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.
"Take a look, find some description, read through that, if it's great I'll take picture."
"Look at it, photograph it, sometimes photograph it with me next to it."
"Read the story, and history, and get to know the artist."
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
Primary persona - Emma Donohue
Persona (secondary)
Secondary Persona - Joseph Green
Secondary Persona - Keith Jones
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
We suggest SFAC just put feedback box on every art piece site and collect feedback to see what people think about it and how they would like to see. So to speak, SFAC can put least effort and gain a high impact by doing so.
All they need to provide is feedback boxes, feedback forms, and pencils.
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
Team work.