Design Jam:
Art Labels

  1. Introduction
  2. Design Thinking
  3. Art Labels
  4. What Are We Doing?
  5. How Can We Do It?

Welcome to this Design Jam!

Thanks!

Thank you to the CCBI and Humber Galleries for giving all of us this opportunity to participate and learn together. I am excited to work on a real world problem while engaging industry experts and users in a practical exercise.

Hello and thank you to our guests, content experts in this space. Welcome Akshata Naik, Program and Gallery Manager, Arts Etobicoke and Melissa Smith, Assistant Curator of Access and Learning, AGO.

handshake

It's nice to meet you!

What are we doing?

For the next couple of days, we are going to undertake in a Design Thinking journey into the world of Art Labels. This means we will be asking a lot of questions from as many people as possible, learning what we can about users, about art, about museums and those little lables that are beside many pieces of visual art.

Desing Thinking Basics

Design Thinking?

Sometimes a succesfull design can be created from a designer's intuition, expertise, and experience. But quite often a designer is placed into a situation where they do not know enough about the problem space challenge to generate effective solutions. Those are the times when we need a strategic method, and that method is what we call Design Thinking.

One example is the d.school method of a "five step" process. Here are the five steps:

Empathise

Define

Ideate

Prototype

Test

There are many other methods of design thinking, like Inclusive Design Method, Agile, or the Double Diamond. We don't need to learn them all in detail. Let's just focus on the general outline which they have in common.

The Condensed Method:

Here is a crash course to get your started as a Design Thinker.

STEP 1: Identify a wide range of users.

If you are trained in marketing, you may have learned that it is important to identify a specific "target demographic" and to design for them. Or maybe you have noticed that restaurants which specialize in one thing tend to be more succesfull than a restuarants which try to be all things to all people.

a row of 7 different people, and one is highlighted

The narrow approach of finding a "Target Market"

This approach might work for people choosing between Thai or Italian, fine dining or family, but it doesn't cut the mustard in wider domains with many diverse users. You may have encountered such problems as a target market of "all humans, aged birth to death." These are things that need to be designed with everyone in mind - things like healthcare, transit, education, websites, the job market...and even Art Galleries. That is why in Design Thinking we don't take a single step forward until we have indentified and understood as many different users as possible:

a row of 7 people different people, and all are highlighted

The Design Thinking approach of starting with a wide range of users in mind.

If you do not start with a wide net, then how can you expect your design to work once it gets out into the world and all sorts of people try to use it?

STEP 2: Identify the needs and goals of those users.

What is a successful design? How about this:

"A succesfull design is a design that provides users with the things they need to achieve their goals."

That means a successful design will require the designers to aquire two key things:

People are diverse. They have a range of needs. They have a range of goals. People are also interconnected, and so those needs and goals intersect, overlap, and have to served simultaneously.

a range of diverse users a range of diverse users who needs are connected

All of these users are unique, they all need different ways to access a design, different ways at different times, and they have different goals. Sometimes they are trying to do achieve their goals, with their different needs, all at once. Think of a family with a child going to a restaurant. Maybe the parents want to relax, maybe the child does not. When McDonald's offers a play place for children, and comfortable seating in the McCafe for the parents, they are attempting to satisfy the intersecting needs and goals of the parents and the children.

STEP 3: Generate ideas you can test with the users

Designers are frequently pushed outside of their comfort zone. We are problem solvers, not solution knowers. That means we do not know what works until we ask users if it works. Designers are not users, or at least, we are not the kind of user...so we shouldn't rely on our own judgement and experience to assess the success of a design idea.

a designer asking users if a design works

That is why ongoing testing and meaningful user invovlement is a mandatory part of design thinking. The last think you want to do is a ton of polished work, only to discover once you are "finished" that it doesnt give people what they need to achieve their goals.

STEP 4: Make it!

Not much to say here. Once you identify all users, once you know thier needs and goals, and once your verify what will work for those needs and goals, the only thing left to do is to make the thing!

Art Labels

What is an art label?

Art labels are those little labels that you see on artworks in galleries, museums, and even in public art.

artwork on a wall, with a label on the right side of it

The label for this artwork is hanging on the wall to the right of the artwork. Full Size

At the Humber Galleries, the art labels contain:

Close up of label content

Close up of label content. Full Size

Humber Galleries even had public art, should that have labels?

Close up of label content

Valentine, Harley - Persephone Install - Lakeshore L Building. Full Size

Most galleries use labels, and they can vary. Here ar esome examples of art labels from the Art Gallery of Ontario. Notice how different labels seem to be for different things?

Close up of label content. Full Size

Close up of label content. Full Size

Let's start to think about this from a Design Thinking approach. Based on what exists, who are the users? What are their goals? What are thier needs?

Users:

Goals:

Needs:

We are Designing Art Labels for Humber Galleries!

But we can't do that without understanding who is using the art labels, and what goals they hope to achieve through the labels, and what they need in order to use them.

It gets complicated! What if an artist, curator, and viewer have slightly conflicting views about what a label should be for? Can you serve both sets of needs and goals? What about a group of museum visitors with different needs (ability, language, interest, knowledge) who want to visit the same gallery together and share an experience? Is anything unique about the users goals for Humber's Gallery? What users are involved there, and what do people need?

We have got to:

  1. Find a diverse range of users

  2. Identify their needs and goals

  3. Give them something to test

  4. Make prototypes of whatever passes testing

How can we do it?

Research Methods

User research takes many forms. You can conduct interviews. Read social media. Conduct Focus Groups. Here is an entire book full of Design Methods:

universal methods of design

Full Book

Collaboration and Creation Methods

There are lots of tools to collaborate. We will be working in Zoom, but, some digital workspaces include: