Author Archives: Lisa Adang

Post-Launch Update on Exhibition Channels: Metrics Analysis

To date, Cooper Hewitt has published several groupings of exhibition-related content in the channels editorial web format. You can read about the development of channels in my earlier post on the topic. This article will focus on post-launch observations of the two most content-rich channels currently on cooperhewitt.org: Scraps and By the People. The Scraps channel contains a wonderful series of posts about sustainability and textiles by Magali An Berthon, and the By the People channel has a number of in-depth articles written by the Curator of Socially Responsible Design at Cooper Hewitt, Cynthia E. Smith. This article focuses on channels as a platform, but I’d like to note that the metrics cited throughout reflect the appeal of the fabulous photography, illustration, research, and writing of channel contributors.

The Scraps exhibition installed in Cooper Hewitt’s galleries.

The Scraps exhibition installed in Cooper Hewitt’s galleries.

Since launch, there’s been a positive reaction among staff to channels. Overall they seem excited to have a considered editorial space in which to communicate with readers and exhibition-goers. There has also been strong user engagement with channels. Through Google Analytics we’ve seen two prominent user stories emerge in relation to channels. The first is a user who is planning or considering a trip to the museum. They enter the most common pathway to channel pages through the Current Exhibitions page. From the channel page, they then enter the ticket purchase path through the sidebar link. [Fig. 1] 4.25% of channel visitors proceeded to tickets.cooperhewitt.org from the Scraps channel; 6.09% did the same from the By the People channel. Web traffic through the Scraps channel contributed 13.31% of all web sales since launch, and By the People contributed 15.7%.

Fig. 1. The Scraps channel sidebar contains two well-trafficked links: one to purchase tickets to the museum, and one to the Scraps exhibition page on the collection website.

Fig. 1. The Scraps channel sidebar contains two well-trafficked links: one to purchase tickets to the museum, and one to the Scraps exhibition page on the collection website.

The second most prominent group of users demonstrates interest in diving into content. 16.32% of Scraps channel visitors used the sidebar link to visit the corresponding exhibition page that houses extended curatorial information about the objects on display; 10.99% used the navigation buttons to view additional channel posts. 19.11% of By the People channel visitors continued to the By the People exhibition page, and 2.7% navigated to additional channel posts.

Navigation patterns indicate that the two main types of users — those who are planning a visit to the museum and those who dive into editorial content — are largely distinct. There is little conversion from post reads to ticket sales, or vice-versa. Future iterations on channels could be directed at improving the cross-over between these user behaviors. Alternately, we could aim to disentangle the two user journeys to create clearer navigational pathways. Further investigation is required to know which is the right course of development.

Through analytics we’ve also observed some interesting behaviors in relation to channels and social media. One social-friendly affordance of the channel structure is that each post contains a digestible chunk of content with a dedicated URL. Social buttons on posts also encourage sharing. Pinterest has been the most active site for sharing content to date. Channel posts cross-promoted through Cooper Hewitt’s Object of the Day email subscription service are by far the most read and most shared. Because posts were shared so widely, 8.65% of traffic to the Scraps channels originated from from posts. (By the People content has had less impact on social media and has driven a negligible amount of site traffic.)

Since posts are apt for distribution, we realized they needed to serve as effective landing pages to drive discovery of channel content. As a solution, Publications department staff developed language to append to the bottom of each post to help readers understand the editorial context of the posts and navigate to the channel page. [Fig. 2] To make use of posts as points of entry, future channel improvements could develop discovery features on posts, such as suggested content. Currently, cross-post navigation is limited to a single increment forward or backward.

Fig. 2. Copy appended to each post contextualizes the content and leads readers to the channel home page or the exhibition page on the collection website.

Fig. 2. Copy appended to each post contextualizes the content and leads readers to the channel home page or the exhibition page on the collection website.

Further post-launch iterations focused on the appearance of posts in the channels page. Publications staff began utilizing an existing feature in WordPress to create customized preview text for posts. [Fig. 3] These crafted appeals are much more to inviting potential readers than the large blocks of excerpted text that show up automatically. [Fig. 4]

Fig. 3. View of a text-based post on a channel page, displaying customized preview text and read time.

Fig. 3. View of a text-based post on a channel page, displaying customized preview text and read time.

Fig. 4. View of a text-based post on a channel page, displaying automatically excerpted preview text.

Fig. 4. View of a text-based post on a channel page, displaying automatically excerpted preview text.

Digital & Emerging Media (D&EM) department developer, Rachel Nackman, also implemented some improvements to the way that post metadata displays in channels. We opted to calculate and show read time for text-based posts. I advocated for the inclusion of this feature because channel posts range widely in length. I hypothesized that showing read time to users would set appropriate expectations and would mitigate potential frustration that could arise from the inconsistency of post content. We also opted to differentiate video and publication posts in the channel view by displaying “post type” and omitting post author. [Fig. 5 and 6] Again, these tweaks were aimed at fine-tuning the platform UX and optimizing the presentation of content.

Fig. 5. View of a video post on a channel page, displaying “post type” metadata and omitting post author information.

Fig. 5. View of a video post on a channel page, displaying “post type” metadata and omitting post author information.

Fig. 6. View of a publication post on a channel page, displaying “post type” metadata and omitting post author information.

Fig. 6. View of a publication post on a channel page, displaying “post type” metadata and omitting post author information.

