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Jake Barton is the creator/founder of Local Projects which is an experience design company that has won multiple awards for museums and public spaces. The work he does focuses on storytelling and engaging audiences through emotions. He is well known for the algorithm 9/11 victims by affinity instead of alphabetically. He also created the Cooper Hewitt interactive museum (which I visited a couple times in the past couple years and always love) which allows visitors to have experiences where they can save different things throughout the museum that you want to view later and you can also do things such as create your own “art” pieces on the interactive tables on each floor of the museum. Jake Barton is not a new name to me, in fact we learned quite a bit about his work in my design course “Environments”, which focuses on the hybrid of physical and digital spaces. Through this course we learned about a lot of the ideas that Barton hopes to include in his work- from creating a narrative in your designs, to finding ways to balance digital and physical, and also focusing on the user and how they fit into the space.
A couple of things Barton mentioned in his talk were different projects he has created, which I listed two below.
-Urbanology Project: You get to chose different tokens (affordability, transportation, livability, sustainability, & wealth); take your place and argue your convictions-this models how cities actually work. Effective way to teach people about cities themselves with technology that is modeling scenarios and creates a data set that can be compared with other datasets and cities. This helps to connect people with the future of cities.
– For the Cleveland Museum of Art: A place with amazing history and architecture, they wanted a new visitor experience. A smart table was the first idea to give an access of information, but Barton wanted to actually make the art more relevant and meaningful. Pulled all interfaces into the center of the gallery and worked with slogans/guiding principles and looked to these principles the curator was trying to explain and create things like representation into experiences. Question of “What does a lion look like? then can chose your definition and see how other visitors voted – crowdsourcing and getting visitors to think about perception- you can experience and interpret with other visitors.
Through his talk, I realized he truly tries to connect with his audience by bringing his work in the form of telling a story or how he solved a problem. But, it is not in a analytical or robotic way, instead, he brings emotions and human experience to the table so that his audience can connect with the work he’s done.