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Manchester School of Art
Manchester Metropolitan University
02-05 September 2019
International Association of Societies of
Design Research Conference 2019
DESIGN REVOLUTIONS
Curatorial Groupware: Designing Collaborative Curation
Tools for Public Exhibition of Community-Built Archives
Wizinsky, Matthew*a; Mann, Nehab; Lee, Jamesc; Avant, Johnathand; McCabe Erine; Arthur, Giftyf
a University of Cincinnati, The Myron E. Ullman, Jr., School of Design, Cincinnati, USA
b University of Cincinnati, The Myron E. Ullman, Jr., School of Design, Cincinnati, USA
c University of Cincinnati, Digital Scholarship Center, Cincinnati, USA
d University of Cincinnati, Digital Scholarship Center, Cincinnati, USA
e University of Cincinnati, Digital Scholarship Center, Cincinnati, USA
f University of Cincinnati, Digital Scholarship Center, Cincinnati, USA
* matthew.wizinsky@uc.edu
This paper discusses the design and production of a groupware tool as a method for advancing a
larger interdisciplinary research collaboration. Groupware is defined here as software enabling real-
time collaboration. In this case study, the digital tool is being designed to facilitate participatory design
through remote collaboration. Community participants and interdisciplinary researchers in multiple
locations will use this groupware tool to remotely and collaboratively design venue-specific
installations from a community-built archive. Each installation of the archive can be designed
specifically to the contextual, historical, and local conditions of the venue itself, as determined by the
community participants. The collaborative efficacy of user-centered design for the production of
groupware is cast in relation to participatory methods (and mindsets) using the case study of History
Moves, a research collaborative at the intersection of public history and participatory design. As the
History Moves team prepares a nationally touring exhibition of an oral history project called “A
Women’s History of HIV in America,” the design of custom—but extensible—groupware for
collaborative curation extends the participatory scope of the project. The voices of the over 40
participating women—from disparate social geographies of Chicago, Brooklyn, and North Carolina—
are represented at multiple touchpoints in the process, through the sharing of their narratives,
participation in the construction of an archive of their materials, and now the design of a collaborative
curation tool. The collaborative curation groupware expands the participants’ agency to self-represent
through curating unique exhibitions at distinct venues. This approach to the decolonization of design
aims to expand the scope of the project’s broader participatory model and enact advocacy through
local programming that directly involves the participating women.
Keywords: Collaborative curation • Participatory design • Exhibition design • Remote
collaboration • Groupware design
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1 Background
Exhibitions are thematic public displays of information, curated to visually and
tangibly represent a notable point of view. Historical archives, contemporary
concepts, and future speculations are thus publicly presented to transcend their
moment while also producing new sites for critical discourse. Exhibition design and
associated programming comprise an interdisciplinary process, which presents
challenges of coordination and pre-requisites the capacity to co-design. The diversity
of skills and their relevance to individual exhibitions makes exhibition designers
accustomed to working in project-oriented multi-disciplinary teams (Hammond &
Waite, 2010). The following section illustrates some of these challenges through an
ongoing case study, originally piloted through local exhibitions in 2016, and now
working toward broader implementation in 2020.
1.1 History Moves: An oral history of women with HIV in America
History Moves is a research collaborative led by a public historian and a graphic
designer who partner with topically-connected communities with limited
representation in and access to the construction of public narratives. As a platform
for participatory projects, History Moves brings together historians, designers, and
community-based organizations to produce public history forged in participatory
engagement. The goal is to make public historical narratives more participatory and
more engaging than those enacted by experts alone. By synthesizing methods from
both public history and participatory design, the collection, curation, design,
production, and study of public histories are undertaken in a hybrid historical-design
process. This process engages contemporary publics in producing substantive
community responses to pressing contemporary political issues.
Figure 1. Participatory editing and curation workshop, North Carolina, 2017
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Since 2014, the History Moves research collaborative has worked with over forty
women living with HIV in three locations from across the United States: Brooklyn,
Chicago, and North Carolina. These women are all participants in the Women’s
Interagency HIV Study (WIHS), a multi-site longitudinal study “to investigate the
progression of HIV disease in women” (Bloomberg, 2017) The study was started by
Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1993 and is the largest ongoing longitudinal study of
women with and at risk for HIV in the United States.
