants. The more I looked into the issue, the more I realized that the scope of this issue is beyond what any individual could tackle. Furthermore, it seemed that no matter what we could do to reduce carbon emissions in the coming years—even if we met all Paris climate agreement emissions targets—hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people would need to relocate because of impacts directly related to climate change.
Due to the scale and inevitability of the problem, I looked into ways we can influence the systems that climate migrants would iteract with. I found that the UN High Commisioner for Refugees ruled that climate change, even if gradual and did not pose an immediate threat to one’s life, was a valid reason to grant refugee status to those who were migrating from their home countries. Since the US had not recognized climate change as a valid claim for refugee status, I decided that the most direct and actionable item to accomplish within the exhibit is to make visitors push for legislation that gave them the same legal protections that the UNHCR had set a precedent for.
Miller ICA Gallery
Moodboarding
The overall emotions I want to evoke in my audience are a sense of empathy and urgency. The dimmer lights try to remove the individual from the experience as much as possible and make it easier to picture what it would be like to be in the climate migrant’s shoes. Large, hanging screens would allow the juxtaposition of location and time, allowing the audience to see how Pittsburgh has changed compared to another (less fortunate) location, or how a single location has been affected by climate change. The hanging objects from the ceiling combined with a change in color in the lighting also help communicate the feeling that time is running out to act. I wanted each person’s experience to be slightly different depending on the individual, so I looked at typographic examples inspired from immigration and travel documents. Since climate migration is such an international issue, I wanted the signs to not only be communicative about the stations, but also give a sense of unity and scope to the problem.
Storyboards for Interactions
Reflection: Hybrid Spaces
I’ve noticed that a lot of retail spaces have started becoming increasingly hybrid environments. Even compared to a few years ago, the technology for ordering items to pick up or get delivered was always there, but the concept didn’t catch on until recently. Previously, almost all shopping was done in person at large retail stores, but the rise of (incredibly fast) delivery like Amazon’s Prime (one or two days) or Prime Now (usually within a few hours) makes buying things much easier. Online shopping gives the user a much broader catalog of possible items to purchase as well as the added convenience of not having to leave the house. The phenomenon has also extended to other spaces such as food delivery (UberEats, Instacart, Postmates, etc.) that have been traditionally dine-in. Larger retailers like Target, Walmart, and others have also begun offering curbside pickup after ordering through an app, making it easier to use digital tools to shop rather than scrambling around in a physical store. Especially during these pandemic times, the improved usability (searching for items by name, category, reviews, etc.), convenience, and product range of moving the retail space into the digital world and incorporating its corresponding perks immensely benefits the user.
Initial Parti Diagram
Breaking down the experience into 5 phases:
- Pink—Looking at the carbon past of Pittsburgh
- Blue—Connecting the cause-effect chain 200 years long
- Green—Introduce climate migration and definitions
- Purple—Sharing stories of climate migrants
- Orange—Reflecting on the future of climate migration
My main goal of the walls was to divide the space to maximize open spaces for hanging/projection interactions and maximize wall space to share information or pictures for the exhibits nearby.
However, this iteration had several flaws. The corridor near the elevator was too thin, making it awkward to move through if another person was already inside reading things posted along its walls. Furthermore, the open spaces felt uncoordinated and confusing to navigate. Each opening led to another large space, and the viewer would have trouble finding the next piece of information to guide them through the experience.
Technology in Interactions
I attempted to start tackling the issue of dividing space from a different angle, and instead began to mockup some possible experiences in the exhibit. Using projections onto the floor and scannable tags, I wanted the physical objects hanging over the projections to trigger digital interactions that the viewer could see. The form and number of tags could also reflect the scale of the issue, filling up the entire ceiling space above the projection room.
Expanding on the approach, I then organized the information I had and grouped together different motifs I noticed within my research. What initially seemed to be drastically unrelated types of information suddenly were easier group together to be on the same display. I knew I had to connect Pittsburgh to the larger themes in order for the viewers to resonate with the plight of migrants later on in the exhibit and feel the full emotional impact of their stories. I planned out the rough sequence in which I had to present groups of information, going in rough chronological order leading from the steel industry of the early 1900s to our current time. Breaking the exhibit experience into phases and highlighting the interactions I wanted the viewer to have at each phase made it much easier to portion out the physical space and decide how much room different sections need.
