Finding personal relevance in a vast collection
Creating meaningful connections
Collections are often shown to visitors from the institute's perspective - here is everything we have got - amazing eh? This experience is about surfacing only some of the collection, cleverly curated, to present it from the visitor's point of interest.
The overall challenge here was to make a vast collection personally relevant to visitors. We aimed to make an emotional connection within a minute or so.
We do that by triggering memories; allowing curated but meaningful search; and letting visitors collect the things they find.
Research was gold
We conducted paper testing with our audience to see if we could create these emotional reactions through the content they might discover.
What would get them engaged? What would keep them wanting to explore more, and create their own personal collection?
It was obvious people enjoyed rummaging through the paper search results; we quickly agreed that replicating that enjoyable physical experience could be done through a large-scale multi touch table.
Memory triggers
An example of how we created emotional connections was by asking people what year they were born. We then presented them with a "lifeline" of imagery which cleverly dips into different collections - for your early years we show objects from the toy collection; in your teenage years you see NZ music; young adulthood surfaces political cartoons; popular culture etc.
The result is very fast - quickly people start seeing things they remember, triggering stories and memories and finding related objects and media. Absolute gold.
