Copper Hewitt museum is a constantly innovative place which always gives me surprise. During this visit, the new exhibition content has brought me new information experience. The first step after entering the museum is to purchase admission tickets. The museum staff gave me an interactive pen and asked me if I have been here before. Since this is my second visit, I had understood the functionality of the pen and felt excited and looked forward to the actual use of it.

The current exhibitions is inclusive of Nature by Design, Rebeca Méndez Selects, Moustiers ceramics, Iridescence, Immersion Room, Models & Prototypes Gallery and Scholten & Baijings in the Process lab (“Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum”). The innovative exhibits in museum brings people brand-new feelings in all the aspects of sense, hearing and touch.

The installation in Process lab invites visitors to explore the design process of contemporary industrial design studios by themselves. The lab shows some industrial crafts and a number of interesting details about the making process of tableware, furniture, and textiles. Some objects from collection are available for touch and two interactive tables are offered for color experiment.

Immersion Room is a creative space where visitors can draw their own wallpaper designs and experience the full-scale projection of pattern on the walls around them. At the same time, visitors can select wallpapers from museum’s extraordinary collection and see them projected on the walls, accompanied by audio clips about the information of that particular design or designer. Multiple types of information give visitors immersive experience, which helps them find inspiration and learn to create.

There is a new project at the second floor “How was your commute to the museum?” which analyzing the commuting process of visitors. Visitor can pick a small red or green ball and put it into one of the transparent buckets which corresponding to a certain type of commuting. The green ball means “good” experience while the red one means “not so good”. The commuting types including pedestrian, bicycle, motorized vehicle, bus and subway. These soft color balls arouse interest of visitors to participate the project, which provides statistical data for future strategies on enhancing museum experience.

Copper Hewitt has made some intriguing digital innovations in the field of interaction, among which interactive Pen and touchscreen table are the two major innovative features of museum. Both interactive pen and touchscreen table give visitors the new experience compared with traditional museum experience.

Interactive pen gives visitors the opportunities to immerse in the process of seeing and feeling exhibits instead of taking pictures busily or using traditional museum App. By aligning and pressing the flat end of the Pen to any object labels, visitors can collect and save objects from around the galleries. Then all the saved exhibits information will be accessible online for future read. Meanwhile, the pen is also used to explore and manipulate the objects that visitors have collected on the touchscreen table. Copper Hewitt converted the pen to a piece of consumer hardware by cooperating with an international team, as stated on the museum site, “Like so many of the objects in the museum’s galleries, it is the product of a collaborative, international industrial design process, exemplifying how designers solve real-world problems.”

According to the introduction of interactive table on museum website, touchscreen tables uses projected capacitive touch technology, offering the same resolution as tablets and smart phones, which enables visitors clearly observe the details of exhibits and get inspiration. This visitor technology emphasized the play experience and displays the specificities of a design museum. Interactive table is not only a “collection browser”, but also a “play designer” that offers various materials, modes and object scenes for drawing three-dimensional model types by visitors themselves.

Copper Hewitt Museum’s innovation on digital experience shows that it attaches great importance to the interactive experience between visitors and exhibits. By building interactive digital entity space, it transforms the traditional one-way display platform into an interactive space for public participation. More broadly, it reflects a digital transformation trend of cultural institutions. With the rapid development of information technology, especially the coming of big data era, our social lifestyle is facing the situation of being changed profoundly by IT, and so does people’s cultural life. As the closest cultural contact with the public, cultural institutions can no longer meet people’s requirements change and diversity according to existing service mode. Therefore, many cultural institutions around the world have been exploring and practicing digital construction in recent years, such as innovating institute website and mobile app or creating virtual experience projects.

Digital and emerging media is helping cultural institutions successfully meet their missions by various digital strategies. According to Xingya Wang, being more accessible, engaging content and generating revenue are what museums are focusing on based on their strategies, and digital innovations give museums these possibilities.

