Compiling Our Findings

Project completion is near! Our team has compiled our research results and will be publishing a book of our findings. We hope that this book will be an instrumental tool in assisting DuSable implement impactful solutions to some of their problems and also serve as a blueprint for further growth and development. The writing, arranging, and printing of the book is due to be complete mid-week after one last round of edits and revisions.

This coming week will mark the end of the semester long project and we will be presenting to DuSable on Friday, May 4th where we will reveal the book and share our progress. We hope they will be as excited as we are to dig into some of the sticky problems and put into action some of our recommendations. We look forward to continuing the relationship with the museum and helping them, and ourselves, learn from this process.

Workshop at DuSable

User Journey

After weeks of analyzing research data, we are finally at the stage that we are going to give recommendations on opportunity spaces~

We mapped out a Visitor's journey (in pink post-its), some pain points and pleasure points we observed, and added some of our solutions (in blue post-its). The solutions are clustered, and will show opportunity spaces to be presented on Friday. 

Engaging Students in the Design Process

Last Friday we were privileged to have students and faculty from the Little Black Pearl, Options Laboratory High School join us for a hands on workshop and prototyping session. The ID team introduced the students to the concept of human-centered design through an immersive design experience. The first activity of the day was self-guided "research" tour through the DuSable Museum of African American History. During the tour, the LBP students collected data about their experiences of the museum and its exhibits. The students took note of the content presented at the museum as well as the way in which the content was displayed. After completing the tour, we broke the students into teams of two for the second activity "Designing a Visit to DuSable." In pairs, the students acted as both design researchers and design participants as they shared the information they collected on their tour. The LBP students then worked individually to design an improved DuSable visit for their partner by brainstorming, sketching and finally building prototypes of the ideas.

The experience ended with a presentation of the ideas the LBP students designed. It was a great day! We learned a lot from the LBP student's insightful research and concepts and we hope that the students had a great time learning (and participating in) the human-centered design process. Also, in attendance at Friday's workshop was Lisa Montgomery, Director of IIT's Student Center for Diversity and Inclusion and Amanda Williams, Adjunct Faculty at IIT's School of Architecture. Lisa and Amanda were active participants in the workshop, coming up with some great interactive ideas to improve DuSable's student experience. We look forward to collaborating more with them both in the future.

Initial Analysis

Today the team met to continue organizing our observations and coming up with insights. Our focus today was mapping out the user journey that teachers and students go through during museum visits.

Next week is Spring Break at ID! We'll be pulling together our learnings to share with the museum staff when we get back.

Compiling Observations

This past Friday's class time was spent analyzing and clustering our most recent museum visits. We started with a few large stacks of post-it notes, each containing a "we saw" or "we heard" statement, and began to determine the overarching themes at play.

As we all crowded around the board and discussed our observations, the post-its began to fall into several main buckets. Our categories were loosely defined to start, but after looking through the headings and asking ourselves "so what?" for each one, we came up with more concrete titles. A few examples were Good balance of levels of engagement for different groups, Welcome to museum determines the success of your visit, Identity of museum drives programming.

We discussed with Jeremy, our professor, to make sure we were on the right track and that our titles were clear and unambiguous. We are now working on compiling a spreadsheet database to organize all of our observations, insights, and ideas for change. This will help us in synthesizing possible solution tracts in the next few weeks.

Forskar barn på museet

 "Researching children at the museum"
On Tuesday we took a trip to the Swedish American Museum and were able to shadow two groups of clever and curious second graders.
The museum offers amazing resources for school groups and is setup in a way that allows the staff to adopt tours to different age groups:

1. A hands-on, experiential section where children are sent back in time to experience the lifestyle in Sweden and the hardship that came before and after immigration.
2. The "actual" museum about the Swedish immigration to America, with information about the life back then, the struggles of the journey and the hopes and fears associated with leaving one's country.
3. An activity time, which includes the performance of a song/dance or some craft activity, giving the students time and space to experience Swedish culture similar to what their peers in Sweden might do.
The teachers are provided with an educational package packed with materials to enable them to prime the children for the visit and ensure they get the best out of their trip.
It looked like they all quite enjoyed it and we were amazed at the amount of information they took away from their visit.

Tomorrow the museum will celebrate its 10th anniversary, so if you are in the area make sure to pay it a visit.