Edmonds Historical Museum
User informed illustrated map of the downtown Edmonds area
Overview
The Edmonds Historical Museum is a museum established to preserve and showcase the rich and diverse history of Edmonds. With certain things changing over the past 50 years and other things remaining the same, the Edmonds Historical Museum is currently looking to take out its bottom floor in order to implement infrastructure that can adapt and be changed as needed, supported by a $150,000 grant for these renovations. Their goal is to integrate technology, house interactive and engaging exhibits, and find a way to display its collection of more than 27,000 artifacts.
Role
Graphic Design
Map design, sketching, prototyping
Project Type
School Project
Duration
Oct 2023- Nov 2023
Problem
How might we utilize a hands on activity to encourage younger visitors to engage and learn more about Edmonds?
Research
We began by doing stakeholder interviews with Edmonds Historical Museum director Arnie Lund, followed by field studies of other existing museums.
While most museums which host historical or artistic pieces are not aimed specifically at children, Bellevue Arts Museum has an area in the museum aimed specifically at children, and often hosts teen events and classes on site. As such, I chose to observe people at Bellevue Arts Museum.
Ideate
Based on our team’s research, I did preliminary sketches using the 10+10 method to quickly draft ideas based on our design direction. Our team was primarily set on the community room idea, and these sketches reflect that.
However, after being made aware of the requirement to include something digital, we decided to instead pivot our idea. Combining some aspects of all of these design ideas, our final plan was to create a prototype of a physical printed map of Edmonds with major landmarks and streets, where people can interact with it through scanning QR codes and seeing what Edmonds looked like in the past and comparing it to the present.
Since our target audience was museum visitors middle school aged and up, and we imagined that this poster would exist in some sort of community room, I drafted an illustrated map style.
User Flow
Keeping in mind the possible user flow for interacting with our map and prototype, after receiving feedback from group members, we decided to focus our web app and map specifically on the downtown area of Edmonds, also referred to as “The Bowl of Edmonds”. This way, people could pin particular locations that are interesting to them more closely on the map, and most of Edmonds’ attractions are in the downtown area anyways.
Final Designs
Through the QR code on the final illustrated map, visitors are brought to a web app and have the option to leave notes or a story about a specific memory they have associated with the place for future visitors to read when they scan it. They can also use magnets to mark their favorite spot on the map.
The map can be a part of a possible future community or activities room aimed at children.
In addition to working on the physical map, I also helped add the vector map to our web app prototype and use our style guide’s primary blue color for the water for a more cohesive look. Building upon the work done by my other team members, I created the filters component and also prototyped the flow so that users could pan around the map with filters staying in place, and apply filters that would reflect on the page itself.
Next Steps
- While we focused primarily on the web app and map for our prototype, aspects of this can be expanded in further development as to be determined by the Edmonds Historical Museum.