Client: Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History
The Challenge:
Create a design process that would result in transformative visitor experiences.
The Outcome:
Activities are developed in a fraction of the time and are measurably more successful at engaging visitors. Staff morale has improved.
As Seen In: “Prototyping to Promote Hands-on Learning“, American Association of Museums, Annual Conference, Phoenix, 2017.
The Education and Outreach Department at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History had developed an initial process for designing impactful visitor experiences, but the process was new and had challenges that needed to be addressed to be effective. My role was to identify how the process could be improved, and implement changes that would affect the ideation, prototyping and fabrication of all educational activities. I was also responsible for managing projects in development already, in the fields of paleontology, geology, invertebrate zoology, human origins, cultural anthropology and entomology.
Design Research
I started by interviewing current Experience Designers. It was clear they enjoyed collaborating, but were not sure what defined a successful project, or where any project sat in its lifecycle. Projects sometimes went on for years, creating a lot of frustration. Visitor input had little to no role in the design process.
Redesign
Applying principles of design thinking, I worked with the team to remap an activity design process that put the visitor in the center and emphasized Ideation. We lowered the stakes of any single decision and gave developers explicit “permission to fail.” The result was a more fun and creative process in which staff loved to participate. I mapped the new process in this flowchart, which became an important tool to make the process accessible and easy to understand.
Tools
The goal was to maximize staff time on design, not on understanding the design process! I created tools to make the process transparent and accessible, ranging from progress trackers to assessment tools to “Measures of Success” (a clear definition of the characteristics of a successful project). A new ‘Facilitation Kit’ made it visually easy to understand differences between “talking at” visitors and engaging them.
Teaching
I taught classes on design thinking to volunteers, staff and teens with a goal of leveraging design thinking to maximize visitor engagement. These classes universally received 5/5-star ratings. For the Harvard Extension School’s Museum Studies Program, I co-designed and led the class: “Smithsonian: Creative Engagement at the National Museum of Natural History”. The tools I developed, like the “Facilitation Kit” were used as the foundation for the class, and I created Method Cards to stimulate design thinking among the students. The “Facilitation Kit” was a great way to visually demonstrate when facilitators were talking too much, and identify opportunities to better engage visitors.
How well did the new process work?
As one employee said, “Before, this process was like Sasquatch. Everyone knew it existed but nobody was exactly sure what it was.” In the new process, scientists, exhibit developers, and educators came together to test in teams, and no one was permitted to fall in love with their first idea. The development cycle sped up, and staff morale improved. Activities are now developed in a fraction of the time and visitor engagement has increased significantly. How do we know? Because we measured it!
![Image source: Alex Proimos from Sydney, Australia [CC BY 2.0]](https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Smithsonian_Institution_National_Museum_of_Natural_History_(7508870948).jpg){kind=link}