“How do I get our director/my boss/the curators/my colleagues on board with the design thinking process?” This question touches on one of the most demanding aspects of human-centered design in museums: promoting change. In this post, I share five steps for managing up design thinking in museums.
The Coventry Transport Museum in England recently underwent a massive redevelopment effort, involving the community in an effort to better tell the stories of the people of Coventry. I spoke with Laura Musgrave from the Museum to learn more about their human-centered design process.
This guest post by Maryanna Rogers explores how museums and cultural organizations are looking outside their walls and co-designing public space with their communities.
The keynote speaker at the 2015 Museum Computer Network, Liz Ogpu, talked about the power of human-centered design and its potential for impact in museums.
Earlier this summer, I came across the Derby Museums Human-Centred Design Handbook, developed by the Derby Museums Trust in Derby, England. I spoke with Hannah Fox, Project Director, to learn more about the Museums' use of human-centered design methodologies.
This guest post is from Maureen Carroll, Ph.D., the Founder of Lime Design and a lecturer in Stanford University’s d.school and Graduate School of Education. In doing hundreds of innovation workshops, she has discovered five compelling reasons why design thinking is good for organizations.
At the Metropolitan Museum of Art, staff from different departments are working together to employ rapid, low-cost research methods to better understand the needs of museum visitors and inform the development and design of apps, websites, and digital games.
In this guest post, Rachel Griner, an independent strategy and innovation expert who served as an Executive On Loan to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, explores how human-centered design can be an expression of humanity.
How might we embed design thinking into a museum? This is the question I've been exploring with the Denver Museum of Nature & Science over the past six months.
The Minneapolis Institute of Arts, one of the largest encyclopedic museums in the country, began a design thinking process in 2013 to find new ways to enhance museum visitors’ experiences.
How is design thinking being implemented in smaller museums? Recently I spoke with Jon Carfagno, the Director of Learning and Audience Engagement at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, or GRAM, about how the museum is taking a human-centered approach to the development of everything from strategic planning to in-gallery experiences.
This guest post is from Liz McDermott, Managing Editor of Web & Communications at the Getty Research Institute (GRI). This post discusses how, with little time and limited resources, a team at the GRI used rapid methods and tools from the design thinking process to answer the question, "How can we make visitors in our galleries aware that we have a mobile tour available?"
For this post, I interviewed Karen Cross, the Design Manager at Atlassian, about the internal design thinking program the company has been building up over the past year. Atlassian makes tools for software development, collaboration, and project management, and several museums and nonprofits use their products. Readers may be wondering why I’m featuring an interview with someone from a software company, and the answer is simple: I’ve always looked outside the museum sector for models of new ways of working, thinking, and collaborating. I believe museums can look to the private sector for new models of working, and adapt these processes to make museums smarter, more efficient, and more awesome.
This article was adapted and reposted with permission from Eric W. Stein’s blog. Eric is an Associate Professor of Management Science and Information Systems at Penn State, and his areas of research and expertise […]
Last week I had the honor of interviewing Shailoh Philips, who worked for the last two years setting up the Media Lab at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, about a project titled Augmenting Masterpieces. The project explores connections between the physical and digital within the gallery space, and aims to build a theoretical framework for digital interfaces in a museum context from a human-centered design approach.
In improvisational theater, there are some shared principles that the improvisers work from. These principles create a positive and supportive platform upon which the improvisers, or "players," can do their best work. What if the principles that allow improvisers to thrive and excel could be applied to museums? In this post, I consider three principles from improv theater and share my thoughts on how incorporating these principles into museum practice could make museums more human-centered and empathetic institutions.
I recently returned from the MuseumNext conference in Newcastle, England, where I gave a talk, "From Insights to Prototypes: How Museums can Use the Design Thinking Process to Engage and Delight Visitors" and co-led a workshop titled "Designing for Happiness: Using Design Thinking to Delight Visitors." In this post, I share the five big takeaways I presented at the conference on how to integrate design thinking mindsets into museum practice.
In January 2014, a cross-departmental team of designers, producers, editors, curators, and senior staff at the Getty kicked off an intense two-week effort to redesign and re-engineer the Getty’s exhibition web pages. In this guest post, Ahree Lee, Senior User Experience Designer in the Web Group at the J. Paul Getty Trust, covers the process they followed, some of the key findings, and how the project is moving forward.
I launched this blog, Design Thinking for Museums, exactly one year ago at the 2013 Museums and the Web conference in Portland. It was an experiment that UX designer and Stanford d.school fellow Molly Wilson and I built in a day at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art cafe, armed with coffee and Wordpress. The blog was developed as a resource for the field and accompanied a paper documenting a partnership between SFMOMA and the Stanford d.school. When the site launched, I wasn't sure how long we would keep it up, if we'd get any readers, and what kind of response we'd receive from the museum community. I'm happy to report that now, one year later, there are small but significant signs of enthusiasm for and adoption of design thinking in the museum sector. I've just returned from the 2014 Museums and the Web conference, where I presented a paper with co-authors from the Getty and the Queensland Museum about how those institutions are using design thinking and prototyping to tackle challenges ranging from designing new digital publications to re-envisioning organizational structures.
This is the third of three posts in which I share some of my favorite improv games to use with teams who are learning and using the design thinking process. The first post covered improv games to kick-off a meeting or workshop, the second covered improv games for warming up for brainstorming and embracing failure, and this post considers improv games for warming up for user testing and prototyping.