Meet You on the Steps: Museums as Social Experiences
Art museums have gone to great lengths to make their collections more accessible. Nevertheless, there remains an ever-growing gap between the messaging of the art institutions, their collection, and their public. Millions of people visit art museums each year. However, many visitors cannot understand the artwork they see there. In other words, although people frequent museums, the connection they feel to the works of art is not a given. This gap led Yiming “Mia” Xu to explore the art museum system and the relationship between art institutions and their visitors. Yiming's thesis, Meet You on the Steps: Museums as Social Experiences, reimagines the visitor experience and impression of art museums. Her thesis questions how design can balance the power relationship between institution and visitor, facilitate visitors' autonomy and satisfaction, cultivate art accomplishments through daily life, and eliminate cultural barriers and stereotypes surrounding conventional art museums.
Yiming’s thesis proposes four innovative design interventions for art museums, visitors, artists and spaces. These interventions help the general public construct their own realities within art museums, which is a liberating framework for increasing connection, relevance, long-term impact and social dialogue.
MUSY : Give visitors personal autonomy within art museums
Every museum has a certain narrative it wants visitors to experience, and it enforces this narrative through its choice of collections, pieces and arrangements. MUSY invites the visitor to exercise greater autonomy over that narrative by having a stake in which pieces are shown and in which order they will be seen. Yiming began with redesigning the way museums deliver information. Her digital ecosystem actually seeks to undermine this external control — this dominant narrative — and to instead allow the visitor’s own personal experience, curiosity and identity and shape the museum’s environment. It gives visitors a much-needed sense of personal autonomy, representation and fulfilment. The process fosters a unique connection between visitor and art, as well as among visitors who may have different constructions.
MUSY is an app to help visitors customize their route through museum collections. Visitors can choose which museum they want to visit. The home page lists the particular museum’s events and news, and they can select several keywords, such as music or movies, that relate to their personal tastes. The app then generates several routes that viewers can choose from in order to personalize how they’d like to experience the collection. MUSY will also provide relevant fun facts and comments from other visitors with similar parameters.
This individualized system benefits not only the visitors but also the museum personnel. The data that visitors input appears on another portal for the museum staff. Through this portal, the staff receives direct feedback that they can use to improve the museum visiting experience to reflect what people want.
Musoum : Enrich the visiting experience & retain visitors
In thinking about how to mediate the relationship between visitors and art museums, Yiming devised momentos: wristbands from the museum that can be hung on a visitor’s refrigerator or wall to remind him or her of the ongoing dialogue between that visitor, the artists who made the pieces and ideally, other visitors who were similarly impacted by those pieces.
Polly Adam, a museum researcher, says, “The relationship between the individual and the art museum is mediated by the appropriation and sharing of designed objects and images.” Because memory is always selective, the question is, can we predict which things visitors will remember, and why they remember these things and not others?
Museom is a museum map wristband to help visitors tag their favorite museum experiences in different locations. Visitors can use Museom in the museum, and when they go home, they can put it on the refrigerator as a decorative souvenir. Each wristband also comes with a hashtag that allows visitors to share their experiences with each other.
Artalk : Cultivate artistic accomplishments through daily life
In addition to art museums and their visitors, Yiming also considered another crucial stakeholder: artists. The general public might be familiar with these artworks, but the image of “the artist” often remains vague and inaccessible. When viewers see an artwork, they often find it obscure because they don’t know how to connect to it or with the artist, the real person behind the work. So, how might designers connect artists to the general public and create an interaction, if not between the artist and the individual examining her work, then at least between the viewer and the artwork itself?
Artalk is an AI artist conversational chatbot app that helps viewers gradually learn about artwork by incorporating art into the viewers’ daily lives. After downloading this app, a user’s phone wallpaper changes to display a different work of art every day. And every day, the Artalk chatbot assumes the persona of the artist who created that piece in order to answer the viewer’s questions and encourage conversations around art.
For instance, suppose a viewer is interested in today’s wallpaper artwork. She can open Artalk’s chatbox to start chatting with today’s AI artist about the artist’s influences, experiences and vision, and how art relates to everyday life. If starting the conversation is difficult, Artalk will suggest questions to break the ice. Its algorithm utilizes modern social behavior to help the general public learn about art in a comfortable and natural way.
The Museum of...? : Break the stereotype about art museums
The ordinary, everyday stories of individuals are the history of the future. That means that it is imperative that artists and art appreciators focus on the present and on how art resonates with their daily experiences.
“The museum of...?" is a public experience design that transforms the audience’s role from observer to participant to content-creator, helping people redefine museums as relevant, lived spaces. Yiming devised a space in which everyone's life can be a piece of a living, deconstructed museum. In Washington Square Park, she invited more than twenty participants to write down what they believe a museum is and to depict that idea in front of the installation.
Yiming believes that our experience of each other, especially through art, must be inclusive, welcoming, didactic and inspiring.
To learn more about Yiming Xu’s work, take a look at her projects in more detail at Miaxu-yiming.com.