The African American Immersion Museum
TEAM: Solo project
ROLE: Researcher & Designer
DURATION: 7 Months
TOOLS: Adobe Indesign, Illustrator, Premier Pro, & Google Slides
METHODS: Literature Review, Exemplar Curation, Journey Mapping, "What-If" Scenarios, Feedback Analysis, Story Curations, Interviews, Co-Design Workshop, Speculative Exemplar Curation, Personas, & Design Fictions
DESIGN SPACE
African American history is inaccurately taught throughout American history classes in the United States. In most cases, less than 9% of African American history is devoted to the subject and as students progress throughout the years, they are still learning about the same distorted historical figures or events without any additional content.
Solution
My proposed solution is an immersion museum that is interactive and entirely dedicated to teaching accurate African American history and culture. This museum is placed in an arranged future that envisions more people having the desire to learn this topic in an empathetic way and having technology that supports the exhibits and features within the museum.
Final Deliverables
Background
I had the option to choose from four different capstone types; Interaction design, User research for design, Service design, and Scholarly design research. As I initiated my exploratory research to determine the domain space I wanted to dive into for an entire school year, I knew I wanted my project to service a community. I had the desire to help bring people together whether it was through service design, interaction design or architectural design. I didn't know exactly what to tackle but the overall goal was to grow communities closer together through a fun and entertaining way in order to educate people. Some topics that I threw out on the table included; the educational gap between social classes, how history is inaccurately taught in public schools, the inequality in the United State's judicial system, and other's related to accountability.
As I was exploring topics, it was impossible to ignore the climate of the United States as the momentum for social justice increased to call out police violence and systematic racism. With protestors rallying together and marching on, I could not stop watching and reading about what activists were doing to push for social change. Since some of my topics were already related to social change in an educational domain, I decided to continue on with issues within the United States’ educational system in regard to African American history. I investigated and dissected two categories in order to frame the issues into several, slightly overlapping, topics in the table below. I challenged myself to combine two capstone types, user research for design and service design, in order to create the African American Immersion Museum.
The title of this project is African American History: An Empathetic Reflection while the solution within my project is the African American Immersion Museum. As a requirement, I completed 4 items that complimented each other and worked in unison while still being fully understandable when viewed separately ; a media deliverable, a brochure deliverable, a booklet deliverable, and the main deliverable. Note: My main deliverable is included within my booklet deliverable and therefore will only have the booklet for review.
Brochure
I envisioned my brochure to look like a blueprint and to project that aesthetic. The brochure has a traditional tri-fold layout that has three equal sections by folding the sides over the middle. While creating my brochure, I made sure to always respect my reader by reviewing all the content on each page asking myself; is this too much information that could overwhelm my reader? Is it too short? Am I giving enough valuable information in this short amount of time to peak one's interest?
I envisioned my readers as people grabbing these brochures outside of the museum, people walking around with it in the museum, and other designers/employers taking a look at my brochure as a deliverable for my project. Regardless of the type of reader you identify as, I wanted my brochure to ignite a call-to-action that will lead them to become active and push for social change.
Booklet
For my main deliverable, I combined service design, speculative design, and user research for design aiming to create a means to point a spotlight on the widespread miseducation of African American history and culture. The original plan was to create kiosks to put in crowded, public locations for people to interact with or to create a pop-up shop that will travel to multiple different locations that would interact with people and help educate them in an entertaining way. However, those two solutions seemed too dependent on personal interactions and didn't give off the impression that users would truly empathize, learn, retain, and spread the message. I went back to the drawing board and really analyzed the research I conducted throughout the months and asked myself, what has the power to create unity on both a social and political level? And BOOM, museums came to mind. Then BOOM, a museum with far-fetched yet feasible/soon to be feasible technology was drafted.
This booklet is a complete layout of my capstone project which describes my exploration into this topic. It informs you on all the research methods I conducted along with my findings and analysis of them all. African American History: An Empathetic Reflection final solution consists of a combination of design fictions that helps piece together one picture. The three portions I split the design fictions into are 1. a description of the futuristic setting 2. a description of the entire museum and 3. a first-hand experience visiting the museum (persona).
Media
I scripted my media deliverable as an empathetic style commercial demonstrating the need for the technology that is displayed in the museum. I wanted and needed to highlight and acknowledge the widespread hate against African American people. I did this through the use of stock footage that showcased visuals of protests and things that socially provoke and promote hate or violence. Being able to employ stock footage was very beneficial due to the nature of my project's solution of utilizing futuristic technology. I didn't have the resources to shoot people using virtual reality goggles or things of that nature that were pictured in the video. I really appreciate my professor allowing this in order to select the most relatable footage in effort to produce a cohesive video.
Black and Brown changemakers have been doing this racial justice work for years, decades, and centuries. This is not a trend for us, this is our lives. The only thing that changed is that more white people started paying attention in the summer of 2020.
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— JACQUELYN OGORCHUKWU IYAMAH
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