initial design:

In our original design, physical objects represented specific pieces in the museum. When an object is put on the Surface, a map of options appeared on the screen. These options included "information" (on the piece), "tours" (it could be found in) and "related exhibits" (that the piece is in). The user could browse through these options to decide whether or not they wanted to see the piece. They could then put a tour card on the Surface which brings up a tour reel (like a movie reel) at the bottom of the screen. They could drag items they wanted to see into the reel, controlling the order of the items to be seen. The user could preview the tour they made by putting a preview object on the Surface. You could manipulate the view of the floor plans and print the map by placing a printing object on the screen.

storyboard:

The storyboard was created to demonstrate the interaction we were trying to promote in the first iteration for reference during subsequent refinement.

low-fidelity prototype:

The low-fidelity prototype was the manifestation of the initial idea. Building this prototype allowed us to interact with our ideas in a way that permitted us to make effective design improvements.

After presenting our intial prototype, we realized that our intial design of the objects was too broad and confusing to users who were not familiar with the system. We decided to divide up the objects into 3 categories (academic, tours, exhibits), thereby narrowing down the user tasks into 3 categories also.

horizontal prototype:

For the horizontal prototype we decided to implement the tour creation feature because it was the main interaction that did not involve previewing or exploring a piece of art. The tour creation feature is also the most "risky" because of it is not a pre-existing interaction. We implemented the scatter view of pieces when an object is placed on the Surface and the population of representative thumbnails on the map.

initial:

We used flat cardboard cutouts, gold pyramids, and paper cards to model our interactive objects. After feedback, we saw a major flaw in the design was that the objects were confusing. A user would not be able to tell that one pyramid object represented a French art collection while another physically identical pyramid represented a Greek collection.

intermediate:

This iteration we employed differently colored shapes (cubes, circles, triangles, etc). Feedback this time made it clear to us that the objects lacked meaning. There was no relation between a cube and the collection that it represented, between the card and ability to create tours, nor between the circles/triangles/etc. and the art pieces. Our goal was an intuitive system, so we decided again to rethink our artifact design.

current:

"I chose to build the objects out of foam because I thought it was more dynamic then using the laser cutter or rapid prototype machine. I can easily build a CAD model to implement in either of these machines, but as I was prototyping the figurines I found that I was constantly building on my original idea, and it was hard to anticipate what something was going to feel like in my hands unless I built it myself." ~ Martina

We decided to build the objects for our application, since we could tailor them to our needs. We settled on three types: course, exhibit, and printer objects. The course cards (left) each represent an academic course. Professors can store relevant artwork and information found at the museum on these cards. The middle image shows the exhibit objects. Typically, the Davis Museum offers three rotating exhibits, but has a hard time properly advertising all three. Thus we created a separate object for each, modeled after a tour guide to indicate the Museum's contribution to the information stored in the object. Lastly, we made a printer object that indicates the ability to print out a physical map of the tour to take with on the visit. We liked this idea of starting with something tangible, and leaving also with something tangible.