Arte Interactivo Workshop Graduation

As part of a Deutsche Bank grant, we have taken on a two-year application development project at New New Yorkers. The whole endeavor will eventually culminate in QMA’s first mobile app. Is this unusual? Hardly; but I think the next sentence will get you more interested:

Our first mobile app is being designed by our students.

True to our nature and always emphasizing student work we decided we would do this bottom-up and not top-down. I’ve seen so many applications which although great in their own right end up in folly because the users they were meant to serve did not take to them. Sometimes apps are also written around temporary exhibits and have no life beyond the exhibit itself. Our needs for the Panorama of the city of New York—which is on permanent display—are different. There is also the matter of to what degree is this app supplemental, instead of center-stage, and what need is it solving?

To be honest we weren’t sure we could completely answer that question. Certainly there are accessibility limits to the way we display the Panorama, and therefore design opportunities around it. The size of the Panorama lies in complete opposition to its scale, making it a “giant miniature,” so proximity to the actual work is all but impossible. This disparity is made more evident by the emotional proximity that the viewer feels towards it. All New Yorkers have strong memories linked to places and landmarks around the city. When they see the Panorama they want to revisit these places, but find themselves at the margins of those places and memories. There lies another design opportunity.

Since the public is the one who is bound to point out the most obvious flaws of our displays we need them to be involved in the design process from the start. Therefore we decided to run a series of workshops where students would learn the basics of prototyping and problem solving using the Panorama as a case study. The artist who helped us develop our proposal, Marco Castro Osorio, was hired to lead one of these workshops in Spanish. Marco comes from the NYU ITP program. NNY has worked with various graduates of this program, and they have always been among our most creative and enthusiastic staff members.

One of the first lessons Marco taught them was that the biggest failures in design are those in which there was no problem to start with, or real needs were ignored in favor of design over enthusiasm and misplaced earnestness (the tyranny of novelty). From that point they explored a series of options based on their needs, aspirations, whim, and imagination. The quality of the proposals was impressive and their ideas interesting. We are now getting ready to run a second iteration of this course in English and hope to find a Mandarin speaking educator/designer to run a third one. At the end of this cycle we will present all ideas to QMA staff and put together a dossier to be handed to the developers that will write the app itself, tailored to our needs.

Congratulations to Luz Aguirre, Ana Reza, Doris López, Gabriel Rivera, Jorge Miranda, Magaly Barzola, Marianna Giacalone, and Rocío Venegas for their hard work!

 

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