This week at the ETC was a bit laid back but no less productive. We spent most of our week receiving information from the surveys we have been busy gather from museum guests, and analyzing the results. These surveys were designed to help us validate our Archetype Cube as well as set the way for a ground-truth experiment which we have planned for this upcoming week. In summary for the results, the numbers we received were positive if not sometimes surprising (in a good way!). Certain questions received the opposite validation then we were hoping for but upon further reflection, it has actually made our cube’s usefulness potential stronger.
Museum visits this week consisted mainly of interviewing the TAs to get a better idea of what they would like to see in the card deck we are developing, as well as gathering information on how they identify and talk about the archetypes and brainstorm ideas for MAKESHOP activities. This information is important as it will impact what information goes in the card set we are developing. This set will contain category decks where a TA would pull one from each randomly and challenge them with working within the design parameters given.
The overall design of the card deck as it is now consists of two card types:
- One type holds an info/reference card for each archetype that will detail its name, where it stands on our Archetype Cube, a reference photo, a quote that a person of this archetype might say in the MAKESHOP, and possibly suggestions of what approaches to TA –Guest interactions and activity design may or may not work.
- The other deck will consist of info/reference cards for each “genre” of MAKESHOP activities (ex. Hack and Repurpose) as well as design questions to consider in relation to the archetypes and general experience design.
As for a possible third deck in the collection, the team is still designing and talking to the teaching artists to figure figuring out what that could possibly be. Hopefully we will be able to have more info on that next week. With the information we do have, our main graphic artist, Dave has been working on card concepts shown below.
Lastly, we had a few visitors to our offices this week. One was visiting ETC faculty member David Bossert from Disney and another was Brad Baer from Blue Cadet. Both were impressed with our work (phew!) and gave some insightful tidbits as to how to carry forward with it. It was great to hear some outsiders’ perspectives on our project, especially for established industry veterans!