Touchbook
Touch book is a product that seeks to make the museum experience more approachable and engaging.
For a long time museums have taken the approach of look but don't touch, for sound reasons artefacts can be extremely fragile even breathing in the same the same room as them can cause long term damage, the problem is that tactile learning is one of earliest forms of learning a human can develop but it often relegated to Childhood, even when tactile learning experiences are included unless the tactility is explicitly advertised people not only do not engage with it but also discourage their children from doing so. So how do we combat this?
A Secondary set of problems are:
The difficulty that visitors, especially first-time visitors have with orientating themselves.
The desire many visitors have to try and see everything in one go.
Both are contributors to a phenomenon known as museum fatigue where at the 25-30min mark, visitors become less engaged in the exhibits and less motivated in exploration. Ideally a product could address both these and the primary issue.
Touch book is as it's name implies a collection of tactile experiences in book form. What is a tactile experience? Here it mainly refers to panels holding the texture and some dimensional information of an artefact, also included are lithographic interpretations of some images, in other words 2d images turned into 3d reliefs of those images as well information printed on paper with more tactile and authentic engagement. The Idea is that the tactile experiences each correspond to an exhibit to better engage the user with the exhibit while also providing a narrative to direct the visitor around the museum.