Increasing Public Arts' Values Through Building Personal Connections

User Centered Research and Evaluation, Spring 2020

Jessica Xiao
Project Manager. Strengthened communication by encouraging each team member to share their ideas. Resurfaced perspectives that were quickly dismissed. Recruited participants, conducted interviews, and participated in interview analyses.
Jenny Shuyu
Designer. Compiled deliverables during progress checkpoints, by summarizing work into a presentatable format. Recruited intervieews and conducted interviews as well.
Andrew Chuang
Analyst. Streamlined data collection methods and analyzed collected data. Took part in the interview and group analysis process.
Chenning Ye
Notetaker. Ensured spoken ideas were recorded during group discussions. Participated in interview recruitment process.

Public art, though abundant in large cities, feels indifferent to most passerbys. Many public arts fail to invoke viewers’ feelings and are unsuccessful in establishing personal connections. So, we chose to investigate: how might we increase the personal connections between viewers and the arts. Through interviews and contextual methods, our research implied that establishing a sense of belonging in a city consists of a four step process: attraction, information, conversation, and recollection, which we have simplified to AICR. The first step, attraction, means that we have to first get viewers curious about the art by giving the arts a sense of mystery. When the art has captured the viewer’s attention, the second step, information, comes into play. Art-related information needs to be presented in a structured and logical manner, allowing each viewer to individually absorb the information. The third stage, conversation, shortly follows, encouraging viewers to naturally initiate art-related conversations in spontaneous ways for new perspectives to be generated. And finally, the fourth stage is recollection, addressing viewers’ needs to record some aspect of a touching experience so that a long-lasting, strong personal bond can be formed between the art and the viewers.

How might we increase personal connections between viewers and public arts?

Insight 1

Possible Design:

Draw people into viewing the public arts by obscuring certain aspects of the arts
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an AR app to unveil the full appearance of the art with only part of it being visible in physical environment

Insight 2

Possible Design:

Only a short description of the artwork is initially displayed
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Use different, intuitive buttons/tabs to represent different information

Insight 3

Possible Designs:

  1. Live features of comments
  2. Virtual group tours
  3. Hooks between two or more people to nudge conversation between them

Insight 4

Possible Designs:

  1. Provide users with guiding questions to encourage them to talk about their emotions when posing photos of public arts.
  2. Apply emotion-based filters, similar to how Spotify categorizes its songs and creates playlists.