Designing “One Minute” Experiences
摘要
Several studies have shown that visitors to art museums spend very short time looking at artworks and reading about them. Visitors’ attention is fickle. Yet, often the information presented to visitors is written in winding and complicated texts. As information is increasingly offered on small screens such as smartphones, and as museums are striving to reach new and young audience groups, brevity and simplicity are ever more important. This chapter reports on a research-through-design study of a smartphone app called One Minute that uses image recognition to identify artworks and offers interpretive text that can be read in a minute. The app was developed by the authors initially as a research experiment, and further developed and deployed at the Brighton Museum and Art Gallery in the UK. The main contribution of the study lies in the design of a format for authoring bite-sized interpretations aiming to awake curiosity. Tests of the app have demonstrated that the format is effective in helping museum curators write simpler and more engaging texts. The app has also been used to engage members of the public to contribute their interpretations of artworks, offering a practical way to invite new voices into the museum.