State Of The Art Analysis Eric Hallström

After visiting both Nordiska museet and Tekniska Museet is my impression very different. The themes on both museum is of course different but the whole experience was like day and night.

My impression from Nordiska Museet was very stiff and quite in contrast from Tekniska Museet that was alive and very interactive.

I will now go through some key points that "Gulan" talked about at a lecture from both the museums we visited.

Target group

From my point of view is this the most important question in this course. It’s easy as a developer to forget who is really going to use the stuff I’m developing. It’s funny though what the literature pointing, I’m quoting: “every product that is used by someone has a user experience.” And it’s so true, why are we really developing stuff if it’s not meant to be for the user? The other part from this quote to mean something is that you can’t design a user experience, the only thing as a developer can do is to design for the user experience. So the best thing you can do here is to really put a lot of work into what kind of people is the design for. This will make development much easier if you know what kind of target group you have. What does this particular group of people need and how do they cope with it? This is some key questions you need to ask yourself when developing something in the future. Some of the key features from the literature when user experience is in the focus is functionality, aesthetics, content, look, feel and emotional appeal for the design.  The literature is also pointing out the wide range of these aspects to reach i.e. your product needs to be fun, healthy, build a social capital and have some cultural status and the design also needs to bring some sense to the users in how they are experiences the product. In some way every object out there maybe have all of these features. I mean you can always relate to what specific objects mean to you and what they bring to you but can you really develop for example a cultural capital? So basically these are some good theories and they really are theories for me at this moment of course it’s a good goal to strive for but can you really reach and implement all of these features? The literature is calling these ideas for principles and really mention that they are something to strive towards and are here for us designers to have something to strive towards. 

Things to engage in at Nordiska Museet 

• Voice information from your portable speaker. 
• Interactive Ipads with information.

Layout of Nordiska Museet
The exhibition was rather self explaining and you just followed the guided voice in your head phones which was handed out in the start. So it was very easy to navigate and follow the exhibition route.

Visitors at Nordiska Museet   

My observations of other visitors at the museum was that they all walked very quietly around in par or alone and not saying much. There was really nothing to do other then just observe glass cages of old history. The main group was tourists and older people. Thought it was a Monday and maybe not the most crowded that to visit.   

Things to engage in at Tekniska Museet

• Loads of big touchscreens to examine bodies and other cool stuff.
• Kinect's screens that interacted in a nice way with the visitor. 
• Music 
• Computer games
• Bicycle that you could measure your produced energy.
• And the list can go on and on, there was loads of stuff to do and engage in. 

Layout of Tekniska Museet

It was the opposite of Nordiska museet was in terms of easily navigating through out the museum. Even through there was a separate exhibitions when we were there. And the separate exhibition was easy to navigate through out. 

Visitors at Tekniska Museet     

The target group here was rather clear, I felt really old walking around there navigating through loads of children running around like crazy. The target group here was family's and younger school classes. Even though I really appreciated both exhibitions and some stuff really blew my mind. 

We did a few interviews, here is one that Kenneth Runnman transcribed. We started with a short introduction that we where students from KTH and asked if it was okay to record the interview 

E = Eric, I = Interview target.

E: Första frågan då, varför valde ni att gå på just det här museet?
I: Fast, jag är ju egentligen också dum (person att fråga) för att jag känner honom(som arbetade på museet), vill ni ha mig ändå( som intervjuperson)?
E: Ja.
I: och så har jag jobbat här.Nej, men det är ett kul museum.
E: ehm, så det är inte första gången ni är här?
I: Nej.
E: Känns det som att det saknas någonting?
I: som vadå?
E: vad som helst.
I: Ja, faktist… bilarna och flygplan, traditionell teknik.
E: Så du vet antagligen vilken målgrupp som museet har?
I: Nej, det vet jag inte men jag antar att det är barnfamiljer.
E: Har ni något syfte eller vill ni få ut något av det här besöket?
I: Nej, vi bara kollar.

E: Tack, ska ni ha!  

Bumbleebee from Transformers
from Tekniska Museet.

Old School packman game from Tekniska Museet.

Some observations 

Among the interviews we noticed that the lack of humans inside the exhibitions was a problem, a guide or someone to explain what this item really is. It's pretty funny though that with loads and loads of new cutting edge technology that the lack of real humans suddenly became a problem. I can agree with the people we did the interviews with that it would be awesome to have some sort of guide or just a person from the museum walking around there. 

Another observation that we did was with the information TV at the entrance, Alexander in our group had been waiting there and did the observation and noticed that not a single person looked at it. 

Another observation was just when we entered the museum, the staff called out in the speakers with information about some guided explanation of some train track that was there. It was pretty good way to reach out with information to the whole museum.

Problem solutions 

I've been talking about navigation problems through out the museum at Tekniska museet, even though that the separate exhibition was pretty self navigating the problem i felt was the connection between the main museum and the other exhibition. The difference from Nordiska museet that the solution they had there was really easy and you just walked from floor to floor until you reached the cafeteria and had to order coffee. 

My most mind blown impression from Tekniska museet was the use of Kinect technology. I could really see Nordiska museet using some kind of Kinect in their exhibitions, like through Kinect you can participate some kind of old dinner party 300 years back or something. 

Both Tekniska Museet and Nordiska Museet had evaluation formulas on touchscreens that you could tell you opinion of the museum. At Tekniska Museet these just fell through and I can't imagine that the participation is big. At Nordiska Museet it felt instead of some sort of funny part of the exhibition that we finally got to interact with something. So I think one feature the museum could use is some sort of tracking device for their visitors so they could optimize different areas and see what people really find out what was interesting.  

This is me!