Project Overview
Dora, your art companion, lets visitors to the new Art Museum campus engage with art in new, deeper ways. Designed as an ‘eyes up’ experience, Dora is an accessible audio companion that blends into the visitor experience and connects visitors to art, artists, music, curators and culture.
Project Commissioner
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Project Creator
Team
Art Gallery of New South Wales
Today: Megan Glass, Liana Modolo, Beau Hankins, Hayley Tasker, Jacob Zinman-Jeanes
Project Brief
Art Gallery of New South Wales (AGNSW) has built a world-class art and architectural experience: the Sydney Modern Project. To coincide with the launch of this new campus AGNSW needed an audio experience: one that embraced technology as a tool to support and enhance a visitor’s artistic experience—but not distract or detract from it.
Responding to the challenge wasn’t about innovation for its own sake; more so about using design and technology to create a companion that would be a way into the art. It needed to support an interconnectedness between the visitor and their personal experience of art and the gallery space it exists within.
Project Need
The solution is Dora—your art companion. Dora is an ‘eyes up’ audio experience whose interface is designed to melt away—changing colour to match the physical space, as visitors create their own path through the gallery. Rather than using QR codes or near-field communication (NFC) which might alienate some visitors, content is accessed by entering a number found near each artwork. You can start anywhere in the gallery and build your own path.
Dora allows you to engage with a mosaic of voices and music as you wander; allowing you to find out more about the artworks, landscapes and architecture from the creators and curators.
Dora improves connection and access to art for the general public through format, features and content.
Many art museums have audio on offer via devices for hire or as downloadable apps. The Dora audio companion is a progressive web app (PWA) available via a visitor's device browser to access everything from historical context to artist inspiration, making for a deeper, more connected gallery experience.
AGNSW can see when and how people engage with the art, helping them create more meaningful experiences as they build on the product.
Dora was designed with an accessibility-first approach. This means that accessibility features like audio descriptions of artworks, or transcripts of content are not tucked away in an extra features corner, but are part of the main Dora interface.
User Experience
The visual design of Dora is intentionally made to feel like part of the gallery, with colour themes that change to match the walls of each new room you visit. This lets the interface melt away and allows visitors to focus on their experience, not their device, while simultaneously being enriched by a mosaic of voices and music.
Dora’s functionality has been boiled down to its essence. There are no extraneous features and each feature is designed to be simple to use by visitors of all ages, abilities and interest levels. As you connect with artworks, Dora builds your ‘path’, an abstract representation of your unique journey through the gallery, which can be shared on social media or saved for later.
We worked closely with the Art Gallery of New South Wales team and users to create an experience that emulates the curated gallery experience, complete with the highest-quality content.
Launched at the opening of the new art museum campus in December 2022, we learned in real-time that people interacted with the physical and digital touchpoints in distinct ways, changing their experience in the gallery in an unexpected way. We optimised the UX for two distinct behavioural segments:
- some people looked for the next number, going on an art discovery hunt;
- whereas others looked to the interface to discover all the things around them, with landscape and architecture categories proving their favourite. We made small changes to the UX to make these easier to access.
Project Marketing
“The foundational idea for the design of the Dora is to enable visitors to follow their own path through the expanded Gallery campus, to have a ‘wander’ rather than a ‘directed’ or ‘guided’ audio experience. The feedback from our visitors has been overwhelmingly positive, many noting the ‘ease of use’ and the rich ‘combination of music, artist commentary and words from curators’. The ease of inclusion of Access content such as transcripts and audio descriptions of artworks, largely enabled by the playlist model, is a highlight for us. Dora offers broad engagement with the art, artists and place to as wide a community as possible in line with our motto From here. For all.” – Francesca Ford, Manager of Digital projects at Art Gallery of New South Wales
Dora increases access to arts and culture information through multi-media content that people can access on their own device as audio, transcripts, images, audio descriptions of artwork.
This democratization of knowledge surrounding the art making process and the interpretations of the artwork enriches the visitor experience and also makes it possible to access art remotely and continue your experience after you have left the gallery.
Project Privacy
Dora encourages a deeper, more connected experience. “The connection to physical space meant the goal of Dora was to be perceived as little as possible. It’s not often our goal is to reduce the amount of time someone spends using what we create, and Dora achieved this goal in a really clever way, blending into its surroundings and becoming part of the gallery.” - Megan Glass, Senior Interaction Designer at Today
https://www.artgallery.nsw.gov.au/in-gallery/privacy-policy-dora/
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