In order to be more accessible, museums are providing audience with more open access to collections and making museums websites more accessible. Take National Portrait Gallery as an example. In recent years, National Portrait Gallery is not only extending the range and methods of viewing digital images of their collections and addressing the importance of open and sharable sources, but also prioritizes investment in redesign of its website to create seamless user experience. To enrich the content, there are many museums have embraced digital media as a creative method. Among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one standout. The Met is regarded as a potent, full-fledged media company because its digital achievement (Baker, 2015). Begin from 2011, the Met has been working closely with industrial organizations to develop apps, 3D print interactive objects and virtual reality experience for the museum. The Met also built a 70-person digital media team in order to formulate and implement effective content strategies in media-saturated landscape. Experimental initiatives including content creation and content distribution. Besides, using digital methods to generate revenue and funding of museum is another trend. Digital activities or products including digital funding model, better UX design, online courses, paid onsite multimedia tour, self-serving ticketing and so on.

Meanwhile, many cultural institutions are also involved in the field of digital technology education for public. For example, Tate, an institution that houses the United Kingdom’s national collection of British art in a network of four art museums (“Tate”), has built a Digital Learning Studio to increase participation and attraction. As a multi-use space for making and learning about digital technology, the studio offers a wide range of learning programs including courses, workshops and development projects.

The digital transformation of cultural institutions is a digital practice which redefines the interaction between public and institutions. According to Dalbello, “Public conversation is at the core of heritage practices involving artifacts and their digital representations”. In this sense, through digital transformation, cultural institutions are extending their role to become participates in a broader discourse with the public.

Reference:

“Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum”. Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, 2019, https://www.cooperhewitt.org/.

“Tate”. En.Wikipedia.Org, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate.

Wang, Xingya. “Review Of Different Museum Digital Strategies”. Museums And Digital Culture – Pratt Institute, 2018, https://museumsdigitalculture.prattsi.org/review-of-different-museum-digital-strategies-6ec009d2f80b.

Baker, Dillon. “Museums, The Next Media Companies: Why The Met Built A 70-Person Media Team”. Contently, 2015, https://contently.com/2015/05/12/museums-the-next-media-companies/.

Dalbello, Marija. (2009). “Digital Cultural Heritage: Concepts, Projects, and Emerging Constructions of Heritage.” Proceedings of the Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) conference, 25-30 May, 2009.

Interaction 19, held from 3-8 February in Seattle, is a week of design events for interaction designers from around the world. It assemble a diverse group of professionals and academics to explore the edges of interaction design and help to spark a transformation of the discipline for the needs of the 21st century. This year’s event features: Interaction 19 Conference, Education Summit, Local Leaders Retreat, Workshops, Student Design Charette and Interaction Awards Ceremony.

The three-day conference Interaction 19 is the main event. In the process of watching speeches of various topics, I found myself interested in the content about artificial intelligence. On 7 February, there are two groups of lectures about AI: “AI is the New UI” and “AI in the Wild”. The first topic attracts me very much. “AI is the New UI” includes five presentation: “Designing for AI”, “How to Design With, Not For, Artificial Intelligence”, “Democratization, Industrialization and Augmentation: Where Creativity and Design Craft is Going Next”, “Designing Transparent AI” and “How AI Will Change The Way We Work”.

In “Designing for AI”, Emily Sappington talked about her opinions about imbuing artificial intelligent components in products. She shared her practices both in large companies and startups, indicating that creating minimum viable intelligence for AI product is the most important and fundamental strategy of product design. Meanwhile, designers should set appropriate user expectation for AI interaction process considering the user’s satisfaction. Because user’s interaction with product is a trust-building process in which quality and ability delivered in product that company promised directly influence the consequence of user testing. Take voice assistance as an example, “A user who can’t set a reminder with their voice , will not be likely to trust the same voice assistant to take down credit card information and order pizza.”

In “How to Design With, Not For, Artificial Intelligence”, Joe Meersman began with IBM Wason case study and some best practices. Then he proposed concrete framework of successful AI delivery, including ideal delivery team for each of the three categories of AI projects and relative delivery process.

Similarly, “Designing Transparent AI” from Arathi Sethumadhavan and Dr. Samuel J. Levulis also suggested that designers should set appropriate expectations about what the AI can and cannot do and strive to make various elements of system performance transparent to users. Then they provided some examples of the techniques that can be adopted to make AI algorithms and vulnerabilities more transparent to users.

