THE CHALLENGE

During the third year of my undergraduate degree, my class was divided into teams to design and build museum exhibits that would be displayed as the annual KI-Xhibition in March. The groups were formed in September, and over the next seven months our group of six worked together to build the exhibit from scratch; including brainstorming, researching, designing, building, hosting, and evaluating.

THE APPROACH

 

The design process started with group brainstorming and decision making to choose a topic for the exhibit. Next, we conducted research and wrote the informational content, and then focused on finding a way to display the content in an engaging and informative manner. As a group, we spent a lot of time working to design an intuitive flow for our exhibit, and to create engaging, interactive content.

 

Our goal was to have content that visitors would want to spend the time fully exploring, and to make it easy for visitors to move from section to section. Keeping in mind that visitors would have varying abilities to dive into the content (from time constraints, to keeping their accompanying children occupied), we created three different depths of content, so that visitors could choose how much time they spent going through the exhibit.

THE RESULTS

We divided the exhibit into sections based on different stages of learning, each with two board game examples. The first section introduced the idea of underlying values and morals in board games. The second stage was more exploratory, getting the visitors involved in finding those underlying values. The third section introduced two new board games and asked visitors to build the list of values and morals found in those games. The last room was filled with questions and some seating, encouraging visitors to continue to think critically about board games when they leave the exhibit.

The final component of this design project was conducting a visitor study. The goal of the study was to see how effective the design and content of our exhibit was in achieving our goal of encouraging visitors to think critically about the board games they play and the underlying values in them. At the entrance to the exhibit we asked visitors to take a survey if they were willing to participate in our study, and we asked them questions about the content they had learned as they walked through the exhibit. After the exhibit finished showing, we gathered the completed studies and coded the qualitative data as a group, discovering that our exhibit was somewhat effective in achieving our goal.