This process began with collecting oral histories and develops into production and
dissemination of public media that present collectively determined narratives about
the past, present and future. There has been a deliberate focus on mobile, physical
exhibitions with the aim of articulating mobility beyond that of digital media. By
touring mobile exhibitions of this material, the social boundaries of urban spaces are
transgressed, physical spaces and environments are transformed, and new sites and
audiences are produced for informed dialogue on the ongoing risks, challenges, and
stories of surviving HIV/AIDS in the 21st century. Cultural theorist Paula Treichler
states that in order to form a definition of HIV/AIDS that will govern policies,
regulations and rules must ‘rest upon the deeply entrenched cultural narratives’ of
those living positive. What AIDS signifies must be democratically determined
(Treichler, 1987).
1.2 Designing curatorial groupware
Curation in the contemporary context refers most often to the preservation,
organization, and interpretation activities of a museum, a gallery, or other types of
collections for the public to see. It is the act of ‘selecting, organizing, and presenting
(online content, merchandise, information, etc.), typically using professional or expert
knowledge’ (Oxford Dictionary definition). However, the word “curate” originated from
the Latin word ‘cura’ which translates as ‘care, concern, attention, management’.
This fundamental understanding of the term establishes the relationship between the
curator and the exhibit itself, to be grounded in care and mindful representation. The
participatory design model employed to develop History Moves thus far, personifies
intentional, mindful representation in that it stresses the participation of community
participants—in this case, American women living with HIV—as empowered
decision-makers throughout the process from collection to curation to public display.
Unlike co-design, that gathers user insights which may or may not translate to viable
design outcomes (Trischler, Pervan, Kelly, & Scott, 2017), the participatory model
seeks community inputs at multiple sequential phases, which are highly iterative and
collaborative in nature. It views the “users” not just as content experts–the ones with
the most knowledge about what they do and what they need–or potential consumers.
Instead, they are partners in design and technical direction (Namioka, Schuler,
1993).
Currently, the History Moves team is working on the design, production, and
programming for a nationally touring exhibition to combine narratives of all
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participating women from Chicago, Brooklyn, and North Carolina. New tools and
workflows are necessary to achieve the project’s aim at expanding its participatory
model for not only collecting, but also interpreting, publicly presenting, and
generating active and local discourse on relevant contemporary social topics.
To achieve this goal—and fill a gap in the landscape of easily accessible tools for
community-engaged research—the team is now designing and producing a
“collaborative curation” tool, designed to facilitate participatory processes that will
allow each venue the exhibition visits to be uniquely curated and designed with direct
input from the community participants (in this case, participating women from the
respective US geographies). “Groupware” describes software, tools, process, and/or
programs that enable real-time synchronous collaboration (Podgorny, Walczak,
Warner, & Fox, 1998). In this case, the groupware tool is being designed to facilitate
participatory design and curation through remote collaboration between researchers
and participants.
While this groupware is uniquely designed for the specific conditions of this particular
archive and its parameters, the goal—and impetus for this article—is to conceive this
groupware tool as a model for similar community-engaged projects. While custom,
the general functions and user experience of this groupware can be made extensible
for interdisciplinary research teams working in similar community-engaged contexts,
in which there is a desire to publicly disseminate community-built archives in a fully
participatory manner.
The process this groupware enables has three primary stages.
1.2.1 Site Visit
Exhibit curation is initiated by visiting different sites to identify and document the
unique capacities of each venue. The site visit is simply generative and can be
discipline agnostic. For instance, a member from the research team, a local clinician
participating in the project, or one of the engaged community participants could fulfill
this function. An inspection of the venue is structured to record its spatial
measurements, accommodative capacity, details of the location including
neighborhood insights, demographics, and history, as well as interior specifications.
This data feeds the groupware with floorplans along with geographical, visual, and
empirical data to aid in planning. Any existing local knowledge, such as the
neighborhood, venue history, regular audiences, etc., are also collected to initiate
curatorial discussion.
1.2.2 Collaborative Curation, Design, and Programming
The inbuilt data on the tool is tagged with identifiers of location, neighborhood, type
of data (photograph or verbatim, static or interactive) that help classify and filter the
artifacts, in this case, a series of dozens of unique “posters”—each containing
several previously aggregated excerpts of oral histories, personal or archival
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imagery, or local historical context—for each venue and the exhibit configurations it
allows.
Once the content elements (posters) are selected, filtered and sorted by type, this
content is assembled in the curator’s library, which can be revisited with a quick
action (Fig 3.) The content that is left unselected is also carried forward, but rests at
the bottom of the library in a separately identifiable pile that can be accessed at any
time. These decisions were made keeping in mind the agile nature of collaborative
projects, where this dynamism facilitates rapid iteration. Taking into consideration the
iterative process of designing the panels, the tool allows the curator to select a
greater variety of content even though the site visits quantify the capacity of the
venue.
