Embedded Files
I co-created a program of research at the New York Hall of Science (NYSCI) to develop a digital dashboard that could be used to help facilitate Connected Worlds exhibit. This exhibit immerses visitors in a simulated animated world that explores how ecological systems relate and depend on one another to maintain balance and health. Visitors use their own gestures, movements, and decisions to guide the flow of resources in this ever-changing environment.
Our goal was to create a tablet-based dashboard that would provide updated live data from the exhibit. With this data, young on-the-floor museum staff, known as Explainers, could help visitors observe and make sense of key concepts and phenomena that emerged when visitors interacted with the exhibit.
My Approach: In this project, I led a participatory research approach with a team of researchers and technology developers and museum practitioners (Explainers, program facilitators, trainers, and managers) to co-design a dashboard that could digitally monitor the state of the exhibit, record trends, and flag interesting events in the simulated ecosystem.
Outcomes: Our goal was to work with practitioners to understand what data to present and how to present it so that Explainers could better facilitate the exhibit for visitors. This project had another important goal — to establish and study a design process centered on relationships among key participants and the agency that grows from these relationships.
Publications
Publications
Beheshti, E. & Lyons, L. (In Preparation). Using Task-Centric Participatory Design to Co-Create a Novel Sociotechnical Educational System. To be submitted to Journal of the Learning Science.
Beheshti, E., Lyons, L. , Mallavarapu, A., Thompson, W., Wallingford, B., & Uzzo, S. (in press). Co-designing Learning Dashboards for Informal Educators. To be published in H. Ba, K. McMillan Culp, and M. Honey (Eds.), Design Make Play for Equity, Inclusion, and Agency. Routledge.
Beheshti, E., Lyons, L., Mallavarapu, A., Wallingford, B., & Uzzo, S. (2020, April). Design Considerations for Data-Driven Dashboards: Supporting Facilitation Tasks for Open-Ended Learning. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI'20). ACM.
Beheshti, E., Lyons, L., Thompson, W., & Uzzo, S. (2020). Human-in-the-Loop: Supporting Facilitators’ Scaffolding of Visitor Engagement and Learning in Science Museums. The Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association (AERA 2020), San Francisco, CA.
Page updated
Google Sites
Report abuse