t_kens
project at kth royal institute of technology
2021, Remote

A venture proposal that connects museums and gallies to their visitors beyond a single visit in order to save them.

With collectable and beautifully designed NFC tokens for visitors, bridging online and offline experiences in an accompanying digital platform that keeps imbuing the tokens with value beyond its material experiences.

responsibility
Iterated throughout the entire product design cycle remotely, utilised different design methods, and designed the app prototype while contributed to aligning features with the business model.

tools
Figma, Miro, Notion, Product Hunt

results
Grade
Excellent (A)

Product Hunt & Email Campaign
Limited responses

credits
Group Members
Jason Huang, Gonzalo Uceda Castro, Christoph Johns, Fran Grgić & Fanni Karvinen

App Prototype
Jason Huang

Tokens Design
Gonzalo Uceda Castro

Pitch Deck
Christoph Johns

Video Editing
Fran Grgić

By going through the Double Diamond design process, we brainstormed for directions then interviewed people for the discovery phase, then utilised the Affinity Diagram and How Might We questions to define insights and opportunities. As a result, our intention was:
How Might We change the way young people display souvenirs without them having to carry all of them whenever they move to a new place?

Afterwards, we started with the Worst Possible Ideas then other methods like the Random Picture, Lightning Demos, Crazy Eights, and Sketches to develop our solutions.

Finally, we had a Concepts Battle with higher fidelity to gather feedback again and to start the delivery phase.

problem
After gathering more feedback from potential users and suggestions from the supervisor, we started to revolve around and restructure our core concept and features. We found that proposing a product with too many fresh ideas seems difficult to grasp, and that felt like a reminder of the affordance factor in design practices. Nevertheless, iteration like this is always common in innovation, being open to critique and not obsessed with what we had created were the key to make something interesting and usable.

Based on the core concept of tokens and restructuring our idea, we started small with this focus and grew towards having arts as souvenirs. We also came up with interesting digital services that our team is better at, and that the improved feedback from our circles moved the solution into the delivery phase. Below are some key features that I tried to present in the prototype, and while it is more focused on the visitors' side, it also shows how some features for museums would be for visitors.

Visitors

Explore museums and exhibitions
Visitors can explore museums or exhibitions based on their location, while the token numbers and colour provide a quick and intuitive idea of the exhibitions within a museum and whether they have visited them respectively.

Access exclusive "member" content and events
As a platform for museums and galleries, visitors can access exclusive member content and events, such as an artist interview and artist workshop.

Interact with exhibitions
With the NFC tokens, the simple piece of technology unlocks the interactivity of exhibitions. It can be an immersive experience where the tokens involve or a ticket to access and save game installations and records. The potential is only limited by imagination.

Experience art in a digital and playful way
As arts continue to grow and diversify with technology, the tokens act as the trigger for digital experience through the companion application. These experiences can be AR, mini-games, or artists filters, unleashing the usage of the tokens to a one-time collection or exhibitions only.

Collect tokens with artworks as souvenirs or gifts
The tokens not only let visitors collect beautiful pieces of art that they can carry easily, but could also register artworks within the same exhibition as a personal gallery through the companion application. These also allow the tokens to be sent as gifs to let receivers revisit the memories as well.

Museums

Promote museums and exhibitions
Unlike other digital platforms with various purposes, the companion application is made for users interested in museums, exhibitions, and arts. Therefore, the platform serves as an accurate channel for museums to promote themselves and exhibitions. Moreover, by utilising tokens and other related content and events, these provide museums to catch visitors attention with alternative methods.

Connect with supporters for fundraising and awareness campaigns
The digital platform also provides museums and galleries to connect with supporters for various activities like fundraising and awareness campaigns. These could be done by utilising tools within the application or linkage to external services. Also, the tokens could and hence bring not only a one-time purchase but also facilitate long term revenue.

Enable innovative digital experiences for visitors
Tokens and the companion application can also enable innovative experiences for visitors, such as leveraging the NFC tokens for interactive exhibitions or creating micro experiences to engage users anytime.

Access advanced analytics about visitors and their interests
With the previously mentioned features to engage visitors and users, these also provide museums access to advanced analytics about them and their interests. The data could be used for better promotion as well as curating better activities.

reflection
Although we tried to evaluate our project by launching Product Hunt and email campaign, we did not receive as many responses and replies as expected. This provided very direct feedback that marketing is quite different on different platforms, and hence the afterthought is that instead of going live on a technology-oriented platform like Product Hunt, we should gather more feedback from artists, museums, galleries, and related platforms.

Above are some of the important slides for our pitch, do feel free to check out or even vote on the Product Hunt page as well.

more at tkens.art

jason huang

app & website

multimedia

photography

diary

about