Contempo Museum App
Project
Contempo Museum App
Visual Design, Coding, User Experience
Sky Alsgaard
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The Contempo Museum App is an iPad application aimed at providing museum visitors with an understanding of the principles of design. Featuring ten artworks from the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection, three principles of design are highlighted in each artwork using animation and a short explanation on how they are being used within the artwork.
THE PROBLEM
Have you ever been in a museum or come across a work of art that has made you ask, “Why is THAT art?!” and then you listen to an audio tour and suddenly you start to see the artwork in a whole new light?
That is the power of information when it comes to looking at art. Unfortunately, most people don’t have someone walking beside them explaining every artwork they see and only 10% of visitors take the audio tour when visiting a museum. So what happens when most people see an artwork that they don’t understand? What do they do?
They don’t look at….
“It has been documented over and over again that when people are faced with artwork they do not understand, they just walk by it.”
— Austin Clarkson and Douglas Worts, The Animated Muse: An Interpretive Program for Creative Viewing
THE SOLUTION
The Contempo Museum App is an iPad application aimed at introducing museum visitors to the principles of design.
Why the principle of design? They are universal guidelines that help the mind make sense of what it is seeing, they also give context for approaching and unraveling art, and lastly, every good artist takes them into consideration when creating, so they are extremely important to know.
In a survey of 215 people, only 20% had taken a class where they learned about the principles, so most people do not have the basic understanding of these formal aesthetic codes. The Contempo Museum App teaches viewers about the principles of design and they can then apply this knowledge to other artworks.
“The Contempo Museum App is not dumbing down the process of looking at art. Instead it is teaching viewers to really engage with the artwork and that is exciting.” — Kara Q. Smith, Editor at Art Practical; Assistant Curator at di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art
