Our Museum Interactive

Walking through the Art Institute Josh and I realized that there are hardly any digital interactives in the galleries. So we decided to create one super search through the museum to educate about the collections! Here is a write up of our interactive:

        Our digital interactive takes the form of a scavenger hunt throughout the whole of the museum and will adapt to new exhibitions depending on what the museum is showing. The idea to take on a museum-wide search is to get people to visit all the galleries and not just what the museum is most famous for, the large collection of Impressionist works. Many of the other galleries contain important and fascinating works, yet they are seldom visited or studied by the public. 

To start, we want to stress the idea of accessibility of the technology we use in our interactive search. We are aware that not everyone owns a smartphone to access the game on their device, so we want to include computer screens throughout the galleries so that everyone can participate. We also want to incorporate the idea of the interactive being a game or challenge, and the idea that one gains points throughout each challenge based on timing and answers. The visitor is actively competing with the other people in the museum, which gives them that competitive push to want to participate in the interactive. At the end of the game the visitor’s score is tallied up and placed in the rankings of all scores, so the idea is to get to the highest score ranking.

Our interactive would start off in the Modern Wing of the museum around the Education Center, and would start off with an easy question to initiate the challenge. An example of the question would be a compare and contrast, something that is not really seen in the art institute as it has such a strict encyclopedic layout. For example it would say find the image in the contemporary gallery that uses the same subject as this nineteenth century painting. From there they would find the painting and get a brief explanation and analysis of the painting and then get their next question. 

Other examples of challenges would be to show a puzzle piece taken out of a painting as well as a description of the style and technique used to create the painting, and then the visitor would have to find the artwork, find the art work that was inspired by the one in front of you, find similar subject matters within another gallery, find an image of a dog in a 16th century painting, count how many self-portraits are in a gallery, find a sculpture of a ballerina, Find a work in the Japanese collection that compares to something in the Impressionist gallery, etc. All the challenges would also give the visitor educational information about the works they find so that the visitor has a great learning experience.

The final challenge would be to put yourself into one of the paintings from the challenge, particularly the one that they find most interesting. The visitor would use the computer or smart phone to take a picture of themselves or their group and it would transform their photo into the style of the painting, and then go more in-depth about that work of art. The visitor can provide their email address and their creation will be sent to their inbox. After the visitors complete this challenge the game will tally the score and rank them among other players.