Meet Van Gogh in the City

Abstract

The project aims at designing an engaging art experience outside the Van Gogh Museum (VGM) for young people. The experience should achieve the design goal of triggering young people’s interest in Van Gogh and his art through experiencing the connections between his personal stories and his painting style and technique in a mixed-reality environment. Before defining this design goal, research was conducted through literature review, context and user research (Contextmapping), and existing XR products analysis. Through literature review, the factors of relevance and participation of enhancing engagement and their relation to emotional connection are found. It provides a clear objective for user research in the VGM context - figuring out the desired content of the museum for young people and how they would like to interact with the content. Specific qualities of interaction and desired content are figured out based on the needs of young people. Among all through mixed reality technology, mixed reality is selected due to its potential to enable diverse interaction and be more accessible by the target group. Based on insights gained from the research phase, the design goal and design criteria are formulated, validated, and prioritized based on the results of a questionnaire. In the ideation phase, ideas are generated and prototyped from both technological and context perspectives, which lead to three important results: Feasible design elements by MR, the understanding of the essential aspects of MR, and a structure of four phases of interaction that help build the design elements into a complete journey. A converging concept is created, tested, and discussed with participants and clients with all the insights above. The insights result in a content structure, providing a logical way of organizing content during the experience through layered information with a coherent storyline. It reduces the cognitive effort needed to process the information so that it engages young people more. Based on the structure of four phases of interaction and user test insights, the final concept is created. The interactive prototype is built with Java, a programming language. The prototype is used for the final concept evaluation. The concept is then evaluated and validated by both the field test and the control test, using observation, questionnaire, and interview combined to evaluate to what extend the design achieved the design goal and criteria. Limitations and recommendations for improvements are discussed at the end of the evaluation chapter. Overall, the design is an interactive art experience (installation) that brings the content of VGM to the public environment, approaches young people, and triggers their interest in the connection between Van Gogh’s stories and art with Mixed reality.