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vickisun4
Dec 11, 20222 min read

4. Final Major Project | Key Concepts

Updated: Dec 13, 2022


Now that I had the bulk of my research down, I needed to start narrowing down the key concepts that would guide my design.


I wanted to have a strong conceptual foundation prior to embarking on prototyping. It was important to me to have a complex, critical concept and a parsimony of design for my final outcome.


I would need to answer the why? What is the point of this project? What are my aims?



Some questions that continued to fascinate me were:


What does the audience create through the encounter with the work of art? I came across the word poiesis, which means "the activity in which a person brings something into being that did not exist before."


I made a mind map to organize my thoughts:


some key concepts guiding my design

Redefine the Museum's Relationship with Audiences

Attendance rates seem to be the primary concern of most museums. What would happen if museums focused on getting to know their visitors better and learning more about how they experience exhibitions?



The Function of Museums

What if museums functioned as an agora of sorts where people could gather to discuss ideas? What other roles could the museum fulfill? As public squares and town halls gradually disappear, could the museum take their place?


Constructivist Approach: Examining the Hierarchy of Dissemination of Knowledge

Could museums be a two-way street? What can museums learn from audiences?


What would museum programming look like if audiences took on a more active role?




I also wanted to look at museums not as temples for the sanctification of works, but also as spaces for worldbuilding. This would mean looking at "experience as a collaborative, communal enterprise" (Benz, p. 2).


I found inspiration in the Citizen Design toolkit exhibition which I saw at the Cooper Hewitt Museum in 2017. Citizen Design invites visitors to engage, empathize, and help envision a better America. Through a series of questions and choices, visitors identify issues that personally matter and use design-thinking tactics to creatively brainstorm possible interventions. Visitors were able to read the ideas of other visitors to the museum. I liked the collective nature of the project but wanted to design something a little less head-on.


In Experience Design: Concepts and Case Studies, "[t]he authors argue that shared experiences, meanings, and lasting impressions of design are created as much in the public domain as in the designer's studio" (Benz, p. 3). To me, this would mean taking a closer look at the role of the museum visitor in creating the final experience, rather than a finished product that we as designers pass on to the visitor.





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