The channels project is as much an expansion of user-facing features as it is an extension of the staff-facing CMS. It has been useful to test both new methods of content distribution and new editorial workflows. Initially I intended channels to lean heavily on existing content creation workflows, but we have found that it is crucial to tailor content to the format in order to optimize user experience. It’s been an unexpectedly labor intensive initiative for content creators, but we’ve seen a return on effort through the channel format’s contribution to Cooper Hewitt business goals and educational mission.

Based on observed navigation patterns and engagement analytics it remains a question as to whether the two main user journeys through channels — toward ticket purchases and toward deep-dive editorial content — should be intertwined. We’ve seen little conversion between the two paths, so perhaps user needs would be better served by maintaining a separation between informational content (museum hours, travel information, what’s on view, ticket purchasing, etc.) and extended editorial and educational content. The question certainly bares further investigation — as we’ve seen, even the smallest UI changes to a content platform can have a big impact on the way content is received.

Announcing the Digital Collection Materials Project

Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum is pleased to announce it will begin its first major initiative to address the conservation needs of digital materials in 2017. Supported by the Smithsonian Collections Care and Preservation Fund, the Digital Collection Materials Project will serve to set standards, practices, and strategies related to digital materials in Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection. Of the more than 210,000 design objects in the collection, it is estimated that roughly 150 items incorporate information conveyed in a digital form. Many of these objects are home and office electronics, personal computing and mobile devices, and media players with interfaces that span both hardware and software. Among the 150 items, there are also born digital works–examples of design that originated in electronic form that are saved as digital data. These include both creative and useful software applications, as well as media assets, such as videos and computer-aided designs.

The first phase of the Digital Collection Materials Project will be the design and execution of a collection survey. The second phase will be case studies of select objects. The final phase will synthesize the survey results and case study findings in order to determine recommendations for a strategic plan of care, preservation, and responsible acquisition of digital materials for the collection.

The historical core of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s collection is comprised of objects selected by the museum’s founders, Sarah and Eleanor Hewitt, to document outstanding technical and artistic accomplishments in the decorative arts. Established in 1897 as an educational resource for The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, Cooper Hewitt’s collection continues to expand to encompass a range of materials exemplifying the broad category of human ingenuity and artistry that today we call design. The diversity of the museum’s collection exemplifies the core institutional belief that design is best understood through process, a framework that fosters understanding of human activity as it intersects with many materials and technologies, including the important fields of interface design, interaction design, and user experience design.

The Digital Collections Materials Project will help preserve long-term access to digital materials in the collection while maintaining the integrity of the designs they express. It will also allow Cooper Hewitt to move forward responsibly with acquisitions in the exciting realm of digital design. Since digital materials are especially vulnerable to the deleterious effects of technological obsolescence and decay, which can lead to inaccessibility and information loss, there is an urgent need to address the conservation needs of digital materials in the collection. It is with an eye to these materials’ cultural significance and vulnerability that the museum moves forward with the Digital Collection Materials Project.

This project received Federal support from the Smithsonian Collections Care and Preservation Fund, administered by the National Collections Program and the Smithsonian Collections Advisory Committee.

Join Labs! Work with Digital Materials in the Collection

There is a goldmine of digital materials in Cooper Hewitt’s permanent collection—rarities like prototypes donated by interaction design pioneer Bill Moggridge; gaming classics like the Game Time wristwatch (which you should really see in action! ); icons of product design like Apple’s iPhone; and artistic achievements in code by contemporary artist-designers like Aaron Koblin.

 Digital Project, Ten Thousand Cents, 2007–08; Designed by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima; USA; processing, adobe flash cs3, php/mysql, amazon mechanical turk, adobe photoshop, adobe after effects; Gift of Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima; 2014-41-2; Object Record

Digital Project, Ten Thousand Cents, 2007–08; Designed by Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima; USA; processing, adobe flash cs3, php/mysql, amazon mechanical turk, adobe photoshop, adobe after effects; Gift of Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima; 2014-41-2; Object Record

And we need your help! We are looking for two ultra-talented and fearless media spelunkers to dive into the collection and surface all of the computer, product design, and interaction design history within. We want you to help research and invigorate this part of the collection so that we can share it with the world. It’s a noble cause, and one that will help give museum visitors an even better experience of design at Cooper Hewitt.

One Laptop Per Child XO Computer, 2007; Designed by Yves Béhar, Bret Recor and fuseproject; injection molded abs plastic and polycarbonate, printed rubber, liquid crystal display, electronic components; steel, copper wire (power plug); H x W x D (closed): 3.5 × 22.9 × 24.1 cm (1 3/8 in. × 9 in. × 9 1/2 in.); Gift of George R. Kravis II; 2015-5-8-a,b; Object Record

One Laptop Per Child XO Computer, 2007; Designed by Yves Béhar, Bret Recor and fuseproject; injection molded abs plastic and polycarbonate, printed rubber, liquid crystal display, electronic components; steel, copper wire (power plug); H x W x D (closed): 3.5 × 22.9 × 24.1 cm (1 3/8 in. × 9 in. × 9 1/2 in.); Gift of George R. Kravis II; 2015-5-8-a,b; Object Record

Project Positions

We are hiring for two contract positions: Media Preservation Specialist and Time-Based Media Curatorial Assistant. The contractors will work together on the first phase of the Digital Collection Materials Project to survey and document collection items. Check out the official project announcement below to understand the full scope of the project.

