Our design is directed towards people who need additional information about art’s emotional impact on the general public, beyond just observing and analyzing the pieces themselves. We have three primary targets for our contextual inquiries:

WCMA Curators

Curators decide which pieces of art are displayed and where each piece is placed relative to the others. This is a crucial job for any museum as art placement can drastically change the experience for its visitors. Our goal will be to learn more about this process, and how they decide what/where each piece of artwork goes. We will interview them about their past artwork placement choices and try to gain a better understanding of their thought process. Ideally, we would also be able to observe their current behavior as they walk through an example/experimental exhibit. However, this part of it may not be feasible. At the end, we could also ask if the curators would benefit from the addition of emotional data in their database. To accomplish this, we are planning to contact curators at WCMA (or MassMOCA, or the Clark, in the case no WCMA curators are available) within the next few days. We will ask to schedule a meeting for the interview, ideally with a WCMA curator at WCMA.

Artists

Artists are always trying to find inspiration for their next piece of work. However, this inspiration isn’t always easy to find. Since our product can make it easier to understand how certain pieces of art effect people emotionally, our goal will be to learn more about the creation process for a piece of art. This way we can learn if our product can supply artists with the inspiration they need. We will hopefully be able to do a contextual inquiry on Williams Professor Laylah Ali. In her bio it says, “she meticulously plots out every aspect of her work in advance, from subject matter to choice of color and the brushes that she will use.” Ideally, we would be able to see her physically go through this process for a current piece of artwork, but again we may have to settle for an interview. Additionally, if she does not have time, we can try to ask other Williams Professors in the art department. To accomplish this, we are planning to email her and decide a time when we could schedule a meeting. This would most likely take place at her office. Citation: https://art21.org/artist/laylah-ali/

Student Researchers

From our trip to WCMA, we observed that many Williams courses have pieces of art that are displayed in the Object Lab exhibit. This means there are several students who have to do art-based assignments. We will try to find a student who has an assignment to create artwork that will go in the WCMA exhibit. Ideally, their assignment will have them do some kind of research to learn more about art before they start their creative process. An art history student may be the most likely possibility for this. If this is not possible, we will find a student who contributed to the Object Lab exhibit and ask them about their past experience with creating this artwork. Our goal will be to better understand how they go through the research process of learning more about art. We want to understand what resources they use and how we can make the WCMA database more robust and user-friendly to researches. Again, this will ideally be a contextual inquiry in which we observe a student (possibly at the library) doing current research on art. We can also ask questions about what kind of information they are looking for, and what tools aid their research.