The Hewitt sisters were these amazing - both sort of philanthropists and dilettantes who went out and single-handedly collected all of these of-the-moment designs in wallpaper and textiles and in graphic design in order to teach people about design.
— Jake Barton
As long as your storytelling and emotional depth are intact, that's what people will focus on.
From a UX standpoint, the toughest battle is how to make a platform that's really open so kids can use it but has sort of hooks and constraints so it's actually driving towards revealing parts of the world through science or through mathematics.
Playgrounds are essentially machines to induce Newtonian physics on our own bodies.
People are moving into modes of participation and self-generation, which apply to everything from museums and television to architecture.
Usually, as designers, you try to create meaning.
Whether it's digital or physical, a pencil or a pen: line work. Humans are making things. And out of that comes the entire designed world we live within.
Whether it's a computer or a pen drawing, design is about drawing shapes and making physical things.
I often say to prospective clients, 'Nothing will age faster than your hardware.' Even the thinnest touch screen will look like a toaster oven in a number of years.
Kids are prone to be on their phone and their iPads, prone to sharing things and making things. Instead of trying to divorce education from that, let's lean into that.
You don't want to pretend that 9/11 ended in 2002 with the first anniversary. So how do you frame the post-9/11 world and play a productive role in discussing it?
It's hard to make something feel like it needs to exist.
A lot of our insights are based on the ways in which people spend time at museums. They're curious, open, interested, and engaging. They want to express themselves and see their own identity refracted through the museum's.
Museums, I think, are becoming more and more aware of how to turn themselves into a must-see spectacle.
People come to museums for storytelling and engagement, and the technology needs to facilitate that.
Sitting with a bunch of adults and arguing about what's going to be most effective for kids is just sort of self-defeating.
The Memorial Finder covers the gap. It tells you the specific panel and number where you can find an individual but begins to reveal the connections between the names themselves. As you move around the site itself, a smartphone app will reveal adjacencies as well as the stories behind the names.
It's not very hard to be clever. It's far harder to be simple, obvious, and meaningful.
People learn more if they're learning in directly engaging ways.
