Experience Design Research for the New York at its Core Exhibition at the Museum of the City of New York

Aug 8

Client: Museum of the City of New York | Location: New York, NY | Funding: National Endowment for the Humanities

We used formative evaluation to support the Museum of the City of New York in developing a dynamic new permanent exhibition about the past, present, and future of New York City and measured its success against intended outcomes.

OVERVIEW

The Museum of the City of New York contracted us to support development and measurement of visitors’ experiences in its new permanent exhibition, New York at its Core, which takes visitors on a journey through 400 years of New York City’s history.

The exhibition also featured an array of interactive media alongside object-based content, including a “lab” where visitors can help imagine the city’s future through creative design games, immersive data-driven animated maps, and dynamic data visualizations, which was a new venture for the museum at the time.

APPROACH

Our collaboration spanned two years and crossed development and completion of the exhibition, including:

Concept Testing: Interviews with museum visitors and teachers about concepts for the new exhibition (especially the Future City Lab)
Prototyping: Naturalistic observations of and interviews with visitors using interactive prototypes
Summative Evaluation: Timing and tracking observations of and interviews with visitors to the exhibition after it opened to the public

CLIENT TAKEAWAYS

The staggered evaluations throughout development provided timely feedback for MCNY and the designers to make decisions and strategize about the direction of the exhibition and its interpretative strategies. In particular, early feedback from teachers helped guide the museum in shaping the exhibition to sensitively balance its portrayal of challenges facing New York City (like poverty) with the knowledge that many students who would visit have real, lived experience with those challenges.

The summative evaluation revealed that the exhibition challenged visitors’ expectations of what a history museum can be. While many visitors appreciated that the museum created a place for them to express their ideas, others struggled to connect the more historical, object-based galleries to the interactive, future-oriented media in the “Lab” setting. Still, most left with a deepened understanding of how New York City has changed over time, especially related to the themes of money, density, and diversity.