To Apply

To apply for the Media Preservation Specialist or Time-Based Media Curatorial Assistant position:

  1. Read the official project announcement.
  2. Download the Request for Proposal for the position you wish to apply:
  3. Follow the Proposal Submission Guidelines outlined in the Request for Proposal.
  4. Submit your proposal to cooperhewittdigital@si.edu by December 20, 2016.

Looking forward to seeing your applications—we can’t wait to partner with you for this important work!

SketchBot (USA), 2012; Industrial Design by Universal Design Studio (United Kingdom); aluminum, plastic, assorted electrical components, javascript, html, css and python source files; H x W x D: 137.2 × 137.2 × 137.2 cm (54 × 54 × 54 in.); Gift of Google Inc.; s-g-1; Object Record

SketchBot (USA), 2012; Industrial Design by Universal Design Studio (United Kingdom); aluminum, plastic, assorted electrical components, javascript, html, css and python source files; H x W x D: 137.2 × 137.2 × 137.2 cm (54 × 54 × 54 in.); Gift of Google Inc.; s-g-1; Object Record

This project received Federal support from the Smithsonian Collections Care and Preservation Fund, administered by the National Collections Program and the Smithsonian Collections Advisory Committee.

Process Lab: Citizen Designer Digital Interactive, Design Case Study

Fig.1. Process Lab: Citizen Designer exhibition and signage, on view at Cooper Hewitt.

Fig.1. Process Lab: Citizen Designer exhibition and signage, on view at Cooper Hewitt

Background

The Process Lab is a hands-on educational space where visitors are invited to get involved in design process. Process Lab: Citizen Designer complimented the exhibition By the People: Designing a Better America, exploring the poverty, income inequality, stagnating wages, rising housing costs, limited public transport, and diminishing social mobility facing America today.

In Process Lab: Citizen Designer participants moved through a series of prompts and completed a worksheet [fig. 2]. Selecting a value they care about, a question that matters, and design tactics they could use to make a difference, participants used these constraints to create a sketch of a potential solution.

Design Brief

Cooper Hewitt’s Education Department asked Digital & Emerging Media (D&EM) to build an interactive experience that would encourage visitors to learn from each other by allowing them to share and compare their participation in exhibition Process Lab: Citizen Designer.

I served as project manager and user-experience/user-interaction designer, working closely with D&EM’s developer, Rachel Nackman, on the project. Interface Studio Architects (ISA) collaborated on concept and provided environmental graphics.

Fig. 2. Completed worksheet with question, value and tactic selections, along with a solution sketch

Fig. 2. Completed worksheet with question, value and tactic selections, along with a solution sketch

Process: Ideation

Project collaborators—D&EM, the Education Department, and ISA—came together for the initial steps of ideation. Since the exhibition concept and design was well established at this time, it was clear how participants would engage with the activity. Through the process of using cards and prompts to complete a worksheet they would generate several pieces of information: a value, a question, one to two tactic selections, and a solution sketch. The group decided that these elements would provide the content for the “sharing and comparing” specification in the project brief.

Of the participant-generated information, the solution sketch stood out as the only non-discrete element. We determined that given the available time and budget, a simple analog solution would be ideal. This became a series of wall-mounted display bins in which participants could deposit their completed worksheets. This left value, question, and tactic information to work with for the content of the digital interactive.

From the beginning, the Education Department mentioned a “broadcast wall.” Through conversation, we unpacked this term and found a core value statement within it. Phrased as a question, we could now ask:

“How might we empower participants to think about themselves within a community so that they can be inspired to design for social change?”

Framing this question allowed us to outline project objectives, knowing the solution should:

  • Help form a virtual community of exhibition participants.
  • Allow individual participants to see themselves in relation to that community.
  • Encourage participants to apply learnings from the exhibition other communities

Challenges

As the project team clarified project objectives, we also identified a number of challenges that the design solution would need to navigate:

  • Adding Value, Not Complexity. The conceptual content of Process Lab: Citizen Designer was complex. The design activity had a number of steps and choices. The brief asked that D&EM add features to the experience, but the project team also needed to mitigate a potentially heavy cognitive load on participants.
  • Predetermined Technologies. An implicit part of the brief required that D&EM incorporate the Pen into user interactions. Since the Pen’s NFC-reading technology is embedded throughout Cooper Hewitt, the digital interactive needed to utilize this functionality.
  • Spatial Constraints. Data and power drops, architectural features, and HVAC components created limitations for positioning the interactive in the room.
  • Time Constraints. D&EM had two months to conceptualize and implement a solution in time for the opening of the exhibition.
  • Adapting to an Existing Design. D&EM entered the exhibition design process at it’s final stages. The solution for the digital interactive had to work with the established participant-flow, environmental graphics, copy, furniture, and spatial arrangement conceived by ISA and the Education Department.
  • Budget. Given that the exhibition design was nearly complete, there was virtually no budget for equipment purchases or external resourcing.

Process: Defining a Design Direction

From the design brief, challenges, objectives, and requirements established so far, we could now begin to propose solutions. Data visualization surfaced as a potential way to fulfill the sharing, comparing and broadcasting requirements of the project. A visualization could also accommodate the requirement to allow an individual participants to compare themselves to the virtual exhibition community by displaying individual data in relation to the aggregate.