In “Democratization, Industrialization and Augmentation: Where Creativity and Design Craft is Going Next”, Andreas Markdalen proposed three things he believes that are critical to understand where design craft and discipline is going. The barriers for entering design field is diminish and people around the world are starting to participate and contribute. Design literacy is wildly increased and process commoditization is widely used with the emergence of new design tools and platforms, such as Autodraw, Adobe Sensei and Simple.io which are achieved by artificial intelligence and machine learning technology. Meanwhile, the popularity of digital transformation promotes the industrialization of digital design. Systemic design helps brand save time and effort in delivering value and product to market. Seamless workflow allows team to drive efficiency and automation. Open source tools like Airbnb design and generative design in Sketch are starting blend generative design with experience design. As a result, technology helps augment human skill and creativity to a large extent. As designers are starting to co-create alongside AI-driven systems and engines, a new era of systems and product design begins.

Kristian Samarian’s speech “How AI Will Change The Way We Work” also looks forward to the future. He indicated AI will likely cause a more significant shift for designers than previous design shift. Specifically, AI will bring us into an era of “teaching” technology. As more work is automated, our design domain will change to augmented human intelligence and human-machine collaboration.

“AI is the New UI” shows that AI is bringing a wide range of changes to the design field. Firstly，AI contributes to efficiency economy, improving the design efficiency. More and more automated design tools have emerged, replacing the repetitive and inefficient design work. As Markdalen mentioned in his speech, Airbnb Design can convert hand draft into prototype in a real time. There has also emerged automatically design tool like “Luban”from Alibaba. “Luban” makes use of deep learning and image generation technology to automatically design and generate advertising banners for Taobao, so that the design of advertising can also achieve personalized recommendation. On “Double 11” shopping festival of 2016, Luban made its debut. On “Double 11” 2017, Luban had been able to produce 40 million posters a day, an average of 8,000 posters per second, and each poster was designed according to the characteristics of commodity images. In other words, each one is unique.

More importantly, AI will interconnect all things, thus the design object will shift from single computer or mobile platform to intelligent devices, such as smart voice box, smart TV, smart cars, etc., forming a multi-scene fusion linkage. Meanwhile, the trend of combination between software and hardware means design objects are more diverse and design reference dimensions are more abundant. “AI is the new UI” indicates the trend of wild application of AI as the form as UI and UX, not just screens on devices. According to a report from Accenture in 2017, AI is rising as the new purveyor of UI and UX. The leading enterprise technology vendors have also regarded AI as the future of computer interfaces. More screenless computing is on the horizon with the innovation of AI in the field of interaction (McKendrick, 2017). Autonomous vehicles and voice-activated home assistants are just early examples of intelligent hardware, now more intelligent hardware is booming in business scenarios. Alipay’s face recognition payment is the representative of AI’s landing in new retail field. It is a new payment method based on artificial intelligence, biometrics, 3D sensing and big data risk management technology. Users can make payment by scaning their faces without using mobile phones, which effectively improves the user’s consumption experience and the efficiency of the payment. On September 1, 2017, Alipay landed the first face payment machine at the KFC restaurant in Hangzhou. By December 2018, there are 23 stores in 11 cities have tried. Not only in KFC, but also in retail scenes such as supermarkets and pharmacies, hundreds of cities across the country have begun to try face payment.

The rapid development of information technology brings great chance and threat to all walks of life. Every industry is exploring more possibilities and thinking about how to take advantage of AI. The design industry needs creativity and emotion, which should play a more important role in linking AI and humanity in the era of intelligence. Therefore, the relationship between design and AI is far more profound and complex than the work replacement relationship. As Sengers argued in “Practices for a machine culture: a case study of integrating cultural theory and artificial intelligence”: “In order to be able to address contemporary human experience, we need science and the humanities to be combined into hybrid forms which can address the machinic and the human simultaneously.”

– Mingqi Rui, Info 601, Professor Chris Alen Sula

Reference:

Interaction 19. (2019). Interaction 19 – 3-8 February 2019 • Seattle, WA. [online] Available at: https://interaction19.ixda.org/program/7_thursday/ [Accessed 15 Mar. 2019].

McKendrick, J. (2017). More artificial intelligence, fewer screens: the future of computing unfolds | ZDNet. [online] ZDNet. Available at: https://www.zdnet.com/article/artificial-intelligence-the-new-user-interface-and-experience/ [Accessed 15 Mar. 2019].

Phoebe Sengers, “Practices for a Machine Culture: A Case Study of Integrating Cultural Theory and Artificial Intelligence” Surfaces VIII: 1999, 6.