Launching Macro UX — The Victoria & Albert Museum, London
The third unit of the course involves working on live briefs with external collaborators. Spanning across six weeks from 11th February to 25th March, ‘Macro UX’ is planned to be an intensive collaborative unit packed with weekly classroom presentations on every Thursday.
This time, there were four external collaborators invited to participate with our cohort, namely: Applied Works, Centre for Behaviour Change UCL, R:GA and the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A). Our class was split up in four big groups, each assigned to one of these partners. Furthermore, there were sub-groups to be formed, the decision of which was left up to us so we could learn the skill of self-organisation within teams. Like the previous unit, this one was also scheduled to be entirely conducted online on a suitable web conferencing platform like Zoom or Teams.
I was assigned to work with the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A).
Brief: To devise a sensory, embodied experience of the V&A online collections. This includes reconfiguring and reassembling elements to expand the collection beyond the museum, reaching new audiences, or touching those familiar with its collection in new ways.
Jack Craig, the digital design lead at the museum presided over the introductory session on Zoom, delivering the brief and explaining the communication routine that would be followed. The discussion raised the following key questions, one or more of which could be sought for answering the brief.
The Big Team: Jinsong Liu (Sylvester), Manali Panchal, Max Hain, Sanjana Mehta, Sanya Nayar, Shiwen Shen (Svaney) and Ziyou (Ines) Yin
The seven of us rushed into our caves to do individual research and come up with interests based on which we would be able to align ourselves into sub-groups. After spending some time, we met on Monday to exchange our ideas.
I did research on the history of the V&A and studied the different kinds of interactivity already accomplished on the webpages, only to fuel inspiration for thinking further on original and novel concepts. Established in 1852, it is the world’s largest museum of applied and decorative arts, maintaining a very significant record of the evolution of civilisations and cultures throughout the world.
The V&A is the world’s leading museum of art and design, housing a permanent collection of over 2.3 million objects that span over 5,000 years of human creativity.
Everyone brought to the table a range of interesting ideas exploring extensive directions. Sylvester talked about the movement of BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) and its implementation in navigating digital collections of the museum. Svaney ideated on ‘incidental timing’ with another visitor at a place on the website designated as an ‘online cafe’, a platform that promoted conversations and idea sharing. Manali fetched a fascinating reference of the Brooklyn Museum’s online collection showcasing virtual costume exhibition as an inspiration for digital archiving.
Max on the other hand proposed visitors curating their own collections that fostered a sense of ownership.
Meanwhile, Ines and Sanjana developed a detailed factsheet highlighting how the online collections are used by different types of users. Jack shared a blog which became very handy in guiding this process. They also did benchmarking with other museums.
I, meanwhile found some of the following interesting features of the website from my desktop research:
- ‘Make & Do’ section: comprising various arts and crafts activities for users of all ages. They teach how to make objects found at the museum with the traditions of the past.
- Interactive books and archives: displayed in a sketchbook format in which pages can be zoomed in/out to an impressive capacity.
- Audio transcripts and music: available for selective collections to reflect the essence of olden time periods.
- ‘Letsmakewednesdays’: every Wednesday, the website launches family activities like cooking together or games for the winters to encourage community building.
- Chrome Cole extension: every time that a person opens a new tab, this extension available for Chrome makes them learn about a new object from the digital collection.
We saw that were a lot of potential directions already pitched and because of which we understood that it would be best to split up in smaller groups for gaining a linear focus.
But, the stage of selecting our fellow teammates proved to be a very challenging one as all of us were ambivalent given that we were fairly new to each other. We attempted many ways of dividing ourselves, even resorting to classification based on sun-signs ..all in vain! There was not a better moment demonstrating that ‘need is the mother of invention’ because this perplexity led us to yearn for a tool akin to tinder for teammates ..and searching the same, we found one!
The tool is developed by Atlassian, a team management software company. Unfortunately, it is available with paid subscription. So we scrapped off the idea and instead tried randomgenerators.
The next blog will discuss all that happened in the first week of this project after we split up in sub-teams.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cole Chrome Extension (no date). Available at: http://cole-extension.com/ (Accessed: 10 April 2021).
How are the V&A’s online collections used? • V&A Blog (no date). Available at: https://www.vam.ac.uk/blog/digital/how-are-the-vas-online-collections-used (Accessed: 10 April 2021).
The Queen and The Crown: A Virtual Exhibition of Costumes from “The Queen’s Gambit” and “The Crown” (no date). Available at: https://www.thequeenandthecrown.com/view (Accessed: 10 April 2021).