My next iteration of the Parti diagram flipped the internal walls to direct the audience in a counterclockwise direction. I gave large, open interactions like the carbon emission visualizations in the pink area and projected map in the green area much more room so that multiple viewers could interact with the installation at once. I placed the timescales display, which requires only a long hallway-like room, along the side wall to give the right side of the exhibit more area for the viewers to gather.
Physical Model
Since the floor and elevation plans in Adobe Illustrator were made at scale, it was easier to transfer the dimensions to my physical model. The walls and floor were made from 3/16" foam core, so I added about 1/4" per wall in order for the pieces to wedge flush alongside one another. This made the joints hold together much more securely than if the corner only met along the edge. I then printed the rough shapes of the floor pieces from my Parti diagram to match the walls and corners in my model before trimming them to fit snugly. Next, I attached 6" grey rectangles along the walls, making sure to keep the overlaps as seamless as I could.
Adding some plastic scale figures and props made from scrap pieces of foam core helped me visualize what it would be like to physically stand in the space. By moving the figures around, I could tell if certain hallways were too tight, or if multiple people standing near an exhibit would feel crowded.
I then added some low-fidelity mockups of some of my interactions at scale to the floor of my model to see how the figures would feel on them. This helped me dial in certain factors that were much harder to predict on the screen, like how much distance each tick of 10 years should cover on the floor of the timescales installation. On other pieces, like the projected map, I could see how many figures could stand on different parts of it without obscuring the information being presented.
Digital Prototyping
I knew I wanted an interaction based on translating movement into time, so I decided to prototype my timescales interaction in TinkerCAD to better understand how a viewer would experience it. The timescales piece told the story of how places change over the span of roughly 100 years so effects of climate change would be more evident.
The circuit uses a proximity sensor to detect how far away the viewer is from the screen and lights up the corresponding LED. As the viewer approaches the sensor, the LEDs turn on from right to left. This way, the screen could start from the past and slowly become more “corrupted” when the viewer walks up to the screen. However, the delay on the LED lights in TinkerCAD made it difficult to visualize this shift in lights as responsive as I would have liked.
Reflection: Architects vs. Environments Designers
While both architects and environments designers deal with physical spaces in similar roles, their approaches differ in achieving their end goals. An architect might design a new church to feel impressive and humbling, while an environments designer might create ways to connect and empower its attendees through the space. In order for architects to build a structure, they must consider factors like structural elements, lighting, and heating that dictate how people would feel inside the space. These physical elements come together to form a cohesive sense of place in their final structure. Environments designers, on the other hand, focus on the interactions of people in an existing place and how they can shape visitors’ behavior, whether it is for faster shopping lines or immersive learning experiences. Although architecture thrives almost exclusively in the physical world, environments designers can leverage the digital world to involve senses that were previously out of reach. In our current age of wireless technology and virtually ubiquitous smartphones, giving visitors information and feedback through sounds, touch, and other non-visual means has become increasingly important.
Expanding on Initial Storyboards
My next step was to figure out the specifics of each interaction and how they fit together to mesh with the entire exhibit. I made sure to outline the touch points, main message, and how it built on the other parts on each storyboard.
I wanted to help the viewer visualize the scale of carbon emissions from the Pittsburgh area in a more tangible, physical way than simply stating “X billion tons of CO2 emissions,” which would likely make the viewer feel overwhelmed while also hiding the true scale of the problem. Instead, I had the idea of creating a scaled-down model where Pittsburgh’s emissions loomed over the skyline, imposing both a sense of foreboding and urgency about taking action. Incrementing tickers on each cube that count upwards in real-time give a further accurate numerical quantity as well as build on the feeling that our time to act is running out.
