Establishing Intent: What we want our visitors to experience
We were happy to have Janina Roesch talk to us about her experience with the previous Museums Night projects that she worked on. Some of her insights were crucial to our further decision making process (and future planning process), so I’ll lay them out here:
Target Group:
highly mixed (everyone was there! Both KISD and not)
KISDies are more likely to stay longer (an hour or more even- they might spend the whole night!)
should remember that people who come later are more likely to stay longer. Those who come at the beginning want to see other exhibitions as well.
The majority of people coming in are NOT FROM KISD
Atmosphere:
we’re part of the museums night, but we are NOT a museum
It’s good to make those who were not aware see what the school can do
Topic:
entertaining and not too complex
making sure everything ‘fits the theme’ is not a top priority
Planning:
start collecting projects from possible contributors EARLY ON!
You will definitely need sponsors. Start contacting them AS EARLY AS POSSIBLE.
Have a good division of tasks when it comes to implementation
Think about visitor flow!
Possible ‘division of responsibility’:
information and text collector
copywriter and graphics
3d render (‘architect’)
lounge manager
sponsorship manager
shop manager
spaces to think about interventions:
- entry
- room 12
- room 11
- outside lounge
TOP 4 TIPS:
Finding sponsors should be a top priority!
We should consider the HOLISTIC EXPERIENCE (not just the exhibition)
Get KISD involved early! ( talk to the Stube early, get help early!)
It’s all about giving visitors a GOOD TIME
In any case, the examples we saw of former Museum Night KISD exhibitions was very impressive. We now feel like we have a lot of work to do to keep up! Seeing these past examples serves well for motivation:
Interview analysis
After that we talked about how we could analyze the information we collected from user interviews. We all agreed that one of the main problems we had was remaining objective while doing so- often the interpretations seemed ad hoc and arbitrary.
Aleks gave a short introduction to a method called CODING, which has it’s roots in grounded theory and is used by social scientists everywhere.
Here’s a slide that sums up the steps to grounded theory:
We’ll be posting a more detailed version of our interviews and analysis by the end of this week!
Thinking about what our potential users expect helped us in the next phase of our meeting to come to conclusions about intent, or what we ultimately want our visitors to experience, given their makeup and expectations.
Out brainstorming session brought us to a great conclusion- that instead of thinking about the 29th as an exhibition (static, personal,introspective, serious ), we would think about it as an event (dynamic, fun, open social).
We’re excited to see where we go from here!
