A Closer Look at Experience Design

From the September-October issue of the Art Institute of Chicago member’s magazine.

Here are some thoughts on the relationship between the virtual world and the built environment, and how experience design helps to bring these dimensions closer together. This article was originally published in the September-October issue of the member’s magazine at the Art Institute of Chicago.

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TO OUR COMMUNITY

Dear Member,

While it may not be immediately evident, every trip you take to the Art Institute is guided by a myriad of designed elements. Consider the different kinds of media that you might encounter on a typical visit. Before you even come to the museum, you’ve likely used search engines, browsed our digital collections, or planned your trip online. Once on-site, you might use our mobile app, listen to an audio tour, read graphics in the galleries, or use signage to get from one space to another.

Behind the scenes at the museum, we have specialists who scrutinize every detail of the visitor journey—designers who align the visual language, developers who engineer the applications, and producers who help steer our teams through complex and multilayered projects. We call this discipline Experience Design, and we aim to connect visitors—more deeply, more personally—with the art in our galleries through a variety of platforms that flow seamlessly from web to mobile to print to gallery.

Before coming to the museum four years ago, I worked for digital and exhibition design agencies with content that ranged from science and geology to history and the arts. Whatever the subject, I have always gravitated toward projects that have a physical dimension rather than a purely digital one. In a time when our attention is increasingly monopolized by glass screens, I think people crave authentic experiences more than ever. To be in a real environment, to trigger the senses, to be with friends experiencing something profound, these are the experiences that people seek out. And a museum like the Art Institute—with its collection of hundreds of thousands of artworks from all over the world and across time—is especially adept at providing them. Our work in Experience Design is to facilitate those transformative experiences through beautifully crafted audio, video, and visual tools.

On the horizon this fall is a mix of brand-new digital initiatives and additional original stories for our existing platforms. On our mobile app, we continue to add podcast-style audio tours, including one that features a costume conservator who prepared textiles for the tournament horse in our Deering Family Galleries of Medieval and Renaissance Art, Arms, and Armor. For email and social media, we’re developing new multimedia storytelling, such as a video about the six Chicago artists who revolutionized the art world as the Hairy Who. And we’ll soon be rolling out a redesigned website featuring new technology that offers greater access to the art and artists in our collection as well as improved tools for planning a visit.

However your museum journey takes shape, we aim to provide fresh paths of discovery and introduce you to a new idea, a new voice, or a new perspective on art and our world along the way.

—Michael Neault, Executive Creative Director, Experience Design