The Museum of Lost Experiences,
a crowd-sourced collection of artistic representations about grief, aims to be a platform for people to connect around losses big and small and process our experiences creatively in a community space.
prob
Problem
Each of us encounters loss at some point in our lives. Those losses can be big, or small and affect us in different ways. While loss is universal, it affects each of us differently and it is common to feel alone in our experiences.
Inspiration
This project was initially inspired by the changes and losses we’ve all experienced due to the pandemic.
What do you miss most about your life before the pandemic?
I miss feeling comfortable going out in public.
I miss hugging my friends and family.
I miss feeling like I have control over future plans.
Now more than ever many of us are dealing with difficult feelings. Whether our pain comes from a change in routine, the death of someone dear, or missing an opportunity; acknowledging that loss and expressing it can help us move through our feelings—experiencing and releasing them.
Through my capstone project, I wanted to develop one possible solution for dealing with the challenging feelings brought up by loss. I began the project compiling a research archive on topics like grief, and the use of creativity, nostalgia, and mindfulness as tools for handling difficult emotions.
Initial Questions and Thoughts
How do we deal with difficult emotions? There is no right way to process loss, but research supports using creativity as a tool for expression and mindfulness.
Creativity comes in many forms, giving individuals the opportunity to find creative outlets that are enjoyable and meaningful to them. Through difficult times in my own life, I have used poetry, collage, illustration, and crafting for comfort, expression, and mindfulness practice.
Since I found creativity helpful as a way to handle challenges in my own life, I thought it might be a good approach in helping others deal with grief or loss in their own lives by creating art about their own difficult experiences
For a long time I was intimidated to create things—I didn't see myself as an artist. It was important to me to encourage people who might not feel comfortable with their own creativity to think of artistic practice as a tool for approaching challenging emotions—to value the process and not the result.
Proposed Solution
The Museum of Lost Experiences (theMoLE) is a digital collection of creative works about lost experiences, missed opportunities, and deferred dreams. Anyone can submit their experience to the collection.
concept
The goal of theMoLE is to encourage people to use creativity to help them approach uncomfortable emotions and provide a community space for people to share and connect around those feelings. Participants have an opportunity to submit their lost experience to the collection where it will live alongside others' experiences.
What we miss says a lot about what we care about and stepping into someone else’s experience is an intimate encounter with what is important to them. By encouraging viewers to engage with others’ stories of loss, the Museum of Lost Experiences helps reinforce that none of us are alone in experiencing challenges in life.
process
Process
Branding & Identity Design
The brand exploration process began with ideation around the project title. I used wordmapping to expand the project name into a web of interrelated words to spark ideas.
Moodboard
A moodboard helped me bring together visual ideas for the brand. The idea of people’s disparate experiences coming together in this project inspired me to bring collage aesthetic into the moodboard. The muted, cheerful colors are intended to invoke nostalgia. I also wanted to use some aspects of institutional “museum” aesthetic to give the brand some austerity and sophistication.
Logo Ideation
With the visual and conceptual framework laid for the project I moved on to logo sketching.
Digitized Logos
From there I digitized the most promising logos from my initial sketches.
Logo System Exploration
With several good options, I expanded the digitized marks to explore the flexibility of each potential branding direction.
I received feedback that the most effective elements from the logo options were the outlined word “lost” and the geometric shape logo, so I ended up combining those to make the final logos.
The logo and wordmark emphasize the loss of experiences and hearken to the collage aesthetic from the moodboard. With the final logos established in black, I incorporated colors inspired by the moodboard to finalize the brand identity.
Web Design
After establishing the beginnings of the brand identity, it was easy to elaborate the shapes used in the logomark and the typography into a design system I could use to make mockups for the website.
Link to web design mockups
Web Development
I viewed this project as an opportunity to stretch my web development skills and deepen my knowledge of React.js.
The Museum of Lost Experiences is centered around collecting creative submissions from users, so I knew I needed a way to store the submissions and dynamically access them in order to display the collection on the site. I decided to use Amazon Web Services (mainly S3 and DynamoDB) as a database for the project, because they are free services at the level I would need.
Link to The Museum of Lost Experiences website
research
Research
Initial Surveying
To gain insight into how to design the submission process, I created a 20-question survey using Google Forms. Using my network and asking friends/family to circulate the survey, I had 85 participants.
One takeaway from the survey, was to refocus my attention on two different user groups:
- people likely to submit projects
- viewers of experiences on the website
There is an overlap between groups—based on responses, but I believe that there are some users who are not likely to submit themselves, but would be interested in seeing others’ experiences. Hopefully, through its public collection, theMoLE can still be a place for communal grief processing.
User Research
After programming the majority of the website, I tested its key functionality with three users from my two user groups, viewers of the collection, and submitters to the collection. I improved the site after each user test to incorporate their feedback. The testing resulted in a more clear submission experience and a more efficient site flow for users looking to learn about submitting and submit their experiences.
Notes from user testingnextsteps
What's Next?
Continue to share the project via social media and other connections to get more submissions to the collection.
Continue curating exhibits.
prob
Bibliography
American Art Therapy Association. “About Art Therapy.” Last modified June, 2017.
https://arttherapy.org/about-art-therapy/Berinato, Scott. “That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief.” March 23, 2020.
https://hbr.org/2020/03/that-discomfort-youre-feeling-is-griefCenter for Disease Control. “Grief and Loss.” Last modified June 11, 2020.
https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/daily-life-coping/stress-coping/grief-loss.htmlNew York Times. “Why We Reach for Nostalgia in Times of Crisis.” Accessed August 1, 2020.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/28/smarter-living/coronavirus-nostalgia.htmlPsychology Today. “Grief.” Accessed September 6, 2020.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/grief