Moving on to the timescales piece, my main goal was to shift a sense of obligation to act from Pittsburgh to the world as a whole. Using the length of the hallway as an analog for time, the two screens would show different scenes of Pittsburgh compared to Central America over time. As the user moved closer, Pittsburgh’s own carbon output would decrease, but the outsourced carbon emissions of its paired screen would increase. I hoped that by juxtapositioning a shot of Pittsburgh turning from grey to green with another of rivers drying up or farmlands turning to desert, the irony would highlight our own climate privilege of living in Pittsburgh.
Another idea I had was to be able to share one’s own stories of migration. The installation’s goal was to increase engagement, provide a visual story and history of the exhibit’s viewers, and most importantly, push the visitor to take further action at the nearby blocks.
I learned in our design studies course How People Work that using maps like Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion projection that showed the world without centering on specific countries or cardinal directions helped viewers think along more global contexts rather than national ones. By being able to see how each visitor’s unique journey to Pittsburgh contributed to our college community, they would now be more likely to view immigration as a global challenge that needed to be tackled across borders than as “someone else’s problem” to be solved. Everybody who came to Pittsburgh started off as an immigrant, and encouraging the visitors to think about their own origins and how their stories contributed to Pittsburgh’s identity was a natural transition into asking them to take action and write letters.
This installation sought to teach the visitor about the shortcomings in our current immigration law regarding climate refugees. A projection of an immigration officer at a booth asks the visitor common questions about immigration as if the visitor was attempting to enter the US. The user selects one of several given prompts and speaks their choice into a microphone. Based on their choice, information on the screen tells them about the consequences of each decision.
As the visitor makes choices, the structure of the questions is designed such that there are no optimal long-term options for climate refugees. The choice of interaction (spoken voice) builds a sense of empathy beyond the screen.
Feedback on Interactions/Exhibit Flow
- First exhibit works very well to convey scale of carbon output
- Transition from emissions to its effect temporally a little unclear
- Need better way of communicating Pittsburgh’s carbon’s effects on other places over time—maybe adding carbon output counters over time to show the effects of outsourcing carbon?
- How should the side panels on Timescales contribute to the experience?
- Projected map serves as transition between emphasis on emissions to emphasis on human cost
- Map has to answer several questions: Why are people forced to move from these locations? How does climate change become an immigration problem?
- Immigration booth doesn’t seem to stick well, figure out how to better integrate into exhibit flow—why are legal protections important?
- Sharing previous immigration experiences an interesting idea, but not sure if relevant—what’s the overall goal/message of sharing one’s own immigration stories?
Things to focus on:
- Make sure actionable item is relevant and effective for viewer
- Emphasizing outsourcing of carbon emissions as temporary solution for Pittsburgh
- Projected map focuses on how impacts of climate change (flooding, drought, etc.) forces people to migrate
- How to convert high percentage of museum visitors to signing petition?
In order to bridge the gap between climate change as a global phenomenon to a human/immigration problem, I decided to use projected map so that the visitor can explore the different issues that would define the area (temperature, flooding, drought, water security, severe weather etc.) in the next 50 years. As the visitor walks across the map, the screen updates in real-time to where the user is standing. Each region also displays the human cost of the problem, giving an estimate of the number of displaced people and showing the likely locations that they would migrate to on the screen.
The primary action I wanted visitors to take is to write letters to their senator or representative to create legal protections for climate refugees. Light up torches have descriptions of who their representatives are and QR codes that take the user to a form to send. The template asks for information like zip code (for counting constituents) and a short personalized message from each visitor. I ended up deciding to use brief letters instead of physical messages or phone calls in order to minimize friction between user and action, while keeping it personal enough to be effective to the government representative. Visual feedback, like a pulse or blink of light, could give the user feedback that their letter had been submitted and they had “lit the torch.” I liked the visual aspect of glowing torches in a darkened room, as it gave each booth a more personal place for the visitors to reflect upon their experience in the exhibit and write a meaningful call to action.
Feedback:
- A lot of interactions going on in the last room—maybe two, but three is pushing the space
- Separating feedback/interaction area from immigration for noise levels
Moving forward:
- Maybe remove one interaction to decrease clutter?