ISA and I sketched ideas for the data visualization [figs. 3 and 4], exploring a variety of structures. As the project team shared and reviewed the sketches, discussion revealed some important requirements for the data organization:

  • The question, value and tactic information should be hierarchically nested.
  • The hierarchy should be arranged so that question was the parent of value, and value was the parent of tactics.
Fig. 3. My early data visualization sketches

Fig. 3. My early data visualization sketches

Fig. 4. ISA’s data visualization sketch

Fig. 4. ISA’s data visualization sketch

With this information in hand, Rachel proceeded with the construction of the database that would feed the visualization. The project team identified an available 55-inch monitor to display the data visualization in the gallery; oriented vertically it could fit into the room. As I sketched ideas for data visualizations I worked within the given size and aspect ratio. Soon it became clear that the number of possible combinations within the given data structure made it impossible to accommodate the full aggregate view in the visualization. To illustrate the improbability of showing all the data, I created a leaderboard with mock values for the hundreds of permutations that result from the combination of 12 value, 12 question and 36 tactic selections [fig. 5, left]. Not only was the volume of information overwhelming on the leaderboard, but Rachel and I agreed that the format made no interpretive meaning of the data. If the solution should serve the project goal to “empower participants to think about themselves within a community so that they can be inspired to design for social change,” it needed to have a clear message. This insight led to a series steps towards narrativizing the data with text [fig. 5].

Concurrently, the data visualization component was taking shape as an enclosure chart, also known as a circle packing representation. This format could accommodate both hierarchical information (nesting of the circles) and values for each component (size of the circles). With the full project team on board with the design direction, Rachel began development on the data visualization using D3.js library.

Fig. 5. Series of mocks moving from a leaderboard format to a narrativized presentation of the data with an enclosure chart

Fig. 5. Series of mocks moving from a leaderboard format to a narrativized presentation of data with an enclosure chart

Process: Refining and Implementing a Solution

Through parallel work and constant communication, Rachel and I progressed through a number of decisions around visual presentation and database design. We agreed that to enhance legibility we should eliminate tactics from the visualization and present them separately. I created a mock that applied Cooper Hewitt’s brand to Rachel’s initial implementation of the enclosure chart. I proposed copy that wrapped the data in understandable language, and compared the latest participant to the virtual community of participants. I opted for percentage values to reinforce the relationship of individual response to aggregate. Black and white overall, I used hot pink to highlight the relationship between the text and the data visualization. A later iteration used pink to indicate all participant data points. I inverted the background in the lower quarter of the screen to separate tactic information from the data visualization so that it was apparent this data was not feeding into the enclosure chart, and I utilized tactic icons provided by ISA to visually connect the digital interactive to the worksheet design [fig. 2].

Next, I printed a paper prototype at scale to check legibility and ADA compliance. This let us analyze the design in a new context and invited feedback from officemates. As Rachel implemented the design in code, we worked with Education to hone the messaging through copy changes and graphic refinements.

Fig. 5. A paper prototype made to scale invited people outside the project team to respond to the design, and helped check for legibility

Fig. 5. A paper prototype made to scale invited people outside the project team to respond to the design, and helped check for legibility

The next steps towards project realization involved integrating the data visualization into the gallery experience, and the web experience on collection.cooperhewitt.org, the collection website. The Pen bridges these two user-flows by allowing museum visitors to collect information in the galleries. The Pen is associated with a unique visit ID for each new session. NFC tags in the galleries are loaded with data by curatorial and exhibitions staff so that visitors can use the Pen to save information to the onboard memory of the Pen. When they finish their visit the Pen data is uploaded by museum staff to a central database that feeds into unique URLs established for each visit on the collection site.

The Process Lab: Citizen Designer digital interactive project needed to work with the established system of Pens, NFC tags, and collection site, but also accommodate a new type of data. Rachel connected the question/value/tactic database to the Cooper Hewitt API and collections site. A reader-board at a freestanding station would allow participants to upload Pen data to the database [fig. 6]. The remaining parts of the participant-flow to engineer were the presentation of real time data on the visualization screen, and the leap from the completed worksheet to digitized data on the Pen.

Rachel found that her code could ping the API frequently to look for new database information to display on the monitor—this would allow for near real-time responsiveness of the screen to reader-board Pen data uploads. Rachel and I decided on the choreography of the screen display together: a quick succession of entries would result in a queue. A full queue would cycle through entries. New entries would be added to the back of the queue. An empty queue would hold on the last entry. This configuration assumed that if the queue was full when they added their entry participants may not see their data immediately. We agreed to offload the challenge of designing visual feedback about the queue length and succession to a subsequent iteration in service of meeting the launch deadline. The queue length has not proven problematic so far, and most participants see their data on screen right away.

Fig. 6. Monitor displaying the data visualization website; to the left is the reader-board station

Fig. 6. Monitor displaying the data visualization website; to the left is the reader-board station

As Rachel and I brought the reader board, data visualization database, and website together, ISA worked on the graphic that would connect the worksheet experience to the digital interactive. The project team agreed that NFC tags placed under a wall graphic would serve as the interface for participants to record their worksheet answers digitally [fig. 7].

Fig. 7. ISA-designed “input graphic” where participants record their worksheet selections; NFC tags beneath the circles write question, value and tactic data to the onboard memory of the Pen

Fig. 7. ISA-designed “input graphic” where participants record their worksheet selections; NFC tags beneath the circles write question, value and tactic data to the onboard memory of the Pen

Process: Installation, Observation & Iteration

Rachel and I had the display website ready just in time for exhibition installation. Exhibitions staff and the project team negotiated the placement of all the elements in the gallery. Because of obstacles in the room, as well as data and power drop locations, the input wall graphic [fig. 7] had to be positioned apart from the reader-board and display screen. This was unfortunate given the interconnection of these steps. Also non-ideal was the fact that ISA’s numeric way-finding system omitted the step of uploading Pen data at the reader-board and viewing the data on-screen [fig.1]. After installation we had concerns that there would be low engagement with the digital interactive because of its disconnect from the rest of the experience.

