The people who would be interested in our design would be WCMA staff who are interested in providing a more meaningful experience for visitors and perhaps staff members who want to expand the number of museum visitors. Our design would provide the historical context of the space in WCMA for visitors, thereby providing a new way of engaging with the space. On the flip side, museum visitors who use our design can enjoy WCMA by learning more about the current space and its history. To learn more about how to achieve the best design, we plan to observe participants who do not often visit WCMA or who do not know much about the space. Our participants will be either a) Williams students who do not spend a lot of time at WCMA. These may be students who mostly take classes that don’t incorporate museums visits or students who tend to take fewer art classes. b) museum visitors who are not from the Williamstown area and wouldn’t be familiar with its history c) local visitors who aren’t familiar with WCMA’s history. These participants seem feasible as we can find students who don’t go to WCMA often and we can approach museum visitors.
Our contextual inquiry will be focused on observing how participants learn more about a space. We plan to observe how people learn more about an existing space and what information they prioritize, both in learning about the past life of a space and the space as it is now. To do this, we plan on providing a laptop to the participant, which they will use to conduct their research. Since we are focused on observing how participants research from their laptops, the environment in which we conduct our observation isn’t as important. Potential spaces we could do this are the WCMA reading room or Lee’s. We want to ask participants to research about WCMA and its history, and through this, we hope to gain insights about what kind of information they pay attention to and the process of their learning. After our observation, we want to ask follow-up questions such as asking participants what they learned and what specific pieces of information they sought in each phase of their research process. In addition, we want to evaluate the effectiveness of current resources available, and we plan on doing this by providing a sample WCMA pamphlet and observing which pages participants pay attention to the most.