iCurator Project Proposal
for CS 160, Fall 2001
Group 5: Kevin Wang, Leila Takayama, Chuck Moidel and Scott Carter
 
The Problem
 

High art museums are often a daunting challenge to visitors, whether they are visiting for their first time or one hundredth. On weekends, museums are usually crowded and thus curator-guided tours are often over-attended. As a result, visitors gain little knowledge about the art, most pieces are left wholly unappreciated, and ultimately the museum-going experience is unfulfilling. Museums are less crowded on weekdays, but there are no curator tours. Visitors are expected to navigate navigatewander the museum using with nothing more than little placards denoting the artist, date, and a couple of rather unsatisfactory sentences about the piece. Audio-guided tours are equally problematic — they usually select a few pieces and leave out a majority of the collection. Furthermore, neither audio tours nor curator-guided tours encourage group discussion or interaction. It is our opinion that art cannot be understood without knowledge of its context, nor does art succeed as a communicative medium without discussion. Our solution to this problem, a system we have dubbed iCurator, involves the integration of a system within a museum that would allow visitors to both automatically retrieve more information on artworks and communicate to others ideas and opinions regarding pieces to other patrons.

 
Analysis

Museums are almost exclusively an information-pushing enterprise. Curators and board members decide upon art that will be shown, the way it will be presented and the amount and type of information that will accompany an exhibit. To an extent this system is appropriate — few people are qualified to discern the difference between quality and second-rate work. Also, it is of course necessary to be true to the artist’s concept when displaying a piece. However, once an installation is in place, and visitors are allowed in, the communication ends — viewers are expected to understand the scope and importance of a piece given at best a two-paragraph description and at worst merely the artist, date and title. Some museums offer tours and reading rooms, which together may provide enough information for some visitors. However, since as museums never permit patrons to control the information available to them, allow pull-driven communication users are not able to tailor their museum experience. Museums to some extent deny the possibility that different visitors will require differentany considerable levels of interaction with the art and their local, museum-going community.

 Though there are attempts to introduce such interactivity to science museums for children (e.g. HP’s collaboration with the Exploratorium in San Francisco, The Experimentarium in Copenhagen), our emphasis is rather on more traditional museum environments and therefore our target audience will be significantly different. However, it may nonetheless be worthwhile for us to analyze some of these projects in the near future as they may bring up new issues, or clarify others.
 
Suggested Improvements / Solution
 To improve interactivity in a high art museum environments, we propose iCurator: a new PDA based, interactive, non-linear personalized-curator and interactive messaging system. Through an interface called the electronic reading room, each visitor Not only would will each visitor using the device will have access to historical information, various essays, comments, historical information and facts about the artist and artwork; via a separate interface they , they will also be able to share their opinions, sketches and photos of the artwork with others in the gallery their opinions, sketches and perhaps even pictures they have taken of the artwork. Patrons will be encouraged to navigate the museum to suit their interests, retrieve to their taste as much or as little  as reading room information from the electronic reading room as they wish about each piece, and interact with other patrons to at their discretion. The system will likely also include public kiosks showing displaying the latest comments or and pictures. In addition, iCurator may will also support chat amongst visitors currently in the museum, shopping services and maps. 
 
Experiment 

To test whether this system will reasonably address issues of non-interactivity in museums, and whether users will find such a system useful, we propose an experiment involving prototyped tools and normal current patrons of the Berkeley art museum. The independent variable is the iCurator. The dependent variables are the perceived levels of interaction, involvement, and sense of fulfillment that museum visitors experience. We will test one set of patrons, by interviewing them about their museum- going experiences before using the iCurator and then by doing a contextual inquiry with them during and after using the iCurator. We will be interested in the. This will allow us to judge the effectiveness of the iCurator system both when used in a group scenario and when used as a between different users and within a single- user system. give a within as well as a between user comparison upon which to judge the effectiveness of the iCurator.

All participants will be givenfill out a consent form, a pre-questionnaire asking for their demographics and previous museum going experiences, and then be given a set of tasks. Given During the following tasks, we will attempt to ascertain whether if the patrons using the iCurator system feel they are actively involved, whether if they find it stimulating and whether or notif they would use the system in the future:

The tasks are as follows: (1) You are having difficulty understandingconfused about the meaning of the piece that you are observing at the moment. Send out a message to other patrons in the museum to share your thoughts about piece and to find out what they thought about it. Feel free to chat with them or simply observe their responses. (2) Your cousin wants you to send him pictures from your trip to the museum since he was unable to join you on your trip for the day. Take a picture of yourself next to your favorite piece of art in the museum. Then take a picture of a part of that piece of art and email the pictures to him, explaining where you are and why you are interested in that particular work. (3) Your friend’s birthday is coming up and you want to find her a gift from the museum. She says she is interested in impressionist art. Find impressionist art in the museum; read a couple of articles from the electronic reading room on a particular piece;, do some reading on the pieces, and order a poster of one of the pieces from the museum gift shop.

As tThe tasks are variedvary in level of difficulty, so that users are prompted to use the iCurator withat different levels of involvement. At the end of the session, we will ask the participants to will fill out a post-questionnaire surveys that asks asking questions about their experience with the iCurator.

We expect the user results to be positive, but perhaps with reservations about experiencing museums in such an uncommon way. Users will probably feel a bit uneasy about the technology and the novelty of the iCurator, but we hope that our system will have an interface that eliminates any hesitations about using the product. We expect predict users to will have more interactive experiences with the art as well as with other patrons during their visit to the museum with the assistance of the iCurator. If we get such results, this will mean that the iCurator has achieved our goal of making the visits to the museum experience more interactive, less intimidating, and overall a more gratifying experience.