Exploring the Museum and Shaping Our Direction
During the first week of the project, our team visited the Carnegie Museum of Art to explore the collection and begin thinking about how visitors might interact with landscape artworks in new ways.
Rather than starting from a fixed technical solution, each team member selected artworks that interested them and developed an individual concept based on their own observations, interests, and interpretation of the museum experience. These early ideas explored different possibilities for immersion, interaction, personalization, and ways of connecting visitors more directly with the artwork.
At the end of the week, we presented our initial concepts to the client. Through this conversation, we gained a clearer understanding of several directions they are particularly interested in:
- Capturing or collecting something from the visitor
- Creating a memorable freeze-frame moment
- Providing a personalized art experience
- Giving visitors some form of physical or take-home artifact
At the same time, the discussion raised an important design question for our team: How can personalization become meaningful rather than simply placing a visitor’s image into an artwork?
We began exploring alternatives to full-body or photo-based capture. A visitor’s contribution could instead come from their choices, gestures, voice, actions, emotions, or selected visual elements. The team was especially interested in experiences where visitors actively compose, modify, or contribute to an artwork rather than remaining passive subjects of a camera.
Several early directions emerged from the discussion, including interactive landscapes where visitors can manipulate elements such as weather or objects, digital collages created from elements collected across different paintings, stylized portraits that visually blend visitors into an artwork, and moments of capture that happen naturally as a result of interaction.
This conversation helped us move away from thinking of “scan a person and place them inside a painting” as the complete experience. Instead, we are beginning to think about a broader journey centered on choice, composition, interaction, and personal contribution, with image capture potentially becoming only one part of that experience.
By the end of Week 1, we also selected our working project name:
Design Progress_ First Logo Design
Beyond Frame
The name reflects our interest in extending the experience of an artwork beyond its physical frame—allowing visitors not only to look at a landscape, but to interact with it, reshape it, and potentially leave with something uniquely their own.
Going into Week 2, each team member will continue developing one concept into a more concrete direction so that we can compare multiple possibilities with our client and instructors and begin narrowing the overall experience.