ArtConnect

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What the game does:

ArtConnect challenges every visitor to come into the museum and inject their own story into the art they see. Everyone arrives with expertise in some arena and can leverage their own experience by creating a gallery tour of five images from the galleries with personal captions. The game provides a place for visitors to choose a previously created tour, or to create their own, or do both. As tours are rated by others, a visitor’s ArtConnect might trend to the top of the choices.

How we built it:

Repeatedly we returned to the three goals laid out for us by the PMA: help people spend more time in the galleries, discover more art, and connect with others. We built our idea on the premise that everyone has their own voice and can express it visually, and we wanted the visitor to connect ideas in fearless exploration that they normally wouldn’t have. It was important to us that the game allowed each player to listen to their own experience when they looked at art and eliminate a sense of obligation about stopping at each picture. We wanted to use a subtle gamification, a creatively open-ended game that provided an elevated experience and which allowed for enlightenment and enrichment without judgment.

Challenges we ran into:

Our mission took a long time to establish, because we discovered we had such a variety of experiences with art and museums. Also, as educators, we had a range of ideas of what needed to be included, and we needed to give up a lot of preconceptions. We also had a keen awareness of coders around us, and of presentations that were using unfamiliar terms, and many of us had a personal sense of intimidation and worry about feeling inadequate. It was also challenging when we began organizing the architecture into a prototype, as not all of us were used to thinking in this mode. We discovered it was tremendous fun to be in teams of two in the galleries, and we tried to think about how to help people connect with the app in simultaneous ways as well as through comments and ratings.

Accomplishments we’re proud of and what we learned:

After much discussion about our goals, we were excited to finally get our ideas on paper. We collaborated well and built trust as we arrived at one cohesive idea with many voices and different perspectives. We feel we were especially thoughtful about how to slow people down when they were in the galleries and to strip away the barriers visitors can feel about looking at art. Ultimately, we ourselves learned how to enjoy being in the museum in new ways, by thinking about how others might.