Through the brainstorming exercise, I realise that I would love to design for interactive materials in the context of a museum. To scope my project, I started to look into the different areas where visual communication could be applied in the museum. Some of the areas I had explored:

1. Information accessibility in museum
2. Community museums/ Private museums
3. Participatory projects in museum
   

   

   

   

I decided to delve into 1#1 Information Accessibility in Museums and consider the different possible community groups to work with.

1. Dyslexic children – most exhibits are contextual heavy and description are often heavily reliant on texts, making it unwelcoming for dyslexic children.
2. Dementia Elderly – this is an underserved community group in most major museums in Singapore currently.
3. Visitors with time constraint – based on the 2017 Survey Population on the Arts, lack of time was the most common factor for not participation in arts & heritage events.

Eventually, I decided to work on designing a children’s exhibition guide for National Gallery’s DBS Singapore Gallery – Siapa Nama Kamu. This is one of the 2 permanent exhibition that covers artworks about Singapore from the 18th century to contemporary times.

Reason #1: I like designing educational materials for kids.
Reason #2: I remember guiding a Korean family with 3 young daughters for this exhibition- while the parents were fully engaged, the children were fidgety as the tour was not age-appropriate for them.

The Gallery does provide children-friendly tours/events for children to learn more about the artworks. However, I realise many of these events require parents make an extra effort to stay updated with the museum schedule and and abide to the tour timings. This is not a luxury all families have especially visitors from abroad.

Hence, I decided to do a museum guide that fits the following criteria:

1. Only pencil can be used for the activities (museum rules)
2. Children can use the exhibition guide without much supervision:
   1. Language is kept simple; contextual knowledge are kept concise
   2. Many visual guides to engage children
   3. Various tactile materials to keep things fresh

I had decided on the following 6 artworks as they do not require much contextual knowledge, display a variety of mediums and cover the major period of Singapore’s art development.

These are the ideation and sketches for each artwork.

And to anyone who was curious to how I created the holes for ‘The Net’ activity page – I used a Making Memories Hole Punch I found in my old stash of scrapbooking materials.