2011 Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool

This week, we presented our final project, msu.seum, to our fieldschool counterparts in the Campus Archaeology Program and I have to say that it was the high point of the week for me. Though we have been hard at work this week developing the user interface, coding, and compiling content, this was the first opportunity we had to discuss the project outside of our CHI bubble.

Interactions like the one with Campus Archaeology this week are essential to any development process. Designers can be prone to tunnel vision, becoming so engrossed in our projects that we cannot see what might be missing or problematic. Talking about our work and inviting feedback during development facilitates a productive, reflexive design process. On a practical level, reflexive design helps prevent scenarios where designers realize a glaring omission or flaw to the app after launch. On an ethical level, these reflexive activities facilitate user-centered design and ensure that apps are developed with the needs and abilities of the users in mind.

As an audience for our pitch, the CAP students are in a unique position as potential users of msu.seum as well as stakeholders, meaning that we are representing them and their hard work toward uncovering campus heritage in this application. Stakeholders, such as the CAP students, are positioned as both content contributors and subjects of content, so it is all the more important that we engage in a cycle of feedback to ensure accurate and ethical representation. I would characterize this type of interaction between designer and stakeholder as a productive fellowship wherein we, the designers and developers, seek to understand our stakeholders better by engaging them in a dialogue and allowing them to engage us and try to understand us as well. Through these exchanges, the scales of authority between designers/developers and stakeholders come closer to an ethical balance.

The CAP students had concerns in regard to particular features of the design, but also toward issues of access and audience. They expressed concern that we’re severely limiting the potential audience for msu.seum by making a native app for iOS and Android, something that can only be used by smartphone users who are in still in the minority of mobile phone users. They suggested that a website would be a much more valuable product because it allows for a much wider audience. As stakeholders in the project, they were rightfully concerned about the fact that a native mobile app would alienate potential new audiences not only to app itself, but to the work that Campus Archaeology does every year at MSU.

The constraints of mobile development and native apps are something we’re very well aware of in conceptualizing msu.seum, which is why we saw this as a multi-phase project from the beginning. From our conversation with the CAP students, we know that a web-based version of msu.seum is a high priority for the next phase of development, whereas we may not have known that before. Overall, the conversation with the CAP students went extremely well, I think. I loved that they called us out about some of our concepts and had ideas about how we could improve msu.seum. Knowing that they are so engaged in this project makes me feel all the more excited about following it through.