Introduction

Welcome to the website for the Davis Experience iPhone application, developed in an independent study by Wellesley senior Lia Napolitano under the advisement of Dr. Orit Shaer. Here you can find information about the problems the Davis Experience application is meant to address, the conceptual design process and design artifacts, and the functional prototype with implementation details.

Problem Statement

The Davis Museum is a hub of artistic and cultural opportunity on the Wellesley campus, granting community members firsthand access to world-class art. However, members of the staff and the student body have noticed an unusual trend: when not required or rewarded with food, museum attendance is surprisingly low.

A main problem is that when users enter the gallery, they have no idea where to go to find the kinds of works they are interested in. Another is that users feel minimal engagement with the works in the museum, and don't feel prompted to engage with them critically or socially. Under the advisement of Dr. Orit Shaer, I sought to create a mobile application that could help remedy these issues and make the Davis Museum experience more attractive.

I chose to create an iPhone application for three reasons: (1) I believe a mobile application will allow users to customize and respond to their experience on-the-fly, (2) I wanted experience developing on the iPhone and in Objective-C, and (3) I wanted to leverage its myriad inputs and context sensitivity. However, a risk of mobile applications is that users will become overly engaged with the application and less so with their surroundings - effectively replacing the museum experience rather than enhancing it, a result which would be greatly counterproductive.

To learn more about how other museums address these problems, I read papers on tools such as MobiTags and Cicero. My primary goals were to create physical engagement with the space of the Davis Museum, critical engagement with the collection, and social engagement with the greater community of visitors. To do so, over the semester I developed an informative - yet game-like - iPhone application prototype that brings users through the process of finding related works in the museum, responding to them, and seeing the responses and insights of others.

- Lia Napolitano ('10)