As soon as the exhibition was open to the public we could see database activity. Engagement metrics looked good with 9,560 instances of use in the first ten days. The quality of those interactions, however, was poor. Only 5.8% satisfied the data requirements written into the code. The code was looking for at least one question, one value, and one tactic in order to process the information and display it on-screen. Any partial entries were discounted.

Fig. 8. A snippet of database entries from the first few days of the exhibition showing a high number of missing question, value and tactic entries

Fig. 8. A snippet of database entries from the first few days of the exhibition showing a high number of missing question, value and tactic entries

Conclusion

The project team met the steep challenges of limited time and budget—we designed and built a completely new way to use the Pen technology. High engagement with the digital interactive showed that what we created was inviting, and fit into the participatory context of the exhibition. Database activity, however, showed points of friction for participants. Most had trouble selecting a question, value and tactic on the input graphic, and most did not successfully upload their Pen data at the reader-board. Stringent database requirements added increased difficulty.

Based on these observations, it is clear that the design of the digital interactive could be optimized. We also learned that some of the challenges facing the project could have been mitigated by closer involvement of D&EM with the larger exhibition design effort. Our next objective is to stabilize the digital interactive at an acceptable level of usability. We will continue observing participant behavior in order to inform our next iterations toward a minimum viable product. Once we meet the usability requirement, our next goal will be to hand-off the interactive to gallery staff for continued maintenance over the duration of the exhibition.

As an experience, the Process Lab:Citizen Designer digital interactive has a ways to go, but we are excited by the project’s role in expanding how visitors use the Pen. This is the first time that we’ve configured Pen interactivity to allow visitors to input information and see that input visualized in near real-time. There’s significant potential to reuse the infrastructure of this project again in a different exhibition context, adapting the input graphic and data output design to a new educational concept, and the database to new content.

Exhibition Channels on Cooperhewitt.org

There’s a new organizational function on cooperhewitt.org that we’re calling “channels.” Channels are a filtering system for WordPress posts that allow us to group content in a blog-style format around themes. Our first iteration of this feature groups posts into exhibition-themed channels. Subsequent iterations can expand the implementation of channels to broader themed groupings that will help break cooperhewitt.org content out of the current menu organization. In our long-term web strategy this is an important progression to making the site more user-focused and less dictated by internal departmental organization.

The idea is that channels will promote browsing across different types of content on the site because any type of WordPress post—publication, event, Object of the Day, press, or video—can be added to a channel. Posts can also live in multiple channels at once. In this way, the channel configuration moves us toward our goal of creating pathways through cooperhewitt.org content that focus on user needs; as we develop a clearer picture of our web visitors, we can start implementing channels that cater to specific sets of users with content tailored to their interests and requirements. Leaning more heavily on posts and channels than pages in WordPress also leads us into shifting our focus from website = a static archive to website = an ever-changing flow of information, which will help keep our web content fresher and more engaged with concurrent museum programs and events.

Screenshot of the Fragile Beasts exhibition channel page on cooperhewitt.org

The Fragile Beasts exhibition channel page. Additional posts in the channel load as snippets below the main exhibition post (pictured here). The sidebar is populated with metadata entered into custom fields in the CMS.

In WordPress terms, channels are a type of taxonomy added through the CustomPress plugin. We enabled the channel taxonomy for all post types so that in the CMS our staff can flag posts to belong to whichever channels they wish. For the current exhibition channel system to work we also created a new type of post specifically for exhibitions. When an exhibition post is added to a channel, the channel code recognizes that this should be the featured post, which means its “featured image” (designated in the WordPress CMS) becomes the header image for the whole channel and the post is pinned to the top of the page. The exhibition post content is configured to appear in its entirety on the channel page, while all other posts in the channel display as snippets, cascading in reverse chronological order.

Through CustomPress we also created several custom fields for exhibition posts, which populate the sidebar with pertinent metadata and links. The new custom fields on exhibition posts are: Exhibition Title, Collection Site Exhibition URL, Exhibition Start Date, and Exhibition End Date. The sidebar accommodates important “at-a-glance” information provided by the custom field input: for example, if the date range falls in the present, the sidebar displays a link to online ticketing. Tags show up as well to act as short descriptors of the exhibition and channel content. The collection site URL builds a bridge to our other web presence at collection.cooperhewitt.org, where users can find extended curatorial information about the exhibition.

Screenshot of the sidebar on the <em>Fragile Beasts</em> exhibition channel page.

The sidebar on the Fragile Beasts exhibition channel page displays quick reference information and links.

On a channel page, clicking on a snippet (below the leading exhibition post) directs users to a post page where they can read extended content. On the post page we added an element in the sidebar called “Related Channels.” This link provides navigation back to the channel from which users flowed. It can also be a jumping-off point to a new channel. Since posts can live in multiple channels at once this feature promotes the lateral cross-content navigation we’re looking to foster.

Screenshot of sidebar on a post page displaying Related Channel navigation.

