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Category: Case Studies

Design thinking on the run: using rapid methods at the Getty Research Institute

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?"

Spreading design thinking throughout an organization: lessons from Atlassian

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.

Using design thinking to connect the physical and digital at the Rijksmuseum: an interview with Shailoh Philips

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.

Discovering design in every nook and cranny: the V&A Museum Residency Programme

This guest post is from doctoral candidate, Saskia Coulson, and describes her journey of using design research to explore residency programs in museums. She explains how museum residency programs can be used as a lens to think about the traditional and emerging frameworks of design. This is then explored through a recent example of research she conducted on the V&A Museum Residency Programme in London.