The Interaction Lab at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Visitor-experience-focused research and development for the nation’s design museum 

Co-founded by Rachel Ginsberg and Carolyn Royston, the Interaction Lab is an embedded research program driving the reimagining of Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s audience experience, across digital, physical, and human interactions. The core idea behind the Lab was to help Cooper Hewitt live its mission as the nation’s design museum by creating a porous border between the work and thinking behind the design of the museum experience and a massively talented multidisciplinary design community, enthusiastic to engage.

From internal launch in March 2019, the Lab injected new ideas into the museum’s work through: internal workshopping and experiential strategy; a public program series (online and off) merging interactive design and museum practice; collaborative thought leadership and professional development; as well as a creative commissioning program that engages the design community as collaborators in designing the next wave of the Cooper Hewitt experience. It eventually also evolved to include an internal consultancy supporting other Smithsonian Offices and Units with audience engagement strategy.

Rachel’s role as Founding Director of the Interaction Lab included primary responsibility for all aspects of strategy, program design and management, fundraising and direct collaboration with internal partners, sponsors, and communities. She also acted as primary designer and facilitator of all participatory programming, while consulting with a variety of other museum departments on individual strategies for exhibitions and programs. After three and a half years leading this remarkable program, Rachel stepped away in August of 2022. In collaboration with a wide variety of talented colleagues, Rachel led the Lab in developing and executing the following programs over her 3.5 years in the role:

INTERNAL CONSULTANCY: INTEGRATING EXPERIENCE DESIGN PRACTICES INTO EXHIBITIONS

A critical part of the Interaction Lab’s work was to support other museum departments in elevating the space and prominence of participation in all museum programs. Over the course of Rachel’s work with the interaction Lab, she consulted personally, and in collaboration with external professionals to design innovative, meaningful audience engagement approaches based on clear objectives and research for a variety of exhibitions that, as of Summer 2022 have not yet opened to the public.

PUBLICATION AND PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT SERIES: TOOLS AND APPROACHES FOR TRANSFORMING MUSEUM EXPERIENCE 

The practical, financial, and social impacts of the coronavirus alongside a national reckoning with racial injustice has increased the urgency to address why, how, and for whom museums exist in the 21st century. For museum professionals, this pivotal question raises another: how might we transform our collective approach to designing museum experiences to better reflect the diverse communities we serve? To explore this critically important conversation, thanks to the support of the Samuel H. Kress Foundation, Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum’s Interaction Lab convened a series of workshops inviting 15 museum professionals doing groundbreaking work across visitor experience-related roles, representing: curatorial, education, audience research, programming and public engagement, visitor services, exhibition design, digital, and accessibility.

Co-authored by the working group and available as a free, open source download, the contents of the toolkit are drawn from discussions that emerged during all workshop sessions, some by design and some organically. It contains thoughts and ideas on why transforming museum experience is necessary, questions to help leaders and practitioners move toward designing transformative museum experiences, and tactics to help drive this work forward for audiences and communities, including useful tools and approaches from the co-authors’ areas of practice.

In addition to publishing the toolkit, Rachel also had the pleasure to convene two cohorts of almost 40 museum practitioners in advancing their own transformative projects based on the guiding frameworks contained therein.

CREATIVE COMMISSIONING PROGRAM: ACTIVATING SMITHSONIAN OPEN ACCESS (ASOA)

The Activating Smithsonian Open Access Challenge (ASOA) from Cooper Hewitt’s Interaction Lab supported creative technology teams in designing engaging interactive experiences with Smithsonian Open Access collections for people all over the globe. Made possible by Verizon 5G Labs, this open call for proposals sought to stimulate new ideas for inspiring digital interactions with over 3 million 2D and 3D objects in the Smithsonian’s Open Access collections, all available under a Creative Commons Zero (CC0) license for download, re-use, alteration, and even commercialization.

From over 102 proposals, seven finalists were selected to receive $10,000 to develop their ideas into functioning prototypes over a 12 week build period that were then presented and made available for public use. In addition to providing mentorship and inclusive design education throughout the build, creators retained all intellectual property related to their work. You can try the ASOA prototypes yourself on the ASOA webpage, and if you’re interested, learn more about how ASOA is modeling a new way to develop tools for museum audiences.

PUBLIC PROGRAMs SERIES MERGING INTERACTIVE DESIGN AND MUSEUM PRACTICE

2021: ACTIVATING SMITHSONIAN OPEN ACCESS PUBLIC PRESENTATION

To mark the launch of the seven ASOA prototypes in August 2021, the Interaction Lab held a public demonstration on Zoom in August of 2021.

