Museums and the “Digital Curb Cut”

A new interactive portfolio is in the works, using Flash CS3. The goal is to stretch my thinking about interaction design while creating an elegant, usable and accessible web application. My intent is to document the process and my thinking as the project develops.

My vision is to dynamically generate various views of the projects with varying levels of details. The thumbnails will hover in clusters, moving slightly to entice interaction much like an earlier project called Urban Poetry. The clusters or groupings will be organized around categories and year, with the option of a list view to sort by project, client, or category.

Cluster views will display depth by like objects appearing bigger, while non-related objects shrink to convey distance and difference. Floating labels will appear to announce the category or year, while the thumbnails hover around the locus of the label.

The initial wireframe designs were created in Illustrator, and brought into Flash. Metadata organizing the individual projects have been added to an Excel spreadsheet, and exported to xml via Access. My version of Office for the Mac did not make this easy, and reverting to a PC with Access was necessary to create the xml in an automated fashion. This was a disappointing realization.

Conceiving of the accessibility of the project has been a challenge, particularly as the content is primarily visual, and Flash CS3 has new accessibility features to be learned. In concept, the project will be navigable by keyboard, and visual descriptions of the projects are being considered. All textual content will need to be exposed to screen readers, and tab orders will need to be dynamically set.

Inspiration for this project was derived from an online exhibit at MoMa for Martin Puryear and from a documentary about the TED conference.

On June 7, the long awaited graduation day at Harvard, my thesis research project was honored as the winner of the Dean’s Prize for outstanding thesis in Museum Studies! Thanks again to Jim Devine, my thesis director and Kathy Burton Jones, research advisor, for their support and guidance. Additionally, a book project is in the works to get the research published.

The complete text of my thesis research entitled, Museums and the “Digital Curb Cut” has been posted to this site. The analysis of the museum and developer surveys are included in Chapter III; case studies featuring interactive projects developed by The Library of Congress and Terra Incognita (Chapter IV), The Thomas Jefferson Foundation and Second Story Interactive Studios (Chapter V), and The Tate Modern (Chapter VI) provide exemplary models for creating accessible rich-media online. Chapter VII offers a summary and conclusion of the research findings, along with recent developments in accessible multimedia, particulary for Flash developers.

Jim Devine, my thesis director and Head of Multimedia at the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow, has organized a demonstration session at Museums and the Web 2007. Myself, Jason Springer and Kurt Stuchell will be presenting our thesis research projects on the theme of “All Access” for museums. The demonstration will take place on Saturday, April 14 from 9:30 - 11 am at the Westin St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco. A description of the demonstration can be found on the Museums and the Web conference web site or download a pdf of the presentation.

The latest installment of photos from London and Italy have been posted. From Olive Oyl to hula hoops in the Vatican, the photos are strangely funny and surreal. Image of storefronts always capture my imagination, and the bird and wolf-heads in Florence were no exception.