Social Media, Participatory Design and Cultural Engagement

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Social Media, Participatory Design and Cultural
Engagement

• Jerry Watkins
• ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries
  and Innovation
• Queensland University of Technology
• Kelvin Grove, Australia
• November 2007

By Alvin John
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Presentation Outline

• Overview of Participatory Design
• Australian Museum Stories experiment
• Critique of the paper
• GUEPS and CDs

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Participatory Design

• Participatory Design (PD) originated in
  Scandinavia in 1970s
• User-centered design approach
• involves users as much as possible so that they
  can influence it
• integrates knowledge and expertise from other
  disciplines than just IT
• is highly iterative so that testing can insure
  that design meets users requirements

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Background

• Experiment conducted at the Australian Museum
• to investigate the potential of social media
  based communication strategies
• Australian Museum
• Established in 1827 and oldest institution in the
  country
• Heritage has a collection of 14.5 million
  specimens
• Attracts web visitation rates exceeding 1.5
  million per month
• Museum authorities
• Shifted focus to quality of experience offered
• Explore social media as a medium to interact with
  communities of interest
• Youths
• Informal learning groups

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Experiment

• Participatory Design (PD) was chosen as the
  strategic methodology to guide the social media
  experiment
• PD was extended to
• museum exhibition design
• library website design
• PD methodology was broken down into three phases
  for the museum project
• Phase 1 Due Diligence
• Phase 2 Iterative Design cycles
• Phase 3 Desired Performance

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Participatory Content Creation Method
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Phase 1 Due Diligence

• Working party formed
• Author as the designer/researcher
• Museums Head of Audience Research
• Head of Web Services

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Phase 1 Due Diligence contd

• Phase 1 had three steps
• Organizational observation
• First hand experience of culture and working
  practices
• Domain review
• Reviewed current best practices by cultural
  institutions
• Attracted by digital story telling genre
  participants write and produce autobiographical
  mini-movies
• Chose to try do-it-yourself digital narratives
• Initial project strategy
• Use museum staff as participants in the first
  cycle of prototyping
• Develop skills in creative storytelling
• Project was christened Australian Museum Stories

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Phase 2(a) Prototyping

• Workshop Design
• Social prototyping experience
• Experiment conducted with online audiences,
  rather than physical visitors
• Initial phase was designed
• to skill museum staff in social media production
  techniques
• in-house training program
• 2-day workshop
• Focus on three main areas
• Creative teamwork
• Creative development
• Multimedia production
• First workshop in June 2006
• Eleven participants assigned to four teams
• Second workshop in November 2006
• First workshop was sufficiently positive
• Fourteen participants assigned to four teams (2
  teams of three, 2 teams of four)

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Creative teamwork

• Teams consisted of
• The writer
• The creative producer
• The editor
• The executive producer

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Creative development

• Micro-documentary a creative non-fiction piece
  (preferably informal tone)
• Teams start with a tentative story idea, genre
  definition, required sources checklist
• Executive producer leads creative development
  exercises
• Team members required to generate by the end of
  the day
• existing content
• original content
• final scripts
• storyboards

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Multimedia Production

• Second and final day of workshop
• Editing and postproduction at the Powerhouse
  Museums Soundhouse Vectorlab facility
• Participants given crash course on Sonys Vegas
  video editing suite
• Tasks
• Record voiceovers
• Edit micro-documentary according to storyboard
• End product Presentation of playable
  micro-documentaries in full screen and web-ready
  codecs

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Phase 2(b) Evaluation

• Evaluation techniques instituted
• Output analysis
• Produced nine artifacts from eight groups over
  two workshops
• Varied audiences interested in different subjects
• In-workshop survey
• Self administered questionnaire
• Indicated a high level of satisfaction with
  social prototyping experience (24 out of 25)
• Organizational pressure may be a factor (internal
  audience)

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Phase 2(b) Evaluation contd

• Post-workshop surveys
• Discussion group approximately three months later
• Sessions based on ideas of Future Workshop
• Involved complete a self-administered survey
• How stories created could be used by museum
• Reflections on any perceived organizational
  barriers
• Focus groups
• Four focus groups conducted in February 2007
• Capture reaction of external potential target
  audience
• Parents of under-5s
• Parents of under-16s
• Science teachers
• Culturally active seniors
• Positive reaction to more informal style of
  museum communication
• Negative reaction to the quality of
  micro-documentaries

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Phase 2(c) Strategy

• First iterative design cycle concluded in March
  2007
• Parties involved in discussion
• Workshop participants
• Senior management
• Critique the current design, conduct of
  workshops, evaluation protocols to make
  improvements

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Phase 2(c) Strategy contd

• Outcomes of the strategy meeting
• Production quality
• Improve quality of audio and video created
• Genre and format
• Micro-documentary format was a success
• Include other genres like linear
  micro-documentary and online interactives for the
  museums forthcoming Web 2.0 website upgrade

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Phase 2(c) Strategy contd

• Second iterative design cycle
• Continue cultural engagement through social media
• Establishment of a core in-house team to continue
  and sustain creative social media production
• Conduct pilot projects with external communities
  associated with the museum
• Wide extensive use of the micro-documentary
  format
• Creation of vodcasts and podcasts by external
  biodiversity groups, students of secondary
  schools
• Powerful way to summarize results of studies and
  disseminating to the wider audience
• Online distribution
• Introduce blogs and wikis

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Summary

• Participatory Design application extended to this
  experiment was a success
• Incorporated users into decision making process
• With social prototyping in an iterative design
  cycle, Australian Museum teams designed new
  tools, techniques and genres of
  mirco-documentaries for communication strategies

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Critique of the article

• Positive
• Positive results with application of
  Participatory Design
• Not so positive
• Working party intervention might be a little too
  much for the first iterative cycle of PD more
  structured than usual
• Not a lot of detail about questionnaires and
  surveys administered
• Not a typical experiment with hard data tabulated
  and arriving at a conclusion different style
  (PD approach)

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GUEPS and CDs

• GUEPS
• Explaining
• Mental model
• CDs
• Visibility
• Consistency
• Progressive Evaluation

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Questions