Bringing Visitors into Design and Design into the Visitor Experience

Involving users in the design process has been shown to increase buy-in, reduce mistakes down the line, and increase overall return-on-investment. True user-centered design involves those users as stakeholders from the very beginning, during the concept and ideation phase. Time and money are often reasons people cite for waiting to involve their users in the design process, but there are inexpensive methods that can be done right on the museum floor or in a museum learning center with materials already available at many institutions.

In this half-day workshop we'll explore three fun methods for involving your museum visitors at the conceptual design phase:

• bags of stuff (conceptual brainstorming and paper prototyping)
• sticky notes (understanding action items from patterns of likes, dislikes, and improvements)
• layered elaboration (asynchronous design across different user groups)

These methods have been used with kids and adults of all ages at the University of Maryland's HCI Lab as part of their KidsTeam group (http://www.cs.umd.edu/hcil/kiddesign/).

The first part of the workshop will be spent in an overview of the user-centered design process and its applications to design technology and interactives in museums. Next, participants will get their hands sticky by actively participating in the three methods. The workshop will conclude with a reflection on the design methods and a discussion for how they might be incorporated into existing activities for visitors. Participants are encouraged to come to this workshop ready to think outside of the box and wearing clothing that they don't mind getting a little messy.