The sidebar on post pages provides “Related Channel” navigation, which can be a hub to jump into several editorial streams.

Our plan over the coming weeks is to on-board CMS users to the requirements of the new channel system. As we launch new channels we will help keep information flowing by maintaining a publishing schedule and identifying content that can fit into channel themes. Our upcoming exhibition Scraps: Fashion, Textiles and Creative Reuse will be our first major test of the channels system. The Scraps channel will include a wealth of extra-exhibition content, which we’re looking forward to showcasing with this new system.

My mock-up for the exhibition channel structure and design. Some of the features on the mock were knocked off the to-do list in service of getting an MVP on the live site.

My mock-up for the exhibition channel structure and design. Some of the features on the mock were knocked off the to-do list in service of getting an MVP on the live site. Additional feature roll-out will be on-going.

Museums and the Web Conference Recap: Administrative Tools at Cooper Hewitt

The Labs team had a great time at Museums and the Web this year. We published two papers for the conference and presented them both to the audience of cultural heritage thinkers, makers, planners and administrators. Sam Brenner and I shared our paper, “Winning (and losing) hearts and minds of museum staff: Administrative interfaces at Cooper Hewitt,” which outlines the process of designing, developing and iterating two in-house built, staff-facing tools: Tagatron and the Pen Pairing Station. Both administrative tools are essential aides to staff managing new responsibilities associated with visitor-facing gallery technologies.

Here is the deck from our presentation:

Administrative interfaces at Cooper Hewitt (14)

Administrative interfaces at Cooper Hewitt

Introduction

  • Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. New York, New York.
  • Our strategy around presenting design is to expose process—how things are made, how they are conceived, how they are designed.
  • This presentation will speak to our philosophy of openness around design process in sharing part of the back-story of how our current visitor-facing experience came together and how it’s maintained.

Administrative interfaces at Cooper Hewitt (1)

Visitor Interfaces

  • The visitor-facing technologies in the museum, introduced in 2014, invite new forms of engagement with the Cooper Hewitt collection. They encourage active participation, letting visitors play, design and collect through multi-touch table applications and the Pen.
  • Before we were able to re-design the visitor’s relationship to the museum we went through comprehensive changes at every level.

Administrative interfaces at Cooper Hewitt (2)

Comprehensive Re-design / Institutional Shift

  • We began a restoration of the mansion, stripping it down to its Carnegie steel girders.
  • To a similar degree we rethought the organizational infrastructure of Cooper Hewitt with a comprehensive re-design of operations, workflows and responsibilities.

Administrative interfaces at Cooper Hewitt (3)

New Responsibilities (for Everyone)

  • There were new jobs created to support the new visitor experience, including that of our Gallery Technology Manager, Mary Fe, whose job responsibilities include maintaining the Pens and troubleshooting touch tables and gallery interactives
  • The re-design affects every staff member at Cooper Hewitt:
  • Registrars: aggressive timetable to enter data
  • Security: understand the mission and visitor experience, teaching visitors on pen usage
  • Exhibitions: label programming, maintenance
  • Curators: tags, relations, chat formatting for length
  • Visitor services: pen pairing – whole new step in between “welcome” and ticket sale
  • Before we got to this stage there was the task of onboarding staff to new responsibilities, which fell largely to the Digital & Emerging Media department. With the allocation of new responsibilities also came the opportunity to create tools that could facilitate some of the work.

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Defining the Need for Considered Interfaces

  • Why did we decide that new interfaces were necessary in certain parts of the workflow?
  • We started with observation, watching workflows as they emerged. We created tools to assist where necessary. The need for interfaces was in part logistical, in part technical and also in part human.
  • Candidates for interface development are parts of the new digital ecosystem where there is:
  • High volume of data
  • Large number of users
  • Complex tasks
  • Something that needs constraints or enforcement
  • Example: the job of assigning tags and related objects to everything we put on display for the reopening. The touch table interfaces utilize tag and related object information. This data does not live in TMS, so it is housed in a custom database.
  • The task of creating the data fell to the curators. Originally this was stored in Excel files. While the curators were happy using spreadsheets, we identified a few major issues with them. The biggest one was that every department had devised their own schema for storing the data, which would ultimately have to be reconciled
  • This example fits all of the criteria above.

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Case Study 1: Tagatron

  • Explicit purpose of the Tagatron tool: make the work quicker; make the metadata consistent; make the organization of the metadata consistent
  • Making this tool highlighted for the digital team the complex relationship between the work, the tool, and the people responsible for each—even though we believed the tool made things easier, the tool had its own set of ongoing technical and usability issues
  • We found that those issues propagated an amount of distrust or lack of confidence in the larger project. Some of these were due to bugs in the tool, but some of it was just that now it was known that this was work that would be “enforced” or taken more seriously, which made users uncomfortable.
  • Key idea: the interface takes on a symbolic value in representing “new responsibilities” and can bring about issues that it might not have been designed to address. It takes on a complex position between human needs and technical needs.

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Tagatron (continued)

  • These graphs illustrate how prolific the task of tagging and relating objects is. It was important to build Tagatron because it is crucial tool in the ongoing operation of the museum’s digital experience. More so than the spreadsheets ever could, it allows for scalability.
  • Since the re-opening the tool went through one major design and backend overhaul, and continues to see small iterations.

