Chapter 1: Principles of Participation – The Participatory Museum. It’s 2004. I’m in Chicago with my family, visiting a museum. We’re checking out the final exhibit—a comment station where visitors can make their own videos in response to the exhibition. I’m flipping through videos that visitors have made about freedom, and they are really, really bad. The videos fall into two categories: Person stares at camera and mumbles something incomprehensible.Group of teens, overflowing with enthusiasm, “express themselves” via shout-outs and walk-ons. This is not the participatory museum experience of my dreams.
How can cultural institutions use participatory techniques not just to give visitors a voice, but to develop experiences that are more valuable and compelling for everyone? Designers have answered versions of this question for many kinds of visitor experiences and goals in cultural institutions. Drawing by Jennifer Rae Atkins In contrast, in participatory projects, the institution supports multi-directional content experiences. This may sound messy. Making it suck. At Cooper, we spend thousands of hours designing systems around the goals and motivations of the people that will use them. We travel across the country, continent and world to have conversations with real users to ensure that we understand their needs and that our design decisions will make their everyday tasks easier and more intuitive to accomplish.
But perhaps we can improve our methods by considering an inverse approach: What if our intent was to frustrate, rather than ease? What if we intentionally made things subtly challenging and unintuitive? Aside from simply malicious design, is there anything that intentionally facilitates a bad experience? Why would someone do that to other people? Making walking suck (for strength) I was first thinking about this a few months ago when I was with my brother who just had his first kid (making me a first-time uncle). The woman at Target was wearing a pair of shoes that had, well, a different goal. The shoes are called “Shape Ups.” Signup and start outlining. Using VoiceOver to Evaluate Web Accessibility. You are here: Home > Articles > Using VoiceOver to Evaluate Web Accessibility Introduction VoiceOver is a screen reader program that comes on new Mac computers, iPhones, iPads, and iPod touches. This article is designed to help users who are new to VoiceOver learn the basic controls for testing web content, and to serve as a reference for the occasional VoiceOver user.
While reading this article, keep a few things in mind: This article does not contain a comprehensive list of VoiceOver shortcuts. Getting Started You can start (or stop) VoiceOver by pressing Command + F5. The VoiceOver Activation keys (called VO keys) are control + option. While working in VoiceOver, keep the following in mind: VoiceOver currently only functions with the Safari and (with limited support) Opera web browsers. Reading There are dozens of keyboard shortcuts that allow you to read web content. You may want to practice reading through the content on this page with VoiceOver right now. Images Data Tables Forms Practice. Keep Focused - an enhanced tool for Time Management using Pomodoro Technique.