Ideum and the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) have worked together on several prior projects, but this one is especially exciting. This time we co-created not one exhibit, but a set of templates and an editing system that IAIA students will use to create many exhibits. 

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Museum Studies faculty and the Ideum team discussed the most common types of touch table applications requested by museums, and chose our first templates accordingly: a collections viewer and a table-sized image with tappable hotspots. We built templates that share basic functionality but provide flexibility and choice of color palette, font, and animation. The students will curate and customize their exhibits by selecting and adding images, video, and text. In this way, Museum Studies students will experience creating touch table exhibits. 

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Ideum’s proximity to IAIA allowed the Ideum team to travel to campus for multiple user testing sessions with IAIA students. Testing an experience with real end users always provides valuable insight, and this case was no different. Testing with IAIA students revealed the features most important to them, and we left campus with more knowledge of the students’ priorities and a list of small tweaks for the application. We look forward to implementing these few final changes suggested by the testing, and then seeing what these students will create! 

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