State-of-the-art Analysis - Alexander Lingtorp

Preface

When visiting Tekniska Museet I arrived early so I had to wait for the others. I went to sit on a bench in the entrance hall near the closed ticket vendor area. While sitting there pondering I noticed how people moved through the area. The entrance area functioned as both a central point in which you could get to all the utility parts of the museum, like the wardrobe and toilets. You could also grab an elevator to other floors in which there were exhibitions. When sitting there I noticed that on the opposite side of the ticket area lay an information wall. Over the course of almost an hour not a single person went or even glanced towards that wall. On the wall hang two large shelves with brochures on Swedish, English, Russian and even Finnish. It was contained maps of both this museum and others in Stockholm. Over these to shelves there were two medium sized television displaying various information. Some covered time limited exhibitions and seasonal events others contained essential information about the museum, for example closing and opening hours. This whole arrangement did not attract a single person, except me of course. I had not choice but to look at it. This is what my analysis will cover, the information to visitors on-site.

Function

The obvious function for the information wall is to bring useful information to the visitor of the museum. We already concluded that the current arrangement does not fulfill the intended function. The problem of their current solution is mainly the placement. The inclusion of both television and brochures are both very nice and friendly towards the visitors. Even the various languages available are plentiful and nice. They might consider adding spanish and/or french but that is a minor improvement considering the main audience is pretty much already covered with the current language selection. Thus the main problem must be that the arrangement does not capture the attention of the visitors and thus render itself useless. The things to change is the position of the whole arrangement or use some kind of attention pointer, a sign for example. It is meant to be found and used and yet not a single person except myself even looked at it.