Jerry Watkins
ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation
Queensland University of Technology
Kelvin Grove, Australia
November 2007
By Alvin John

Overview of Participatory Design

Australian Museum Stories experiment

Critique of the paper

GUEPS and CDs
Participatory Design (PD) originated in
Scandinavia in 1970s
User-centered design approach:
• involves users as much as possible so
that they can influence it
• integrates knowledge and expertise
from other disciplines than just IT
• is highly iterative so that testing can
insure that design meets users’
requirements

Experiment conducted at the Australian Museum
 to investigate the potential of social media based
communication strategies

Australian Museum
 Established in 1827 and oldest institution in the country
 Heritage has a collection of 14.5 million specimens
 Attracts web visitation rates exceeding 1.5 million per month

Museum authorities
 Shifted focus to quality of experience offered
 Explore social media as a medium to interact with communities
of interest
▪ Youths
▪ Informal learning groups

Participatory Design (PD) was chosen as the strategic
methodology to guide the social media experiment

PD was extended to
 museum exhibition design
 library website design

PD methodology was broken down into three phases
for the museum project
 Phase 1: Due Diligence
 Phase 2: Iterative Design cycles
 Phase 3: Desired Performance
Working party formed

Author as the designer/researcher

Museum’s Head of Audience Research

Head of Web Services
Phase 1 had three steps:
1.
Organizational observation
▪
2.
Domain review
▪
▪
▪
3.
First hand experience of culture and working practices
Reviewed current best practices by cultural institutions
Attracted by digital story telling genre – participants write and produce
autobiographical “mini-movies”
Chose to try “do-it-yourself” digital narratives
Initial project strategy
▪
▪
Use museum staff as participants in the first cycle of prototyping
Develop skills in creative storytelling
Project was christened “Australian Museum Stories”

Workshop Design
 Social prototyping experience
 Experiment conducted with online audiences, rather than physical visitors
 Initial phase was designed
▪
▪
to skill museum staff in social media production techniques
in-house training program
 2-day workshop
 Focus on three main areas:
▪ Creative teamwork
▪ Creative development
▪ Multimedia production

First workshop in June 2006
▪ Eleven participants assigned to four teams

Second workshop in November 2006
▪ First workshop was sufficiently positive
▪ Fourteen participants assigned to four teams (2 teams of three, 2 teams of four)

Teams consisted of:
 The writer
 The creative producer
 The editor
 The executive producer

Micro-documentary – a creative non-fiction piece
(preferably informal tone)

Teams start with a tentative story idea, genre definition,
required sources checklist

Executive producer leads creative development exercises

Team members required to generate by the end of the day




existing content
original content
final scripts
storyboards

Second and final day of workshop

Editing and postproduction at the Powerhouse Museum’s
Soundhouse Vectorlab facility

Participants given crash course on Sony’s Vegas video
editing suite

Tasks:
 Record voiceovers
 Edit micro-documentary according to storyboard

End product – Presentation of playable microdocumentaries in full screen and web-ready codecs

Evaluation techniques instituted:
 Output analysis
▪ Produced nine artifacts from eight groups over two
workshops
▪ Varied audiences interested in different subjects
 In-workshop survey
▪ Self administered questionnaire
▪ Indicated a high level of satisfaction with social
prototyping experience (24 out of 25)
▪ Organizational pressure may be a factor (internal
audience)
 Post-workshop surveys
▪ Discussion group approximately three months later
▪ Sessions based on ideas of “Future Workshop”
▪ Involved complete a self-administered survey
▪ How stories created could be used by museum
▪ Reflections on any perceived organizational barriers
 Focus groups
▪ Four focus groups conducted in February 2007
▪ Capture reaction of external potential target audience
▪
▪
▪
▪
Parents of under-5s
Parents of under-16s
Science teachers
Culturally active seniors
▪ Positive reaction to more informal style of museum communication
▪ Negative reaction to the quality of micro-documentaries


First iterative design cycle concluded in
March 2007
Parties involved in discussion:
 Workshop participants
 Senior management

Critique the current design, conduct of
workshops, evaluation protocols to make
improvements

Outcomes of the strategy meeting
 Production quality
▪ Improve quality of audio and video created
 Genre and format
▪ Micro-documentary format was a success
▪ Include other genres like linear micro-documentary and
online interactives for the museum’s forthcoming Web
2.0 website upgrade
 Second iterative design cycle
▪ Continue cultural engagement through social media
▪ Establishment of a core in-house team to continue and
sustain creative social media production
▪ Conduct pilot projects with external communities associated
with the museum
▪ Wide extensive use of the micro-documentary format
▪ Creation of vodcasts and podcasts by external biodiversity groups,
students of secondary schools
▪ Powerful way to summarize results of studies and disseminating to
the wider audience
▪ Online distribution
▪ Introduce blogs and wikis



Participatory Design application extended to
this experiment was a success
Incorporated users into decision making
process
With social prototyping in an iterative design
cycle, Australian Museum teams designed
new tools, techniques and genres of mircodocumentaries for communication strategies

Positive
 Positive results with application of Participatory Design

Not so positive
 Working party intervention might be a little too much for
the first iterative cycle of PD – more structured than usual
 Not a lot of detail about questionnaires and surveys
administered

Not a typical experiment with hard data tabulated and
arriving at a conclusion – different style (PD approach)

GUEPS
 Explaining
 Mental model

CDs
 Visibility
 Consistency
 Progressive Evaluation