Project 1 : arts343

DESIGN PROJECT ONE: Navigating Contested Content

Task: Navigating a Screen-Based Interface
Research Method: Paper Prototyping
Subject: Anthropological Museum

For class on 1.27, read this old article (with new introduction) on Fred Wilson's art installation, "Mining the Museum."

Please also read up on Paper Protyping.

PROJECT DESCRIPTION

With your team, you are to create a paper prototype for a touchscreen kiosk guide to the collections of University of Illinois' Spurlock Museum. Your design should reflect a particular point-of-view on the ethics and politics of displaying anthropological artifacts outside of their original and intended context.

Your guide may include the entire collections, or only one part. Include individual pages for at least 10 examples of actual artifacts, using printed reproductions from the website in your final presentation.

Be prepared to present your final product for a new user in our class - members of your team will serve as the "computer" to help a user's navigation through your site (ie. You will shuffle paper to help the prototype function.)

For the sake of time, you can substitute ("more like this" or "etc.") pages for where your design delves into larger collections of duplicated pages about specific artifacts, etc.

For the sake of time, you may also invent content or context for the Spurlock collection, as long as your fictions are based in some existing detail. (For example, you may invent that there is a whole collection of nurse's uniforms from Malaysia, collected by former Illini football star Red Grange, if you find something in the collection that suggests such a thing, and the display of such a collection makes sense for your design structure and theme.)

SCHEDULE (see course calendar for details)

01.27 - Introduce Project, begin content selection

02.03 - Structure and Layout

02.10 - User Testing and Critique

02.17 - Final due emailed to me as webpage

VIDEO RESULTS