Design Thinking for Visitor Engagement: Tackling One Museum’s Big Challenge Through Human-Centered Design

Paper
Dana Mitroff Silvers, USA , Molly Wilson, USA, Maryanna Rogers, USA

Published paper: Design Thinking for Visitor Engagement: Tackling One Museum’s Big Challenge through Human-centered Design

This paper, co-authored by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) and the teaching team of the course “Design Thinking Bootcamp” at Stanford’s Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (d.school), documents a partnership between SFMOMA and the d.school in Fall 2012. For this partnership, a class of multidisciplinary graduate students took on a design challenge for SFMOMA and prototyped innovative, divergent solutions following the design thinking process. In this paper, we will share the stories of the students’ process and insights, provide examples of the prototypes they developed, and discuss the impact the project had on the museum’s approach to collaborative problem-solving.