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Case Study 2: Pen Pairing Stations

  • Context of Pen Pairing: Every visitor to the museum receives a Pen. At the museum’s front desk each Pen is paired with a unique admission ticket. Every ticket has a shortcode identifier that allows visitors to retrieve their Pen visit data online when they enter the code on their ticket.
  • Pen pairing is done at a very critical point in the visitor experience when the interaction needs to be quick and frictionless. Visitor Services Associates have to coordinate a number of simultaneous tasks.

Pen Pairing Station (continued)

  • This video depicts the Pen pairing process behind the front desk. It documents the first version of the Pen Pairing application, and shows the exposed Pen-reading circuit board before housing was built.
  • Pen pairing is one of the most demanding of the new responsibilities created by the “new experience”–has to fit between welcoming a visitor, taking their money, answering any questions, looking up their member ID.
  • Each use of the tool only lasts 5-10 seconds but we’ve spent many hours and built many versions of this tool to figure out exactly what needs to happen in that time to accomplish all the tasks, including updating databases, handling failures, serial communication
  • Every one of these iterations gave us an opportunity to be connected to the staff using the tools, not only to make something that works better, but to be a part of the conversation

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Administrative Interfaces: What does success look like? How does it feel?

  • In informal interviews with Tagatron users we found trust to be a central theme of users’ response to the interface
  • Since Tagatron augments the curators’ use of TMS, they were less trusting of its database as a long-lasting data repository
  • Improving user feedback (like confirmation messages) helped build trust in the interface
  • Bill Moggridge, Designing Interaction: designing interaction is designing the relationship between people and things
  • We came to realize the responsibility of designing interfaces—validating and responding to users’ concerns; acknowledging the burden of new responsibilities
  • Administrative interfaces at the crux of the staff relationship to the new Cooper Hewitt experience
  • Anticipating issues in developing and maintaining administrative interfaces (when success feels like failure):
  • First, the human factor: being open to the feedback and creating an environment where the channels exist to communicate staff thoughts on the tool.
  • Second, the technical factor: being able to act on what you hear from staff and make the required changes to complete the feedback loop.
  • Our responsibility as facilitators of technology in the museum to hear and act on concerns.

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Questions to ask when starting an administrative application to anticipate issues and accommodate of feedback.

Question 1: To what degree should the (administrative) tool fit with pre-existing notions?

  • This question addresses the need to understand contextual use of the tool
  • Tagatron: curatorial culture around spreadsheets and TMS
  • Pen Pairing Station: this tool disrupted the expected ticket selling workflow. We learned the that the tool needed to make Pen Pairing as unobtrusive as possible

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Question 2: How much of the underlying technology should come through to the interface?

  • Infrastructure & interfaces are layers of an onion—the best mental model for a tool’s interface might not reflect the best technical model for its back end
  • Tagatron: the filtering tools were a reflection of how data was stored in the database, not how curators expected it
  • Pen Pairing Station: error messages from all parts of the application stack came through to the user unaltered, this was not helpful to users
  • Highlights the need for a technical solution that allows for flexibility in the middle, “translation layer” of an application

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Question 3: What kinds of feedback does the tool provide?

  • Feedback is the voice of the interface/ its personality–is it finicky or reliable? Annoying or supportive?
  • Tagatron: missing feedback created distrust
  • Pen Pairing: too much feedback caused confusion (error messages, validation handshake)
  • Our design and production methodology: working code always wins/ learning through doing; build small, working prototypes and continually iterate.
  • A more anticipatory form of design (like design thinking) could have helped us find answers to this question sooner

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Question 4: Is it an appropriate time for experimentation?

  • Tagatron’s v1 included relatively unknown-to-us technology like MongoDB and nodejs. We should have used more familiar technology or done small-scale tests before implementing a project of this scale–it severely hindered our ability to accommodate feedback
  • Other tools we built that involved experimental tech were only successful because their scale and userbase were far smaller (label writer)

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The result of everything: bridges, lines of communication opened

  • Building administrative tools for staff created cross-departmental conversation—in taking on the role of building and maintaining Tagatron and the Pen Pairing Station, the Digital & Emerging Media team engaged users from departments across the museum and observed closely how the tools fit into staff members’ larger roles

Curating Exhibition Video for Digital Platforms

First, let me begin this post with a hearty “hello”! This is my first Labs blog post, though I’ve been on board with the Digital and Emerging Media team since July 2015 as Media Technologist. Day-to-day I participate in much of the Labs activity that you’ve read about here: maintaining and improving our website; looking for ways to enhance visitor experience; and expanding the meaningful implementation of technology at Cooper Hewitt. In this post I will focus on the slice of my work that pertains to video content and exhibitions.

Detail: Brochure, Memphis (Condominiums): Portfolio, 1985

Detail: Brochure, Memphis (Condominiums): Portfolio, 1985

The topic of exhibition video is fresh in my mind since we are just off the installation of Beauty—Cooper Hewitt Design Triennial. This is a multi-floor exhibit that contains twenty-one videos hand-picked or commissioned by the exhibition curators. My part in the exhibition workflow is to format, brand, caption and quality-check videos, ushering them through a production flow that results in their display in the galleries and distribution online. Along with the rest of the Labs team, I also advise on the presentation and installation of videos and interactive experiences in exhibitions and on the web, and help steer the integration of Pen functionality with exhibition content. This post gathers some of my video-minded observations collected on the road to installing Beauty.

