16 week project | Fall 2023 | Maria Bowman
This is a research and concept project completed as the capstone of my Industrial Design program at The Ohio State University. For this project I worked with the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park to develop a system made to inspire park visitors to be interested in aviation. The first 5 weeks of this project were spent investigating the design opportunities in how the park currently operated.
In the first five weeks, I visited all the locations of Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park, investigated other parks, researched related topics, sketched design conjectures, and created, bucketed, analyzed, and described a variety of different research questions.
As I moved into the development stage, I created this problem statement and design brief out of my observations and secondary research. The park needed a way for people to move through the museum with purpose, giving them direction, and choice, in their own experience.
In finding ways to change the park experience, I looked into content gamification, specifically the tools that open world and multi option game makers use to encourage players to interact in specific ways. I wanted to play with the concepts of novelty and harmony.
Using inspiration from collectables and light up objective identifiers, I designed the concept behind Thinking Cap: a personal addition, something that involves the visitor like a wearable, guides them through the museum.
A quick overview of the system and it's purpose:
A video guide to the details of the system:
Finally, here are some prototypes of the portions of the system. A full size wearable hat, a 1/6th scale hat stand, and a 1/6th scale hat.
