Exhibition designer interview and contextual inquiry guide now up on wiki

[James William Yoon]

Thanks Clayton and Ron! You both bring up very valuable points.

Clayton, I've added your questions on visitors with disability to the guide,
and we'll be thinking more about this as well to add others.

Ron, I agree with all your points, particularly that this guide is only a
starting point. There really is a need for repeated contact to tune our
conversations, as every case will have its own idiosyncrasies. Also, it'd be
fantastic if you could circulate your requirements gathering report on
Kurio--we'd be especially interested in the methodologies you used. And
thanks for the links to your papers: I've just read the abstracts, and they
look to be very useful!

Cheers,
James

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 10:55 PM, Ron Wakkary <rwakkary at sfu.ca> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Agreed! We've used variations of CI mixed with ethnography in the past. Two
> instances involved museums. There were a few things that we found to be very
> important that are not explicit in the draft but I'm sure you've considered.
> It also goes without saying that each inquiry became tailored to each
> institution to some degree so a generic protocol is only a starting point.
>
> * Repeat visits are a must or at minimum field visits were scheduled over
> several consecutive days, e.g. a week. This allowed for refining the
> protocol, targeting the inquiries, reflection, and follow-up.
> * We relied equally on participant observation (which requires putting the
> time in) as well as interviews. We targeted our observation work at visitor
> experiences, institutional overviews, and targeted stakeholder roles or
> functions, e.g. exhibit planning or content management.
> * We found that observing activities and workflows in museums are difficult
> due to the project nature of museums, complexity, and duration. We relied on
> a few additional techniques to observation and interviews, namely go-alongs
> (targeted observation of activities), video walkthroughs (videotaped
> talk-aloud sessions aimed at particular work activities or situated
> discussion and demonstrations of stakeholder perceptions of museum functions
> like an exhibit, for example), and documents collection and analysis. These
> forms of data collection allowed us to "triangulate" and reconstruct
> workflows and activities.
> * We also were committed to "reciprocity", meaning that data collected and
> analyzed was presented back to informants and stakeholders for correction
> and input. This also set us up very well for later participatory design
> activities.
>
> If it is helpful I can circulate or post a copy of an in-depth internal
> report on requirements gathering we completed in our last museum project,
> Kurio <http://kurio.iat.sfu.ca/>. It covers our methods, data, and
> analysis.
>
> We also found information ecologies, based on activity theory to be a
> helpful framework for designing the protocol and interview questions and
> later analysis. This is particularly so with inquiries where organizational
> and technology issues intersect. This approach helped us to acquire high
> level or ecological understandings of the site but also specifically with
> design implications. If you are interested see our M&W 2005 paper:
>
> http://www.archimuse.com/mw2005/papers/wakkary/wakkary.html
>
> and for design implications in using an ecological approach see a 2006 DIS
> paper:
>
> http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1142405.1142448
>
> If you have trouble accessing any of these just let me know.
>
> best,
> Ron
>
> ----- "Clayton H Lewis" <Clayton.Lewis at Colorado.EDU> wrote:
>
> > excellent material!
> >
> >
> > can we work something in that asks about visitors with disabilities,
> > eg
> >
> >
> > are there aspects of your exhibit development process that address the
> > interests of visitors with disabilities?
> >
> >
> > are there things that you'd like to do to address the interests of
> > visitors with disabilities?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > On Apr 20, 2009, at 10:19 PM, James William Yoon wrote:
> >
> >
> > Hullo,
> >
> > I've put up a working draft of our exhibition designer interview and
> > contextual inquiry guide on the wiki (along with Word, Pages, and PDF
> > versions under the attachments). For the time being, it's one of the
> > child pages off of the main Engage page. The direct link is:
> >
> > http://wiki.fluidproject.org/pages/viewpage.action?pageId=6818521
> >
> > Feel free to comment and edit where things are missing or unfitting.
> >
> > James
> >
> > _______________________________________________________
> > fluid-work mailing list - fluid-work at fluidproject.org
> > To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives,
> > see http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
> >
> >
> > Clayton Lewis
> > Professor of Computer Science
> > Scientist in Residence, Coleman Institute for Cognitive Disabilities
> > University of Colorado
> > http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~clayton<http://www.cs.colorado.edu/%7Eclayton>
> >
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________________
> > fluid-work mailing list - fluid-work at fluidproject.org
> > To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives,
> > see http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
>
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