Van Gogh’s Bedrooms Digital Publication

Under direction of UIC's professional practice class Design Thinking and Leadership, Cheryl Towler Weese, Meghan Ferrill and Arturo Pena led our class to design a Digital Publication for the Vincent Van Gogh Bedroom Painting Exhibition in collaboration with the Art Institute of Chicago (AIC). Our goal was to design a publication solution that would appeal to a range of audiences, from general readers to scholars, situate content within the inherently interactive architectural structure that distinguishes digital publications from printed books and design a digital publication that serves as means to explore new approaches to future digital books published by the AIC.

PROBLEM

The New York Times publishes an article, “The Plot Twist: eBook Sales Slip, and Print is Far From Dead,” asserting the fear of eBooks replacing printed books has subsided. Our class took this as a hypothesis to investigate the data behind traditional printed books versus ebooks to define our method of user consumption of scholarly materials.

 Our analysis concluded that ebooks usage was surging in demand overtime with users preferring to be actively engaged by interactive learning experiences. We began to envision a publication that would be academically substantive, informative, inspiring, educational, and multi-faceted; one that incorporates not only the content of the original print catalogue but additional materials deemed relevant to the existing content and appropriate as digital content. In collaboration with the AIC, we proposed two ideal solutions to solve for interactive and immersive reading platforms.

RESEARCH

SOLUTION

Our focus for the solution design was to bring the traditional gallery experience online so that the AIC could interact with a larger, more global audience of learners. We approached our design from the notion that users would interact with materials in a variety of ways that included traditional ebook reading, embedded interactions within the text and interactive viewing tools to take a closer look at Van Gogh’s Bedrooms.

DEFINING FEATURES

As part of the digital publication design meant for e-readers, we designed several interactive components to enhance the reading experience. Since the publication was evolved around Van Gogh’s paintings, we created enhanced functionality for the users to explore the painting in detail by way of a separate modal window. The user could zoom in and out of high resolution images Van Gogh’s work and review additional information about the painting. In addition to detailed viewing features, we designed an interactive map whereby users could view the location of where a painting was created and explore other paintings created within that region.