A Day at The Museum: Film Intros

Day at the Museum

Team Director’s Designers: Benjamin Frailey, Rhea Singh, Jake Ledford, Connor Schrank, Enyu Li

Time Frame: 2 Months, October – December 2019

Project Brief: For this project, our team was tasked with creating a museum exhibit about a period of design and design history. It was to be an interactive exhibit with at least 3 touch-points, and we were instructed to use probes as a way to gather user data.

Scope

We decided our scope fairly early one, and its more or less what brought our group together. We wanted to focus on the film intro’s of the 1950’s and 1960’s, classic films like Vertigo and Charade. These intros had a lot of creativity and striking imagery, as well as a lot of symbolism that separated them from intros created prior. Our scope would put the patron in the designers seat as they walked through the exhibit and play with concepts like shape and color, symbolism, and font.

Touch points

Ideating on the touchpoints proved a little difficult. We struggled to get anything useful from the probe because it was not that engaging for participants. Essentially it was just a worksheet, which was something I was disappointed in. We could have done a lot for and gotten more insight if it was something that had the participants interact with their world and apply what they saw from these film intros to that. With that in the past we created a bunch of touch points, and then narrowed them down with some simple body storming testing and a refocus on our scope. We went from 7 to 4 touch points in this process. we sketched and fleshed these touch points out, and assured that they connected to each other and reflected the idea of putting the patron in the directors seat. We also built the physical space around the floor plan or our UX studio space, so when we had a final body storming session in that space it translated very well and was more immersive.

Touchpoint 1: This touch point we called the history tunnel. We lined the walls of the tunnel with screenshots from a variety of different 1950’s/60’s film intros. We included some informative text as to what the film the intro is from. This allowed the user be engrossed in the context of the time before moving onto the more intensive touch points.

Touchpoint 2: This touch point was a wall where users collaboratively used the shapes and colors from the Charade intro to create a a large image that reflected the use of color and shape. Users would take cut outs of colorful shapes directly sourced from the original intro and put them onto the black wall, adding onto what prior patrons had created.

Touchpoint 3: This was a line of long tables where where the patrons would read about the symbolism portrayed in a movie intro, be prompted to question this intro and it symbolism, and then watch a video showing how this symbolism came in later in the film.

Touchpoint 4: This was the final touchpoint. Patrons would watch a bit of the intro to From Russia With Love, a 007 intro where women danced with the title credits being projected onto their body. They were the prompted to recreate this intro, albeit less objectionably. They would type any text they wanted into a webpage, and this would then be projected onto a wall they could step in font of , as see how their bodies affected the projection of the text like in the 007 intro.

The exhibit

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Our exhibit was a success! We had around a dozen people show up in the two hour time span we ran it, from 5:30 to 7:30 on November 25th, 2019. We held it within the studio space and we were able to successfully form the space into our exhibit. We used tables and whiteboards as dividers, trash bags as walls and chairs lining the perimeter of the studio. We also had period correct movie music softly playing through the exhibit. This created a relatively immersive museum experience with the materials and space we had available to us. Within this space we held 4 different touch points that guided the users through this experience. These were the touch points discussed before, and we were able to lead 15+ participants through it. Participants walked through the history tunnel to get an idea of the history and scale of these intros, and then played with the Charade wall to try it themselves. They were them able to learn about the symbolic weight of these intros at the tables, and finished it off with a lighthearted play-around with a projector and text trying to recreate the into to From Russia With Love. All of this lead out to dynamic exhibit with interactive touchpoints and ups & downs to add up to an informative and fun experience.

Reflection

I Think this project was a lot of fun, and I felt more at home with it than I had during the project before this. I really liked working with the physical space, and there was a big focus on ideation which I enjoyed. we had a few struggles, like our probe. I think we did not make the best use out of it, and with that our user research suffered. Our connections between or touchpoints what also lacking in some regards. Other than that, I think we did very good and made good use of the studio space, and where we didn’t do as good acted as a great learning experience.