Great Ideas Companion
Intro
Great Ideas of Humanity is an exhibit from the Design Museum of Chicago focused on adapting timeless ideas across cultures into posters by various designers. This app gives users an easily accessible way to see information about the posters on display, the designer of the poster, and related resources.
Problem Statement
The Great Ideas of Humanity exhibition does not have an adequate way of presenting information about the posters on display to visitors. The method of printing out a small sheet of paper with a short description is limited by the constraints of size, and is unable to fully illustrate the concepts, themes, or intentions behind each poster. In addition, this small sheet of paper causes crowding in busy environments as they are usually placed directly next to the poster on display.
Opportunity
A digital companion to the Great Ideas exhibit neatly solves the limitations of space and allows not only for more information to be included, but for links to additional sources that allow users to easily research any poster that intrigues them. It is also easily accessible from a distance through a QR code, preventing crowding.
Design System
The most important facet of this design is being easily scalable, since a large number of posters were on display and our team needed to be able to make individual pages for each with identical formats. This was achieved through the use of a template with toggleable variables that were reused for each poster. These components include resource links, designer/s, and designer comment.
Elsewhere, the design is fairly minimal, largely consisting of color blocks in brand colors or square image thumbnails.
Design Structure & User Flow
This app can be broken down into three main pages: the gallery, the quote, and the information display.
The gallery is designed to be highly visual, allowing users to easily see the poster they are about to select or to find a specific poster if they are perusing the gallery with the app open. Designer and quote sources are visible directly below.
The quote is tailored to the existing Great Ideas branding that the team was working within. It is placed at the top of each page to introduce users to the context behind the poster since the quote and/or quote source is occasionally lost in the design.
The information display includes the basic description of the poster, but also includes additional information in the form of designer insight on their design and links to external sources relating to the poster, incentivizing visitors to make use of the app in order to understand each work better.
