IA Summit 2017

Museums and other cultural institutions are really good at sharing knowledge and expertise with visitors. Unfortunately, too often their excitement about imparting information overtakes their awareness of visitors’ spatial needs, resulting in frustration, confusion, and, as a result, less focus by the visitor on the content of the museum. As interaction design moves more and more into physical spaces, it’s natural to look at museums as proving grounds for testing new ideas of how people might interact with their environments. This talk presents a new paradigm for building experiences in public spaces that reposition humans at the center of public work. The larger theory is based on an adaptation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, and was developed out of research conducted at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2016. Attendees will learn about why wayfinding to bathrooms and signposts to time planning are just as vital as testimony and artifacts to museums and their visitors, and leave with a framework and tangible action items to help recenter people in buildings of all kinds as human beings.