2020: DISCUSSIONS ON TRANSFORMING MUSEUM EXPERIENCE

As part of the initial workshop series that led to Tools and Approaches for Transforming Museum Experience the working group held an online program with almost 200 participants to engage the museum community in conversation about the kinds of museum transformation they would like to see. Findings from this workshop ultimately informed decision making about the structure and contents of the toolkit.

2020: PANDEMIC AS PORTAL ONLINE COLLABORATIONS

Pandemic as Portal  was an experiential collaboration in two parts that brought together audiences of up to 175 people from many countries to discuss our experiences with the pandemic and how they were affecting our relationships with museums, each other, and ourselves. The theme and the name was initially inspired by Arundhati Roy’s Financial Times article The Pandemic is a Portal. Different from a portal that simply jumps people immediately from one place to another this period felt almost more like a tunnel, that gave us time (wiling or not) to examine our transition as we moved through it.

Whatever it is, coronavirus has made the mighty kneel and brought the world to a halt like nothing else could. Our minds are still racing back and forth, longing for a return to “normality”, trying to stitch our future to our past and refusing to acknowledge the rupture…Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. – Arundhati Roy

Participants used online collaboration software, Miro, to document their ideas during both programs. Please explore them!

Exploring the In-Between: May 2020

Preparing to Emerge: August 2020

2019 - 2020: IN-PERSON PROGRAMS

Since the Interaction Lab’s inception, it has been a critical priority to invite a dynamic community of thinkers, doers, and learners to explore the intersection of design and museum experience. Between September of 2019 and February of 2020, the Interaction Lab held 5 public programs, inviting audiences of 65-120 for a range of programs offering highly interactive gatherings connecting design practices to the work of designing the museum experience.

Feb 11, 2020 – Museum Storytelling: Linked Architecture and Future Interfaces

The Interaction Lab partnered with the Columbia University School of the Arts’ Digital Storytelling Lab on a meetup at the Film Center at Lincoln Center. During the first part of the evening, Carolyn Royston, Chief Experience Officer, Rachel Ginsberg, Interaction Lab Director, and Adam Quinn, Sr. Digital Product Manager pulled back the curtain on a new digital infrastructure that will present otherwise invisible design stories connecting things like exhibition themes, collection objects, research publications, even the mansion itself. Then, we moved into a 90 minute prototyping session, exploring new interfaces that would bring this newly linked information architecture to life.

January 21, 2020 – Information Design for Sensemaking

Interaction Lab Founding Director, Rachel Ginsberg opened the evening with a presentation that framed the practice of information design to museum visitor experience and proposed a new definition of the practice. Then we were joined by award winning data designer Giorgia Lupi to share her work and practice. The talks were followed by a workshop and discussion with participants to explore priorities for Cooper Hewitt’s own information design process.

December 9, 2019 – Workshop: Bodystorming Access

The Interaction Lab invited Anna Gichan, Zazel-Chavah O’Garra, and Kayla Hamilton, a group of dancers of varying abilities, to develop participatory bodystorming workshops to explore how different bodies can and do interact with the physical space of the museum. We opened and closed the event with candid group discussion.

November 13, 2019 – Interpretation as Storytelling

For our 2nd event, we were eager to move into a participatory format, and to dig into storytelling approaches in design practice and explore how they might inform our approach to interpretation at Cooper Hewitt. The Interaction Lab invited Sr. Curator and famed graphic deisgner Ellen Lupton, Interactive Narrative Designer Nick Fortugno and Extended Reality Designer Michaela Ternasky Holland to speak about their design practices, and then conduct workshops with participants to apply those practices to the museum setting. At the end, we reconvened together to discuss our findings.

September 17, 2019 – Curator, Computer, Creator: A Discussion on Museums and AI in the 21st Century

To launch our public program series, the Lab partnered with the Museums and AI Network, a UK/US collaboration of museum professionals exploring use of AI in museums, with specific emphasis on ethics and accountability. For this first event, three speakers presented different perspectives about AI: those of a Curator (Andrea Lipps, CHSDM), a “computer” (Harrison Pim, Wellcome Collection), and a creator (Karen Palmer, AI artist). To close the evening, we kept time for discussion, followed by a reception.

Still image from Bodystorming Access public program, December 2019, featuring Curiosity Cloud sculpture from Nature: Design Triennial