 Hi there, good afternoon. It's not going to be a dry session, so we're going to just run it. That may sound very very dry, but it's not. So I'm Don and I'm from Media Design School. More so run the year-to-year programs for the Bachelor of Media Design specializing in media design graphics. And I'm Simon Nichols and I specialize in interactive design and we have a missing member. Unfortunately, she's been called away for a family emergency and it's Lucy and she's responsible for the motion design aspect. So the three disciplines work together on a similar brief and today we want to talk about our experience with Auckland Museum that we just completed. So we're just going to run through this kind of structure, so we're just going to have a brief introduction how we set out the initial conversations, the process of the project, the outcomes that the students produced, and the reflections from both our side of things, Media Design School and the Auckland War Memorial Museum. So this project started about May of 2016, I believe. We ran it this year. So it was at the beginning of the year probably at the same time, but it took about a year for it to be set up. We had to Jenny Marshall, who was at the Auckland War Memorial Museum contacted or met one of our I don't know what her title was, Industry... Industry Initiative. Project kind of manager at a conference like this, and then the conversation kind of started and then eventually that produced a brief for the students. She was very interested in our take. We took a very different tag from other university pedagogy because we are very industry-aligned and Jenny was very interested to see what can be done as far as our conceptual ideas were formed by students who were between the 19 to the 25-year bracket using technology. And I think we're realizing we're not from the glam industry, but we're realizing that people seem to turn over quite quickly. And so maybe, I don't know, but Jenny's kind of left the museum, and then we got in contact with Johnny, who Dina Gistak, Nils, who you've seen talk maybe, and Brad Hawkins. And then we kind of started the project. So we're just gonna talk about the process. So the brief, the setup process took kind of the maybe the longest amount of time to sort out. Because obviously with Auckland Museum, they are doing a bit of a rejigging around their spaces. So we've had, they said, oh, we've got an opportunity for your students to come and engage with us with the spaces. But we also have, we are bound within the QA requirements as well for our degree. So we needed to make sure that it benefited both parties. Whether it's going to align with our learning outcomes, as well as giving our Auckland Museum the best outcome possible. Yes, and it was kind of a back-and-forth process. So it's several kind of meetings. And the we had to kind of work within our frameworks and make sure that the students weren't creating or the projects briefs that we gave the students weren't too specific, so that there was enough room for exploration. So for instance, Dina came to us. So we're just going to show you the briefs in a minute. But Dina came to us and said we want an app for this and we kind of went back and said well maybe we can take out the word app and we'll just have a project around what, you know, the event that you're organizing and let the students come to the conclusion maybe through UX design that they needed an app. But I think the biggest hurdle, the biggest hurdle was getting these youngsters to understand that the museum wasn't a boring place. When we first talked to them, their faces just went And we go no, because one of the briefs actually concerned a hoarding space because they were rebuilding the Maori section. And there was, of course, divided off the war memorial part of the museum and they said do something with this hoarding. The students' faces just went, oh, it's just panels of wood. What do we do? But so we had to align these briefs to really get them going. And in the process itself, the reason for sharing this experience with you is because we discovered that the students learned best when they're doing it themselves. We weren't on the ground telling them what to do. So these are the briefs. So these are the seven briefs that we eventually worked through which were making our digital collections accessible, turning the building works into a feature which we, at lunch yesterday, we put something onto the art wall. If you've looked at the art wall down... Upstairs. Down on the atrium. Upstairs, yeah. Turning the building works into a feature. Pre-visit school pack which was looking at customer experience of class visits. We had a wonderful children's interactives. Dinos education program. And this is one that Dina is talking about, the app. Dina runs the late program at Auckland Museum and she wanted to engage with audiences that are deaf and hard of hearing in a better way. So after we'd done that, we'd set up our initial briefing session so we brought the students to the theatre at Auckland Museum which is similar to the Soundings Theatre here. And there's Mills presenting one of the projects. And so yeah, we had all the students there. And then we let them loose in the museum that morning. Probably the first time. Yeah, five minutes, go! But yeah, so that was great to kind of bring them into the spaces and they were instantly kind of engaged. Yeah, so it was a team, they were separated into teams. So we had 12 teams and we had the seven briefs. And we told them, you get to only select one brief and the students all picked out of a hat. So they all went, oh great, hoarding. Fantastic. But strangely the students were fighting over that. The late. The late. The hard of hearing. Working with the people that are deaf and hard of hearing. Which I found interesting because that was the most complex problem I think in my mind. To me also I really enjoyed the, I really liked customer experience and UX. So trying to get them to work with the school packs. And my job was making it look pretty. Yeah. Just make it look pretty. Okay, so briefly show of hands. We know what design thinking is. Design process. I was trying to find, you've probably all seen the