The Beauty curators and the Labs team came together when content for the show began to arrive—both loans of physical objects and digital file transfers. At this time, my video workflow shifted into high gear, and I began to really see the landscape of digital content planned for the exhibit. Videos in Beauty fall into roughly two categories: those that are the primary highlighted object on display and those that supplement the display of another object. Sam Brenner recently posted about reformatting our web presentation of video content when it stands in as primary collection object and has a medium that is “video, animation or other[wise] screen-based.” This change was a result of thinking through the flag we raised earlier for the curators around linking collection records to tags, i.e. “what visitors get when they collect works with the Pen.” As has been mentioned before on this blog, the relationship of collecting points (NFC tags) to collection objects does not need to be one-to-one; Beauty expanded our exploration of the tags-to-collection records relationship in a few interesting ways.

Collecting Neri Oxmann

When visitors collect at the Neri Oxman tag they save a cluster of collections database records, including 12 glass vessels and a video.

In the Beauty exhibition, collecting points are presented uniformly: one tag in each object label. Additionally, tags positioned beside wall text panels allow visitors to save chunks of written exhibition content. The curatorial format of the Triennial exhibition organized around designers (sometimes with multiple works on display), however, encouraged us to think carefully about the tag-collecting relationship. I was impressed to see the curators curating the Pen experience, including notes to me along with each video, like “the works in the show are jewelry pieces; the video will supplement,” “video is primary object; digital prints supplement,” and “video clips sequenced together for display but each video is separately collectible.” They were really thinking about the user flow of the Pen and the post-visit experience, extending their role in organizing and presenting information to all aspects of the museum experience.

Another first in the Beauty exhibition is the video content created specifically for interactive tables. With the curators’ encouragement, the designers featured in the exhibition considered the tables as a unique environment to present bonus content. For example, Olivier van Herpt provided a video of his 3D printer at work on the ceramic vessels on display in the exhibition. It was interesting to see the possibilities that the tables and post-visit outlets opened up—for one thing, the quality standards can be more relaxed for videos shown outside the monitors in the galleries. Also notable is the fact that the Beauty curators selected behind-the-scenes-type videos for tables and post-visit, suggesting that these outlets make room for content that might not typically make it onto gallery walls.

Still from Oliver van Herpt's "3D Printed Ceramic Process"

The video “3D Printed Ceramic Process” by Oliver van Herpt is an example of behind-the-scenes video content that was made for tables and website display only.

The practical fallout on my end was that these supplemental videos added to the already video-heavy exhibition, putting increased pressure on the video workflow. In turn, this revealed a major lack of optimization. The diagram of my video workflow shows, for example, several repeated instances of formatting, captioning and exporting. Multiplied by twenty-one, each of these redundant procedures takes up significant time. Application of branding is probably the biggest time-hog in the workflow—all of it is done manually and locking in the information of maker, credit line and video title with curators and designers is a substantial task. It’s funny, the amount of video content is increasing in exhibitions at Cooper Hewitt and it’s receiving increased attention from curators, but the supplementary videos in the galleries are not treated as first-order exhibition objects, so they don’t go through as rigorous a documentation process as other works in the show. Because of this, video-specific information required for my workflow remained in flux until the very last minute. Even the video content itself continued to shift as designers pushed past my deadlines to request more time to make changes and additions. In truth, the deadlines related to in-gallery video content are much stricter than those for table/post-visit-only content because gallery videos require hardware installation. The environment of the tables and website afford continual change, but deadlines act as benchmarks to keep those interfaces stocked with new content that stays in sync with objects in the physical exhibition.

Exhibition Video Workflow

The workflow that videos follow to get to gallery screens, interactive tables and the collections website.

I maintain a spreadsheet to collect video information and maintain order over my exhibitions video workflow. These are the column headings.

All the steps and data points that need to be checked-off in my exhibition video workflow.

By the exhibition opening, I had all video information confirmed, and all branding and formatting completed. The running spreadsheet I keep as a video to-do list was filled with check-marks and green (good-to-go) highlighting. I had created media records in TMS and connected them to exhibition videos uploaded to YouTube; this allows a script to pull in the embed code so videos appear within the YouTube player on the collections site. I also linked the media records to other database entries so that they would show up on the collections site in relation to other objects and people. For example, since I linked the “Afreaks Process” video record to all of the records for the beaded Afreak objects, the video appears on each object page, like the one for The Haas Brothers and Haas Sisters’ “Evelyn”. Related videos like this one (that are not the primary object) are configured to appear at the bottom of an object page with the language, “We have 1 video that features Sculpture, Evelyn, from the Afreaks series, 2015.” Since the video has its own record in the database, there is also a corresponding “video page” for the same clip that presents the video at the top with related objects in a grid view below. I also connected object records to database entries for people, ensuring that visitors who click on a name find videos among the list of associated objects.

Screenshot of Haas Brothers record webpage

The webpage for the Haas Brothers record includes a video among the related objects.

It is highly gratifying to seed videos into this web of database connections. The content is so rich and so interesting that it really enhances the texture of the collections site and of exhibitions. Cooper Hewitt curators demonstrated their appreciation for the value of video by honoring video works as primary objects on display. They also utilized video in a demonstrative way to enhance the presentation of highlighted works. Beauty opened the doors for curating video works on interactive tables, and grouping videos in with clusters of data linked to collecting points (aka. tags). I’m pleased with the overall highly integrated and considered take on video content in the latest exhibition, and I hope we can push the integration even further as the curators become increasingly invested in adapting their practice to the extended exhibition platforms we have in place like tables, tags and web.