April 6 – Concept 01 | Ongoing Conversation

Aim:
To enhance the perception of the Mattress Factory (MF) and communicate the diverse experiences it provides, through the voices of its patrons.

Concept:
Enable patrons to create and contribute to a collective understanding of the MF. It is envisaged that this will be communicated as a result of personal experience and interaction with art installations and designed objects placed at various locations throughout the MF.

Design Rationale:
Our interviews found that patrons often want to talk about what it is
the saw and experienced in the MF. By building a place for them to
leave their ideas and impressions and read what others before them
have said, we can help continue the conversation.

An important aspect of this structure will be the prompts. We envision them to be applicable not only to the permanent exhibits at the museum but also the alternating shows. An exercise for staff and artists might be to think of or pay attention to what the big impressions and questions are that they have of a piece. They can use the tag template to create piece or exhibit specific tags in order to generate a richer exchange. The prompts will be what determines the quality of this idea.

Physical implementation of the Tags:

• Entrance (coat area)
• Sofa area beside reception
• Café
• Main exhibition space beside reception

Physical implementation of the Wireframe Structure:

• Main exhibition space beside reception

Details:

• Encourage personal communication
• Augment brand association through colour (red, white, black)
• Build a portable, large scale MF sculpture in which tags can be attached (See figure 1 below right).
• Small tags (see figure 1 below left) with sharpies will hand throughout the MF space. The locations for their dissemination would be throughout the first floor. For example this could be in the elevator, at reception, in the entrance, upstairs, in the café or the WC.
• Each tag will have prompts to encourage the dissemination of ideas.
• Tags will have a detachable branding item for visitors to take home. This could be an item that illustrates an aspect of a current exhibition or provides information about a future exhibition.

Figure 1: tags & MF sculpture

For Further Development:

• Develop the purpose behind the prompts. What themes can be developed to support our purpose or intent?
• Create a variety of prompts that underpin the intent of the communication (include a blank option).
• Suggest the first area of implementation for the MF sculpture.
• Define the elements of the design situation for the actualisation of the tags and sculpture.

Material considerations:

• The tags will require durable string, florist ribbon or a flexible ring to attach them to the MF sculpture.
• What material will the tags be made of (circular white stock material)?
• What material will the MF sculpture be made of (chicken wire, ropes)?
• What type (ie. waterproof) of sharpie will be attached to the tags, which colours (red & black) and how will the tag and sharpie be presented together. Remember they may eventually hang in various locations throughout the MF grouped together in bunches.

Tag Prompts:

• If I were an art piece ________________
• If the Mattress Factory were a person ________________
• I spent most of my visit ________________
• If I came back again I would ________________
• I want to see more artwork from ________________
• I want to see more ________________
• I am here from _________________
• The piece I dug the most was ___________________
• I think installation art is ____________________
• The part of MF I liked the most was ___________________
• While in the building, I heard __________________
• I touched/pushed/pulled ________________________
• What I saw in the dark was _____________________
• ________________ (Free comments). This tag would relate to a specific artist’s work and would have a printed image of the artist’s work on the tag. In this way the artistically represented tags would be significantly differenced to the above general solid colored types of tags.

Script

*this will not be the first thing that people here, but rather toward the middle or end of the introduction.

If you can take this tag and fill it out once you have been through the museum, you can add it to the MF structure over there. People often want to talk about what it is they have just seen. Any staff member would be happy to hear your thoughts. By filling out the tag, you can leave your opinions for others to read and continue the conversation after you leave.