Let SF Arts Ecosystem Grow and Glow

SFAC - Case Study

Overview

San Francisco Arts Commission (SFAC), established by charter in 1932, is a city agency that champions the arts. On top of the belief that arts incite inspiring personal experiences and offer engaging approaches for the community to connect with each other as well as San Francisco, SFAC envisions to support a healthy art ecosystem by building public awareness of the value and benefits of the arts.

Therefore, they ensure to understand the community’s perspectives on what makes art “good” and invest in public arts that could maximize people’s experience.

My role: UX research, Synthesize, Visual design

Team: Kalen Jennings, Michaela Guerrera

Duration: 10 days

Problem

To understand San Francisco residents’ and visitors’ views toward the public art and create a more engaging art experience, SFAC needs an approach to collect feedback from the community and provide information on public art for people who stumble upon them.

Solution

We designed 3-phased solutions that can enable SFAC to get feedback from the public as well as to deliver more information for them.

At this moment, we focus on the 1st-phase and 2nd-phase solution

• Place a feedback box on each public art spot

• Generate QR code for each public art piece which allows people to link to SFAC’s current database containing the information

DISCOVER

Survey

With 19 responses

Field Study

Observation of a Sculpture at Embarcadero Center (30 minutes)

Interview

With 12 people currently living in San Francisco

By asking them “What Do You Do When You Encounter a Piece of Art?”, our goal is to understand how local people interact with public art.

DEFINE

Wrap up How People Feel and Think

Affinity map - a method used to gather and group data or ideas based on their natural relationships. Affinity map helped us reveal the compelling, high-level insights and trends in the data.

See The Big Picture

To Encourage the Mutual Communication

Through a concept model, we can see the big picture on relationships between the public art and each stakeholder. Our primary stakeholders include SFAC,  artists, and public (residents and visitors).

Given the goal is to help SFAC get the community’s feedback and provide valuable information to more engage the public, the relationship between artists an other stakeholders would not be emphasized in this project.

Instead, we focus on improving the communication between SFAC and residents & visitors, which demonstrates below in the highlighted area:

Persona (primary)

These Personas Represent the Residents/Visitors in San Francisco

Persona (secondary)

DEVELOP & DELIVER

Finding the Simplest Solution

Create an Minimum Viable Product (MVP)

1. Feedback Box

Place a Feedback Box on Each Art Piece Site and Collect Feedback

Remember Emma? See How Her Journey Looks Like.

Feedback Boxes Benefit SFAC But Not The Residents and Visitors

This feedback box would help SFAC understand how people think about that art piece with a low cost; however, the residents/visitors couldn’t get information from it.

2. QR Code

To Help People Find Information about Public Art

Since people want more information on public art that they encounter and the SFAC currently has an online database containing this information, we suggested generating a QR code for each art piece.

By scanning the QR code to get more information on a work of art, it’s not only easy for an individual but also convenient for SFAC to collect quantitative data on public engagement with the art.

* The camera of iOS 11 or later version supports QR code scanning. By simply scanning the QR code using regular camera app, it would directly lead you the the website.

Emma’s user journey with QR code