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Today we were introduced to our client and project, Västerbotten Musem. Or contact Emma is in charge of the open-air museum and her goals is for us to design something that would establish a connection between traditional crafts, there is supposed to be a space for crafts and a venue for the immaterial cultural heritage.

It's an interesting challenge because since I'm born and raised in Umeå I'm very familiar with the museum, so I'll guess in this project I'll have to pretend that I'm seeing it with fresh eyes so I do not color my first impressions. The challenge for me is to somehow see excitement in something that is old news for me.

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The exercise of today was to do context mapping, as I understand it we were to gather every thought or question we had about Västerbotten Museum, what we liked about museums and what we don't like. To map out the sort of space that we are to design within. I feel like I don't really like to be handheld too much in a museum, I like to be on my own and to experience the museum freely, but others in the group felt the polar opposite. We sort of compromised in discussion that it's good with some sort of guidance as long as it's not imposing.

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We had a meeting in the group about preparing for our meeting was about preparing for our visit to the Västerbotten Museum and what sort of documents we would try to gather. We basically think we should just gather as much as possible of almost anything, all from photos to just personal impressions, we also agreed to try to talk to people there but I felt a bit pessimistic about actually finding anyone at this time.

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The visit went smooth and there were actually more people there to talk to than I had expected. I got a hold of one of the staff working there, Jimmy. He was open to digitization and thought it could bring the museum to more people, also was very enthusiastic about new technological solutions for artifacts.

Also lots of photos. No possibility to enter the buildings though. And no guides or any really engaging information.

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We met in Zoom to work together to decide what directions we wanted to go in. We wanted to bring the audio of the museum grounds into a digital space, having stories and content that would inform about the crafts and history of the place while also trying to be fun. And we also began to do some sketches on how we envisioned this solution to look like.

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We all had done some sketching from the day before and we presented it to the class. Our sketches were centered around an app using virtual maps to guide the user with audio guides and visual interactions. Unfortunately we didn't get all that much criticism, but I can feel that we will have a problem with deciding how much of the app will be entertainment and how much will be educational and how we tie this all together

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Today we met and went back to basics. I put forward the proposal of everyone in the group writing down what their perception of our concept was and what values we felt were important. We sort of reached a consensus about how it should be trying to be engaging and interactive, immersive but also try to be accessible to as many people as possible. The goal should be to bridge modern generations with the ancient history. I feel like this was useful because we sort of checked off that everyone was on the same page and there were no miscommunication going on.

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With today's meeting we really felt like we needed to figure out what concretely we wanted to present with our design. I was very nervous that we did not have a complete enough idea or that it was to scattershot. It felt like we went in on the track of a digital app so quickly it's easy to feel like we just went on rails. By creating our flowchart we at least now have some idea of what particular set of features and artifacts we wanted to present.

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Over the night we had created some more refined prototypes to really test our idea and we gathered together and merged all components together to see if we felt the layout maked sense. Then later we presented this to everyone in the class, doing a sort of walkthrough of the app, again the response was not overwhelming but we did get some questions about how a user would access this app in the first place and how we would overcome that.

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Today we decided to really boil down what our design was going to be about, and basically it will be a platform/app that works as an virtual guide using audio primarily but also visual interactions to tell stories. The user will be able to scan QR codes on location to gain access to unique stories and content. It isn't super flashy but I feel a lot more confident now that we really have a direction we are going in, but we were urged to do some more research to look into if something like this had been done before. Anyways I feel better now, there have been some communication issues in the group regarding the intent of the project and a lot of times it feels like we've pulled ahead too far but I feel like we're in the same sort of area now.

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Another meeting on zoom again we must now prepare and really tie together everything for the presentation. Some members had also done research and found similar case studies of apps in museums, but it's hard to really validate them. But it seems like it's a valid direction we are heading into. I take on the responsibility of making a more enhanced version of our lo-fi prototype for the presentation, we also try to create our slides collaboratively, a lot of discussion went on here about how we should structure the presentation. Communication has been difficult during this project, not because of anyone's fault but because it's been hard to really understand how everyone involved has envisioned the product. Either way tomorrow we will do more and I'll have to present my refinements.

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Today we continued working on the presentation. The refined prototype is more or less finished now and it was received well but there are some additional things to do for tomorrow and the presentation on thursday.

The chaos in the slides continues a bit but finally the structure is beginning to clear: I'll talking about the prototype and the interviews with the staff.

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Rehearsal and finishing touches, it finally is getting tied up, surprisingly it all makes sense now. The finished prototype is approved, the slides are all in order. Tomorrow we'll see what everyone thinks.

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It all went perfectly and Emma really liked our concept which felt nice. It's odd to me how we all went from being very scattershot and spread in all directions to finally have converged on the same goal. I don't know if this is what everyone had in mind, I feel like I might've influenced the process too strongly or been to vocal and maybe some in the group felt like they were pulled along. I hope not, but either way it seems like we all managed to converge in a way that seemed implausible weeks ago.