Designing for a public space: Gallery One at Cleveland Museum of Art

Male 1: Certainly a lot of what we find ourselves challenged by are ways to make what we call walk-up interfaces. Things that people don't need any knowledge in advance or any capacity to even understand in advance that they can get something satisfying out of it. So the two ways we deal with that are one, through an incredibly aggressive form of prototyping. We use it to advance our ideas way, way before visitors even use them. The second way, is with the concepts for the interfaces themselves that we not only don't assume any level of expertise, we essentially move away from that, we make interfaces that are so self-apparent that they can advance an argument. For everyone from a three year old, you know, up to an advanced P.H.D. candidate. We had this idea that was based on a conversation with a curator about the timelessness of creativity. Essentially, when you look at what humans have been making with art, literally back to the first cave paintings, they made other people. Right, we've been essentially reproducing images of ourselves, and expressing ways that we feel through art from the beginning. And so, what we wanted to do is essentially match that with facial detection. Within an art museum context, making things is a core part of the human experience. If people can get fat, then suddenly an art museum becomes something much more universal, and so using that argument we developed a series of different interfaces that allow people to be active, that allow them to participate. Female 1: This is the sculpture lens for Cleveland Museum of Art Gallery One Piece. We've got three full interactive games. The first I'll show you is my personal favorite, which is Strike A Pose. Between each game you've got a stylized and more cinematic introduction to the work itself. Which shows you just highlights of the collection. This is meant to propel you into the galleries as well. Brief, inspiring, but yet again encompasses the breath of the collection. I can go through an entire menu option of sculptures. Let's see, I like this guy Here is where the gamification does happen. The percentage of accuracy shows up, so if you are posing with your friends, they are then able to see how well you're doing versus their own poses. You're able to go back and look at their pose and their per, percentage as well so it does become, again, a conversation and a learning launch point. Another game on this sculpture lens is make a face. Now the prompt is essentially get your face up close. Now this works for people of all heights, even small kids. It will track down here but centers the image on your left. So it's telling me step forward oh, and I'm looking. Any face that I make. I don't have to match this. If I'm smiling it finds my match and then captures that in a photo. So, people will have a tendency to come up and then start looking really closely. Oh, and then they realized that it's mimicking and copying what you're doing and then giving you a resulting artwork. The game actually prompts you to put your face in the square, but the square itself will track you. It will find you up until I think, eight feet, is the range. So if I'm far here, it will still try to find me, but it won't track as well. So we've gone ahead and taken all of artworks, this for example and put those into a database which then we compare to the facial structure this a triangular playing system which attracts the best. The eyes and the distance between the eye brows we have had to do some controlling for glasses. It still works pretty well. And then I always get my, I'll get my same guy. Oh. The project for gallery one was fairly undefined at first. What's a good way or an approach for visitors to both interpret, yet engage, but without being distracting. Our approach is essentially putting the visitor first and prioritizing experience over technology. That's your takeaway. That's what people enjoy. That's what you're going to remember. Not, oh, that was a really cool screen. You're going to remember I was with my friends and we did this really amazing thing at the museum. Right? So that That's what we design, what feels good, what's right and what people remember afterwards.