Part I of this presentation.
The Creating Museum Media for Everyone project (CMME) was created to further the museum field’s capacity to design, develop, and implement innovative digital interactives for science museum exhibitions that engage people with and without disabilities in informal science learning. The Project convened two workshops (the Possibilities Workshop and the Prototyping Workshop) to address these goals. This LEAD session will report on the outcomes of those workshops, the subsequent prototypes that were developed to build on the knowledge gained, and will summarize the Project's white paper on "Making Museum Exhibits Accessible for All: Approaches to Multi-Modal Exhibit Personalization." The development team's three promising approaches that were explored in more depth by the teams participating in the Prototyping Workshop include dynamic haptic display, data sonification, and multi-touch audio layers. The LEAD session will demonstrate these approaches, seek participant feedback on the results, and will query the museum professionals in attendance as to how any or all of these approaches can be designed into exhibits in the near future.
2. “…further the field’s capacity to design, develop
and implement innovative digital interactives for
science museum exhibitions that engage
people with and without disabilities in informal
science learning.”
The Creating Museum Media for Everyone
project (CMME)
5. • Intensive workshops which bring many people together and
challenge them to be creative can lead to new and
interesting ideas
• Participants need common background information
• People with disabilities should be included in the design
process from the beginning
• Personas can be a useful tool for keeping end-users in mind
• Varying forms of documentation are important for project’s
records and dissemination purposes
What we learned about running workshop/hackathon
14. PIs: Christine Reich & Andrea Durham, Museum of
Science; Jim Spadaccini, Ideum; Larry Goldberg, WGBH
National Center for Accessible Media
This presentation was based on work supported by the National Science Foundation
under Grant No. 0532536. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or
recommendations expressed in this presentation are those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the Foundation.
Credits
Notas do Editor
Collaboration with Ideum, National Center for Accessible Media at WGBHNSF-funded
An opportunity to:Learn about the project’s goalsLearn from leaders in other fieldsExperiment with the latest technologyBrainstorm ideas about information-based technology interactivesAreas of presentation:Designing in the museum environment, UD/UDL, disability theories & models, personalized experiences, emotion and learning, gamification for people with disabilities, needs of specific groups in museums, user evaluation, data sonification
Split into four groups, mix of expertise in exhibit design, technical design, software development, education, personal & professional expertise with disability. Each group had a focus. 2.5 days to develop a (hopefully) working prototype that solved the solution they were focused on.
the team developed a vibrating puck that would provide tactile feedback. According to the different levels of vibrating feedback, visitors would be able to feel how the data points were spread out in a space and where their particular measurement was located. 4 different vibrating modes in this prototypeHad brainstormed about the types of tactile sensations, aesthetics of the different sensations, and what was technically feasibleWanted visitors to be able to pick out points, trends, and quantities One thing they considered was how big a space visitors would explore at the exhibit and how people with limited mobility would use exhibit. Assumed that there would be audio and visual elements as well.By moving the tactile slider, a visitor’s hand would travel along the x and y axis of a graph simultaneously triggering different types of pitches corresponding to data points. The team was able to use code developed by Georgia Tech’s Sonification Lab, to provide an auditory indication to a visitor of trends within the data or where their own data point was located.
Built off of the work done in Bruce Walker’s lab at Georgia Tech (they were involved in the workshop)Sonifying = using sound other than verbal descriptionSonified a scatterplot, allowed for free exploration to find specific points
Tried to combine the sonification and haptic work for an exhibit at the Museum of Science, into an exhibit about our wind lab – comparing efficiency and power production for five different types of wind turbines on our museum’s roof.Lots of technical issues with the vibrating puck idea (not enough variation to be meaningful, making it not breakable)Prototyped three other options: vertical screws that would rise out of the exhibit, horizontal screws that would change based on data, and air being blown through holes of variable size.Tested all three to see what people were getting out of it, how they interpreted them.
Figured out a way to make the amount of air being pushed out variable. Combined air feedback and sonification into one prototype.Too much fun! People didn’t even notice the graph, were playing it like a musical instrument.
This is a draft of design for a computer-based interactive and the surrounding information.Now moving in to sonification alone. Will play a trend line, allow for self-driven exploration of the trend line, full exploration of a scatter plot, comparing between different turbines.Working on 3D printing and other tactile representations (along right side of this illustration) to give idea of shape and scale of different turbines.
Another group in the workshop through about how to make multi-touch tables more accessible. Ideum, New Mexico-based exhibit design firm, is heading up this work.Challenge to add an audio layer to a dynamic, multi-user environmentThought about various approaches for audio layer approaches:RFID tags/bar cods—own personal preferencesPush-button interfaceTactile elementsGesture basedFiducial/object triggeredIdeum is pursuing using a gesture to create an accessiblity “bubble” around a specific user that will add audio and navigation component. Will be triggered by a specific gesture.
While all of these approaches had Universal Design in mind, there are situations when people have particular needs. This group focused on the broader issue of what a personalized museum experience might look like—giving everyone the option to optimize their experience. Group at the workshop thought about this, NCAM is turning this into a white paper to share with the field. Larry Goldberg will present about this. Now.
