HeartBeat-Box
Brian Halaburka
Chinmay Nivargi
Spencer King
d.school, Stanford University
  HeartBeat-Box was a four week project, where the Design School at Stanford partnered with the San Jose Tech Museum of Innovation to try and come up with a new exhibit idea. In the human-centric spirit of the design school, initial design research involved visits to the museum on multiple occasions to try and understand the users and what they wanted. The weekdays at the museum see a lot of elementary school students coming in as a group with their chaperones, but the weekends see a lot of parents who come in with their family.
Interaction with all these user groups revealed that even though parents believe that the museum is catered towards 8-14 year olds, they would still bring their 3 to 5 year old children. This was surprising and a deeper dive and interviews with parents with young children (age <6) who visit the Tech Museum revealed their motivations for bringing young children to the museum. First, parents with young children came because the museum offers a space to interact with their child without distractions. While many of the activities they do at the museum could be done at home, they don’t do them because parents are distracted by other things such as writing emails, cooking dinner, cleaning, or calling a friend. At the Tech museum, their only responsibility was to interact with their child. Second, parents who visited the Tech Museum with young children wanted their children to get excited about science. They didn’t need their children to learn from the exhibits, they brought them in the hopes that they will gain a sense of curiosity about science. In particular, one visitor was a high school science teacher who was at the museum with her 3 year-old daughter. She valued science, and felt that having a strong background in science leads to successful career later on in life. She brought her child to the museum hoping she would be interested in science and pursue a scientific or technology related career later in life.
In addition, The Tech Museum for Innovation is committed to create a space where the visitor may create their own experience in the museum. This is the Museum 3.0 project, where the visitor is allowed to create hypotheses, “hack” the museum environment, and collect data on themselves and other visitors to support their hypotheses. The solution also needed to incorporate sensors for data collection to educate visitors to explore the quantified self movement.
The solution incorporating these design elements is HeartBeat-Box – an interactive exhibit where visitors – specifically parents and children wear heart rate sensors and get visual and aural feedback as well as data about how their physiology and heart responds to external stimuli. An initial prototype included a simple game using an Arduino (www.arduino.cc) and a Pulse Sensor (www.pulsesensor.com), connected to a computer, where the objective was to try and control heart rate and sync up numerous visitor heart rates to line-up the hearts representing them perfectly to each other to a crosshair. Each heartbeat was also synced to a musical instrument and this led to another dimension of creating music using a different kind of input device.
This led to a lot of engagement and interesting conversations between children and their parents about their heartbeat and ways to control it. Visitors were not aware of being able to manipulate heart rate – they believed they could raise it, but not actively lower it. The most popular exhibits in the museum promoted engagement through personal input, since it makes the exhibit and phenomenon more relatable. This definitely was the case with prototype testing – seeing one’s own heartbeat reflected in the exhibit was exciting.
In a broader context, such a tool could be used as part of a bigger exhibit, or whole museum rooms with stimuli designed to elevate or soothe heart rates to educate people about their hearts and breathing. Further gamification would involve manipulating others behaviors – trying to scare or surprise each other and observe effects of loud sound, video and bright lights on physiology. Rooms in the museum where people can play with these aspects would serve as learning environments while simultaneously entertaining visitors. Other sensors that incorporate breathing rate and temperature can help study interaction between the different senses and organs while interacting with the exhibit. Collecting data about responses to these stimuli and then learning patterns and displaying them would get people curious about their physiology in relation to others as well. These would definitely be steps towards Museum 3.0.