- Make visualizations of interiors and installations as if visitor was walking through the space → how do the people use the space itself?
- Move beyond statistics, humanizing the experience
- Connecting the story beyond exhibits when moving from macro to micro views (whole globe to story of a single migrant)
- build more empathy in immigration experience → sharing stories, picutres, videos, handwriting, etc.
- Maybe consider hanging stuff again?
Fleshing out physical models of each interaction notes:
Interaction 1: Visualizing carbon emissions
- Based on Allegheny county emissions at the UN Department of Public Information rate of 1 metric ton of CO2 : 19683 cubic feet, the county has put out a cube measuring roughly 5.58 miles on a side
- 1 mile to 1 foot scale: roughly 1:5000 scale → 6-ish foot cube
- 1 human : 0.5mm (grain of sand-ish size)
Interaction 3? : Projected Map
Location 1: Central America/Northern Triangle
- Biggest Threats: Flooding, Changing rain patterns, food insecurity
- 2 million people displaced by 2050
- Likely migration to Mexico, US, Costa Rica
Location 2: Sahel Region (Western Africa)
- Biggest Threats: Crop failure, intense heat waves/drought, climate-related violence/political instability
- 30 million people displaced by 2050
- Likely migration to Chad, South Africa, Middle East, EU
I decided to take out my time scales interaction because it occupied a lot of floor space and didn’t contribute as much to the overall visitor’s narrative as other interactions did. This opened up more floor space for my primary interaction, the projected world map, and gave the torch/taking action part of my exhibit its own divided-off section. Having it isolated made it feel more reflective and meditative than it had been in previous iterations.
Lessons from Thursday’s crit:
- sensitive/personal stuff shouldn’t have to be on big screen, move interaction to phone, what are the screens for? → big screen for content & navigation
- screen should allow more than 1 person to interact
- watch the lighting/overall illumination levels → no darker than movie theatre, spot lighting where ever there is text that needs reading
- dark public space is unusual/memorable, justify why it connects with your content or why you made that design choice
- make sure text size & height at viewing band of visitors
- unclear of how map on floor relates to map on wall → build a stronger sense of mirroring, indicating which one is showing on screen
- text does not have to go on walls → is wall text optimal? signage?
- cohesive art direction, should interplay with information
- when should visualization look at a space vs. an interaction? think about the story you are telling to the audience → what is the story? the individual stops? what do you want audience to focus on?
- introduce issue/problem, introduce TOC, research, approach, what is the spatial experience like/interactions (space as an interface), summary & what do you want audience to remember
- make sure to introduce main goal/idea of exhibit & how each interaction reinforces that idea
- closer to client pres. → presenting final idea, not process
- end on one of the visualizations so there’s something to look at when audience is thinking of some questions
- have bibliography slide?
- minimap on slide helps orient where/direction of camera of viz
- storyboard/gifs useful for communicating concepts & interactions
Final Presentation
Visualizations
Floor Plans and Elevations
Physical Model
Reflection: Meta-cognitive Experience
Looking back at the project, I realized that much of the conflict I had was because I was too scared to seriously engage in the project. My initial fear of making a “bad choice” or going in the wrong direction made me very hesitant to commit to an option and explore it fully. In hindsight, it seems obvious that these choices aren’t permanent and I could simply backtrack and explore a different path. I noticed that towards the end of the project, when I was inevitably forced to make decisions because of the looming deadline, I could iterate much faster due to receiving feedback and learning from mistakes.
Furthermore, I found that I was the most mentally engaged several iterations in, where I could look at some of my past versions and analyze what worked in them and what didn’t. Without that breadth of work to pick apart and remix into something new, progress was slower and felt more forced or tedious than after I got into the groove of prototyping and reflecting.
In the future, I think I would work better if I planned out several initial paths to follow (mainly to get my thoughts and research down) and just start trying to make progress as soon as I can. The faster I can iterate and fail, the faster I can learn and the farther I can push my project in the same amount of time.