Modern art invites interpretation and reflection, so each person's visit to the Tate Modern is unique. Our research discovered that visitors wanted to share their unique experience and their thoughts, so our team envisioned a technology for visitors to record their emotional responses within the gallery and disseminiate these for conversations online and offline.
The emotion logger
The data would be synthesized into a color-coded Halo that summarized their emotional journey, which could then be projected to be compared with friends side-by-side, exported to be used in digital conversations, or juxtaposed with projections from other visitors of the day.
A screen when viewing logged emotion pointsProjections of visitor's Halos and envisioned usage
The Process
The initial brief challenged us to design a way for visitors to "leave a trace", so we needed to understand the Tate Modern's visitors and how they were already interacting with the museum. What did they do? How did they interact with the art? What were they interested in?
We started with conducting 8 hours of direct observations within transitional spaces of the museum over a spread of weekdays and weekends. To understand the behaviors that we were seeing (and not seeing), we held 7 in-depth interviews with a convenience sample of recent Tate Modern visitors. Patterns emerged when we coded our findings and dumped our data into virtual affinity diagrams on Miro.
Affinity diagram of the interview data
From these, we synthesized the Solo Visitor (our primary persona) and the Social Visitor (our secondary persona), both of whom desired to share their experience of the museum but had different behaviors. To better understand their behavior, we created user journeys to put them into context.
Our personas
Based on our understanding of the museum visitor from our research, we established design goals to be addressed:
How might we allow visitors to share their reactions with others? (Key goal)
How might we provide a unique takeaway for each guest, either physically or digitally?
How might we make our interactive technology stand out?
How might we make our design relevant to all visitors and unique to the Tate Modern? (Bonus)
Throughout the process, we had developed an inspiration board and collected desk research. With these materials in mind, and our persona and user research, our team used Crazy Eights to sketch out concepts, which resulted in about 28 total concepts. Two of these ideas were then selected through dot voting to be further refined.
Sketches and dot voting
The team investigated these using storyboards and desirability surveys. We ultimately settled on our final concept, the Tate Halo.
Future user journey for Patrick
After creating prototypes of the wearable devices, screens, and mockups (see Overview), we conducted a round of 4 evaluations in order to provide the basis for future improvements. The results of these were combined and deduped into a spreadsheet for easy communication.
Evaluations spreadsheet, based on the Rainbow Spreadsheet
