Research Question: How can I design a way for museum visitors to access their emotions and memories associated with works of art?
Starting with a pretty general research question, I decided to embark on more fieldwork in museums. Given how crowded the National Gallery is, I figured it would be a good site to study all kinds of museum visitor behavior.
AEIOU at the National Gallery
I knew the importance of in situ observation and testing. Only through close observation would I be able to spot places for intervention in museum-going scripts.
I briefly toyed with the idea of placing participants in a makeshift gallery for future workshops to test my design, but this did not make much sense. I would need to test my prototype in real-world museums with real people.
Pictures of People Sketching, Children Watching People Sketching, Sitting, Standing, Walking around Gallery, Taking Pictures of Van Gogh's Sunflowers
After doing some initial observations, I then did an AEIOU of the National Gallery to try to find more patterns among visitor behavior:
I also tried some behavioral mapping. In the gallery with Van Gogh's Sunflowers, I noticed how all the visitors gravitated directly to that specific painting. They barely looked at the other paintings hanging beside it.
Etiquette Among Museum Visitors
There was constantly a large crowd standing in front of the painting. It was fascinating to see how they were still acutely aware of one another even though they tried to avoid eye contact at all costs. The only time they made eye contact or spoke to one another was when they crossed in front of each other's sightlines or photo lines.
I also started to make a typology of museum visitors. There were some who went for solitary contemplation, others who went as a social activity with friends and family, and those who were amateur artists and spent significant amounts of time with a single work of art.
I also tried some social experiments of my own, such as how close I could stand to someone before they moved away. I was also more open to eye contact and ended up falling into some spontaneous conversations with the museum visitors around me. These spontaneous conversations quickly became one of my favorite parts of the museum visit, and I wondered how I could better facilitate for this kind of interaction as a designer.
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