Prototyping practices supporting interdisciplinary collaboration in digital media design for museums

Abstract

In the museum world, innovative design practices often result from collaborations spanning disciplinary borders within the museum. This article focuses on prototyping as one of the fundamental methods to support design activity, and to foster collaboration among members of the design team. In particular, the article aims to explore how prototypes support design practice by integrating knowledge coming from different team members' expertise. Using a qualitative research approach, this paper explores the use of prototypes in five digital media projects in museums. The qualitative data collected have been analysed and discussed through the lenses of the Socialization–Externalization–Combination–Internalization knowledge management framework. This study aims to contribute to a better understanding of how and why team members can take advantage of prototypes to create, transfer, combine, and embody knowledge.

Keywords:

• Prototyping
• museum
• design research
• digital media
• knowledge management
• design

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Principal Investigator Dr Giasemi Vavoula for the support she has given, and continues to give me, with this research project.

I would also like to express my gratitude to the museum practitioners and designers who afforded me their time for interview, providing helpful information and documents. For this article, I would like to thank in particular: Wendy Burkland, Melinda Walker, and Anita Brown-Graham (The Institute of Emerging Issues) for their generous availability and interest in my project; David Waingarten and Brad Johnson (Second Story Interactive Studios) for the great support in organizing interviews with the design team (Chris Dewan, Daniel Meyers, David Brewer, Thomas Wester, Michael Godfrey, Sorob Louie, Jennifer Dolan, Kirsten Southwell, Norman Lau, Alex Cho, Marc Lehman, Jinu Yang, Swanny Mouton, Sam Jeibmann, Philippe Laulheret, Matthew Fargo, Donald Richardson); Gallagher & Associated (Cybelle Jones and Sujit Tolat); Barbara Martin (Museum fine Art in Boston) for her great support in organizing interviews with the museum practitioners and design firms; MFA museum team: Barbara Martin, Jenna Fleming, Lynn Courtney, Elliot Davis, and Erica Hirshler; Design firms: RLMG (Richard Lewis, Stephanie Stewart, and Diana Bonfilio), Small Design (David Small and Jenna Fizel), and The 47th (Ann Karash Kimura); Jake Barton, principal of Local Projects, and Jane Alexander from the Cleveland Museum of Art for her fundamental support in organizing interviews with the museum practitioners; Gallery One team: Jane Alexander, Caroline Goeser, Seema Rao, Jennifer Foley Meghan Stockdale, Elizabeth Bolander, Andrea Bour, Niki Krause, Mary Suzor, and Thomas Barnard; Josh Goldblum, principal of BlueCadet Design, and Kate Quinn from the Penn Museum for their fundamental support in organizing interviews; Museum team: Yuan Yao, Lucy Fowler Williams, Allison Francies, Kevin Schott, Courtney O'Brien, and Jenn Reifsteck; BlueCadet design team: Troy Lachance, Aaron Miller, Kim Quinn, Mark Llobrera, Stacey Martens, Aaron Richardson, Victoria Jones, and Paul Rudolph; Annie Polland and Nick Capodice at the Tenement Museum NYC; Potion Design Studio: Philip Tiongson (principal), Abby Palmer, and Jonathan Bobrow; and Dana Mitroff Silvers for the stimulating conversations on design issues.

I am grateful to Dr Catharina Hendrick and Dr Ryan Nutting from the School of Museum Studies who have supported and intellectually stimulated me during the writing of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

With a Ph.D. in Design, Marco Mason is a Marie Curie fellow (EC-FP7) carrying on a research that aims to investigate design theory and practices of digital media for museums. The objective is to investigate the phenomenon of digital media design in the museum context by analyzing and interpreting existing design practices. The three years design research project is conjunctly conducted with the Program in Science, Technology and Society at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester, UK. Marco obtained his master's degree in Architecture at the Iuav University of Venice, Italy. At the Faculty of Architecture, he conducted research and teaching activities before moving to the Faculty of Arts and Design where he obtained his doctoral degree in Design Sciences in 2012.

Notes

1 http://www.tenement.org/shoplife.html.

2 http://www.museumsandtheweb.com/cma2013/.

3 I am grateful to Dana Mitroff Silvers for the stimulating conversations on design issues.

4 Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) policy requires that the Committee on the Use of Humans as Experimental Subjects (COUHES) review and approve all research involving human subjects that is performed under the auspices of MIT. The COUHES operates in respect of Federal mandate (The Common Rule 45 CFR 46). I completed and passed the appropriate human subject training course before the research protocol was approved.

5 The interviews of the first case study were almost all video recorded in order to make the best of the whiteboard strategy. I decide to adopt this very time-consuming technique (in term of transcription and analysis) only for the first case study, as the initial phase of ground theory research is crucial because it creates the basis for further data gathering and successive analysis. For the later case studies, it was more than sufficient to record the interviewees and take pictures of what written and drawn on the whiteboard. When recording was not possible due to ethical restrictions, extensive notes were taken.

6 During this process of labelling, patterns of similar properties started emerging. They were functional in creating emerging conceptual categories that, during the ‘axial coding’, I organized hierarchically and the relationships of which I started. I constantly wrote memos each time significant reflections emerged from the analysis, which helped to make conceptual leaps from the raw data to emerging themes (Birks, Chapman, and Francis 2008). At the same time, I researched appropriate literature (which is in large part reported in this paper) to understand existing theory, progress the analysis, and explain the diverse ideas which were emerging (Dunne 2011).

7 Native American Voices: The People – Here and Now was developed in collaboration with numerous Native American advisors and contributors who graciously allowed the Penn Museum to present their opinions and works: http://www.penn.museum/sites/nativeamericanvoices/contributors.php#navadv.

8 https://basecamp.com. This type of web database is an asynchronous tool (Xu et al. 2008) placed at disposal of the teams for to-do lists, calendars and time tracking. It also offers the possibility to store and share any file format and to communicate through a text messaging system, which also allows users to comment on the saved files.

9 http://gallagherdesign.com.

10 http://secondstory.com.

11 The redesign and reengineering of the Getty's exhibition Web pages at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

12 I am grateful to Jake Barton who recommended his video presentation at the Eyeo Festival 2013 which describes how his design team made use of prototypes to design the Collection Wall at Gallery One. The two extracts from the presentation can be found at https://vimeo.com/73379787.

Additional information

Funding

The Marie Curie research project (started October 2012) is funded by the European Union – Marie Curie Actions International Outgoing Fellowships for Career Development (IOFs). The outgoing stage of the fellowship (2013–14) took place at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology supervised by Prof. John Durant from the Science, Technology and Society Program; and the return stage (2015) takes place at the University of Leicester supervised by Dr Giasemi Vavoula from the School of Museum Studies.