Project Title
Poole Museum
Background:
I got introduced to the Poole museum project through the MESH program. ‘MESH’ is an initiative by Arts University Bournemouth for the collaboration of students across MA with external client projects. Here I was introduced with Poole Museum project, for which collaborated with a fellow MA design student, along with this Fran( MA innovation award leader)and Phil ( MA dean) guided us throughout the project.
Client /
Poole Museum
Role /
Innovation designer
Brief:
The initial brief was an all-inclusive summary of different things that they wanted to achieve in the post – Covid era. Some of them included: to improve the diversity of their volunteers or reach under-represented audience, more opportunities for the public to engage or connect with staff. That can be summarised as the need to create a: ‘Creative culture and redesigning the work culture’ in the Post- covid era in order to include all different working styles.
Research:
Poole Museum is in an exciting moment of transition, where it will be moving into newly designed spaces. We considered how we could bridge the gap between where it's are now and where it will be in a few years. This led to our focus on engendering a creative culture in the workplace. We visited Poole museum in-person, which gave us the insight of place and talking to the staff we realised the need for more focused changes on the 4th andthe 5th floor. Along with this, the post-covid-19 era bought different working styles for different groups, some of them worked on site 1 day a week or 4 days/week and so on.
We planned to accomodate these diverse working styles and flexible timings. After the visit, created personas and thereby the assumptions of their needs and space requirements. In order to produce an all-inclusive and precise solution, the next step was to conduct more precise research. This study had been conducted with the help of primary and secondary research.
Primary research
The primary data has been gathered with the help online questionnaire (google survey) that was circulated to all the staff at Poole Museum. The next step involved, the research report that incorporated findings from this primary research, Poole museum websites, discussions, and other sources to draw inferences on the subject. Based on these research reports and the follow-up discussion led us to create the personas and the detailed brief for this project.
Research Analysis
The most surprising part we found out through this research was the personal comments, it gave us a brief understanding of other parts like the environment, their ideal working day, and how lack of interaction in the post-covid-19 era that affected most of the staff.
Working styles:
After our previous research, we identified the need for different working spaces and working styles. According to a research report by global influences and future workforce articles, it shows that future of the in-office work culture is an all-inclusive environment. Here, team working styles predominantly use structures such as collaboration, brainstorming, peer review, self-directed or group thinking and these provided a real opportunities to share ideas and achieve creating a new work system. So in the next phase of designing and creating draft ideas we started working with these different spaces. The initial ideas involve graphic interventions, 3D printing, public-staff collaborative boards, posters, and repainting spaces.
‘To transform Poole museum into a place of diverse working styles, inhabiting di erent spaces for all di erent styles of working. At the same time enabling the freedom to customise your own working spaces and thus encouraging creative work culture’
Ideas behind the final designs:
Co-curating:
Co-curating means the act of sharing the duties of creating something. Co-curating in this scenario represents making space for divergent perspectives. It also represents the freedom of designing their own spaces and in collaboration with others. 4 major working styles identified in the Poole museum require a collaboration of some form. Co-curating is the way to create those by considering diverse views. For example, a common brainstorming place could be a space designed by involving the different departments from learning staff, curating staff to the front-end staff.
Biassociation:
'Koestler's fundamental idea is that any creative act is a biassociation of two (or more) apparently incompatible frames of thought.' Can we encourage such creative leaps by making spaces that facilitate biassociation in both individual minds and collectively? Our idea of biassociation is simple and allows us to connect the working styles and objects of poole museum to diverse visions and when they are put together would show the complete picture.
The Final Designs:
After the research phrase and coming across the ideas of bi-association and co-curating. We started with the big idea of 3D printing, here we wanted to represent what's under the Poole Museum mission statement in a 3D form which would also be mobile and carry visually appealing typography. This 3D printing idea also involved scanning some of the items from Poole Museum which they could easily carry around. Some of the other ideas were of creating a board for staff interaction, graphic posters one the idea of collaborative working, a survey board, and some visual wall graphics.
The final designs involved dividing our solutions and creating design for each of working styles as: 3D printing, in-house collaboration, formal collaboration, Let's connect ( staff-public), graphic intervention.