beautiful diagram with the hexagons. Yeah. I couldn't find the attribution for that. So I changed that. I did have the hexagons. But this is another one in the IDO's design thinking for educators resource pack. So if you haven't heard of design thinking or you haven't heard of IDO, look at IDO online. They've got amazing, amazing resources for design thinking with kind of methodology and activities and what have you. So yeah, design thinking is kind of a process of empathizing, defining the problem. Setting all limits in it as well. Limitations. Then ideation, prototyping and testing. So the students were going through that process. And this is the, I guess the less didactic part of this project. This is all they're doing. We've given them a brief. They are familiar already with the design thinking process and also they were second year students. So they're already familiar with the craft and their discipline. Then we've just kind of thrown them at the problem. So when the students starts engaging with the brief and foremost, so following the design thinking process, they thought of the problem both from the technological side of things as well as the consumer side of things. So we're not only dealing with Auckland Museum as the client, but we're dealing with its visitors. So as you can see from the glam sector, the visitors range from zero to 99 years old, male and female and something else. And all sorts, all ranges. So it proved to be very problematic when the target audience is so wide. How then do you address a specific design problem, providing a design solution to such a broad problem? So the student starts ideating and throughout this process, we've never told them to use a whiteboard. We never told them to use that. We never told them that technology has limitations. We just set them free. It says you can either be futurists and start thinking of potential technology that you can utilize in a museum space, or you can utilize current technology. So this isn't staged. I was super. I was really excited and happy to see the students pulling out the whiteboards in our spaces and just starting to use them. I'm just going to flick through because we're starting in 15 minutes already. So this is some of the technology that our students use. So this is a Trello board. I don't know if you've used Trello before. It's a free online tool for project management. It's designed for the Kanban method. But the students use this for their process and collaboration. So this is just two examples of the board. We use Slack with the students for communication. Another free online tool. So here was talking yesterday about lots of free tools. There's so many for achieving things. So we're just going to quickly go through slides of students working. So aside from the technological aspect of things, so the students collaborate amongst each other and they develop very competitive strengths from one team to the other. And that drove their own learning. So when some students say, we're going to do an interactive holographic display, then the other students will say, well, we're going to do something else. We're going to do light projection, mapping and all that stuff. So the students may come up with this fantastic idea, but we had the clients come in several times. So here's Johnny and Brad in a meeting with the students and the students are presenting their pictures and their prototypes and getting feedback from Auckland Museum staff. This is again, there's Lucy, if you want to know what Lucy's... Back of her head looks like, yeah, that's her. Yeah, the students presenting in our space and then Johnny testing out prototypes. So from the user experience, all the students were very concerned about was how is this going to form on their devices, like small handheld devices such as smartphones and iPads, or how does it work if it's going to be a large screen? Or is it going to be on the floor? Is there going to be projection mapping involved and stuff like that? So when the students finally did their final n-hitch, think sharp tank, so we told them you have to be very convincing in your presentation. So they also learned on how to present well as well as coming up with all this fantastical graphics. Sorry, I just hate this photo. Why do you hate this photo? It's probably my bald spot, isn't it? That's Simon, by the way, his bald spot. So we're going to show you a couple of projects quickly. So this is a team that was working on bringing the digital collections that the Auckland Museum has and making them more accessible to the public. So they came up with this system that was kind of like a Pinterest board that you would create as you walked around the museum. There would be stations, I don't know if you can see, no, there's no image of it, but there would be a little QR code next to the... Artifact. Artifact? So you would scan it with your phone, and then you'd come out at the end and you could then see your board collected in this. They looked at the photography that the museum had. They looked at photography, and they did these kind of flat lay graphics based on the collections. So they discovered that a lot of the collections were photographed in a particular way. So the students thought, bridal registry. You can build, you can curate and build your own collections and the outcome can be printed, displayed, or loaded onto your own device that you can carry out at the museum. And they did other collateral in terms of promotional materials. This was another project for the... It was a dinosaur. Was it dinosaurs? Yeah. And so this was more... It was aimed at a younger audience and you could pull the children, children could pull out these torches, then shine. And it triggers an interactive display on the touchscreen. Yeah. So they've conceived... This is very theoretical. So if you go back to that one slide here, all these torches here are locked in with a particular code that when it's pointed at, like say dinosaurs, pop-up windows will appear and maybe video feeds will also appear and it'll teach all... The students didn't actually make this but they did explore completely how it would be realised. And in the final presentation, they showed prototypes. So prototypes work and this was a video which I don't have but it showed the prototype. And then a third group, I think it was the same brief as the last one. They did a 360... It was an app that had a 360-degree view of the view from an animal. So you could pretend you're an animal and you could look at the world through their eyes. It proved an interesting thing because one of the animals or creatures was an ant. So it actually went into the ground and up onto the trees and it was very exciting. But in yesterday's VRAR session, for those who've attended, talked about the potentiality of a bendable screen. Things that bend... They exist now. It's still not publicly accessible but the students looked at it and go, hey, we can do something with this LED screen that's able to bend. Students are really engaged with cutting-edge technologies. And so they were looking at things like bendable screens, they were looking at VRAR and they might not in the space of time would be able to realise a project in VR but they were prototyping. They identified quite a number of problems, problem areas. They also identified potentialities for such a technology. And so, yeah, it was amazing. Even though some of them we couldn't launch right away, it was something that we could consider later on. So the last section, we're just going to quickly talk about the reflection from us as lecturers and the Auckland Museum. So from our point of view, what we're trying to do at Media Design School is to connect with industry and have real-world experiences because we're trying to create students that are... Our motto is creating students that are prized by industry. So, yeah, we really enjoyed and we found it extremely beneficial to work with Auckland Museum. The students are very engaged and produced a kind of great variety of kind of work. Yeah, I think at the end of this experience from the students' perspectives is that they no longer view museums or stationary artefacts as boring. They look at it from their generation into this sort of space and it becomes their space when they are more engaged with it using a device or digital means or whatever. It's no longer something that is just beyond them. It's a Roman vase and they look at it and go, what is it? Instead now they can say, we can use technology, digital accessibility to bring this back with them and that's what they feel that their generation benefits most out of spaces such as this. I think the benefit from us is that having... Actually, I'll go on to the refiction. One of the things that they said, which I should have said at the beginning was that the bureaucracy within our media design schools was very low. They mentioned having to work or trying to work with other institutions and that the layers of bureaucracy were so much that they couldn't get access to the lecturers to create these projects which was very interesting because there was like one layer between us and Jenny. Some of the things that they said was that the time investment was actually larger than they thought. So we had, you didn't see a picture of Dina there because she was kind of really busy. They also said that actually we kept it kind of as quite a small project. So, Johnny mentioned that it would have been good to have someone from management or executive involved in the pitching process at the end so that there would be better buy-in because he said that if a manager had seen some of these projects it would have shifted what the Auckland Museum was actually doing. So that was a really great bit of feedback that we were actually doing something that had a lot of impact on the projects that were in place for the museum. Also, one of the things was that the project was very self-contained so there was no other content other than the presentations that the students made. And so next time what we might do is create some kind of exhibition or other to further promote the work. Yeah, it leaves quite a bit of a few questions. For me, I find that it opens up more questions actually about how sustainable if we rely on new technology all the time for novelty's sake or archival's sake then how do we make it new all the time? You know, so that is something that maybe if we continue working with Auckland Museum maybe that's something that we can work into the briefs as well to address how do we then keep up with technology and keeping everything abreast? The briefs weren't open enough I think we realised at the end. They were too specific but Johnny said they should have been further targeted into a specific audience. The audience were too broad or actually just left up to the students. The museum did present us at the beginning the demographics so we knew that it was young mothers and then older people that were the audience for the museum but they did say that actually getting young adults like 18 to 25 year old people and was beneficial for that kind of creating something for that audience. So in terms of the Auckland Museum and I assume a lot of other glam sector people need to connect with tertiary education and so this was a really good way for the Auckland Museum to do that. That's it. We've got a couple of minutes I think for questions. Three minutes. Does anybody have any questions? Yes. Did the crate thing get made into an app? No so it was all prototyped. Students only had 8 weeks for this. They came up with amazing ideas. Can they steal it? The students did prototype it to a workable app but it only was a few layers in so they were only just pitching the idea but they wanted to make it look like it's working. This was a high fidelity prototype. Yeah. We do. Our students are in that. And this is Mandy? And she's also from Media Design School? Yeah so you can't steal the idea. So you come and talk to us and we might negotiate a plan? A plan. Yeah. So the Auckland Museum when they sat down for the proper pitch the sharp tank pitch, they were very excited and they kept saying could you play it back again? Could you play it back again? There was a video with us in that. It makes us feel excited because there's some content there that really excites both parties which is great. Join me in thanking Simon and Don. Cool. Thank you very much.