The curation of the exhibition panels will simulate a walkthrough on a path through
the selected floorplan. The design of each panel will be visualized individually,
pairing posters in sets of four, static or interactive, which can be configured in
multiple ways through simple drag and drop interactions (Fig 6.). The sequential
movement from one panel to the other establishes an intended sequence of viewing
the exhibition, helping the curatorial team of researchers and participants to build a
step by step narrative.
Programming community-engaged events—also specific to each venue—is critical to
producing new sites and audiences for discourse. The context-specificity of the
exhibition contents and design, enabled and executed by the design of the
groupware, is extended by context and venue specific programming. Speaking
events, symposia, workshops, tours, and even informal but organized discussions
not only generate substantive local discourse, they also produce new opportunities
for community participants to translate their personal experiences into expertise,
operating as docents, lecturers, and facilitators.
Planning for a robust programming schedule at each venue is facilitated by the
groupware. Proposed events can not only be accessed and acted upon by multiple
collaborators but are also stored in the knowledge base for incremental
development. This living archive preserves and expands on the possibilities of the
venue, creating a package file as an outcome that stores both the context-specific
content curation as well as the programming. This feeds into future work as an
advanced vantage point each time when designing within similar contexts which
might have overlaps in venue, content, or program planning.
Any given work session may have participants working in three or more physical
locations. A new session ID at the beginning of each curatorial or programming
planning session keeps track of who participated on the project, with fields to input
insights on the group’s discussion and decision-making. For example, in this case
study, some participants wish to retain anonymity so the physical proximity of any
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given exhibition to their place of residence may be one very important factor for
curatorial consideration. This real-time synchronization would mimic the natural ways
of everyday communication and vastly improve future work efficiency. The tool relays
instructions that can be executed by the team using a user-centered design
methodology.
1.2.3 Implementation of Collaboratively Curated Plans
After a city’s multiple venues have been collaboratively curated and programming
plans initiated, the tool produces documents and workflows that assign follow-up
tasks to the team. Group content selections are applied to elevation drawings, and
data sets of the required components (including digital audio files and physical
posters) are produced. These venue specific components are then attached to a
generic set of installation instructions for assembly of the exhibitory, which can be
distributed to the installation team at each site. The group’s decisions about event
programming are similarly captured and distributed to team members for planning,
confirmation, and implementation. In this workflow, the collaborative planning
activities catalyse and organize the work of implementing each venue’s installation
and programming.
2 Methods: User-Centred Design in service to Participatory Design
History Moves begins its projects with oral history, uses hybrid participatory
design/public history methods to interpret collected narratives, and then translates
(aggregates) those collective narratives into public-facing media, including books,
short films, digital publications, archive interfaces, and mobile exhibitions (Wizinsky,
2019). In this process, the participating women transformed their roles from
anonymous subjects of medical study into a network of agents actively shaping their
own historical narratives—from anonymity to authorship.
Figure 2. Manual curation process of the exhibition
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In order to for the exhibition to be mobile and remotely curated, a team of designers
and digital humanists are designing and developing a digital collaborative curation
tool. Currently developing as a tablet app, this tool facilitates and visualizes the
curation of the exhibition by the participating women. The tool is being developed in
the form of wireframes with structural specificity that drives functionality even without
the content itself. Dozens of modular “posters” (printed content) with images or
quotations from the oral history interviews comprise the primary content of the
modular exhibition design. Some of these posters use conductive inks connected to
micro-processors to allow for touch-activated audio playback. The database of
posters, audio files, and related metadata comprise the central archive planning tool
at the back end of the curatorial groupware.
The design and development of the collaborative curation tool is a joint effort
between designers and design researchers from History Moves and faculty,
students, and staff from the University of Cincinnati Digital Scholarship Center
(DSC). The DSC is a catalyst for collaborative, trans-disciplinary forms of research
and teaching. The DSC brings together humanistic methods and technical
innovations to test paradigms and create new knowledge between disciplines.
Faculty, students and staff with specialties in Digital Humanities, Computer
Sciences, and Library Sciences collaborated with design faculty and students in
conceptualizing and developing the tool and workflow, making for a fully hybrid,
trans-disciplinary experience.
3 Results: Task Flows, Wireframes, and User Testing
Design researchers engaged in the project have developed a workflow for the app,
annotated wireframes, and an (in progress) interface design which will be developed
by a team of students and faculty organized by the University of Cincinnati DSC. The
focus is on democratizing the user experience, as the users will be interdisciplinary,
mostly not exhibition designers. User journey maps have been developed and
tested, to be taken in the field for usability testing with participating women and
clinicians. Developed sections of the groupware app will be evaluated as well,
through usability tests aimed at universally efficient information architecture.
In order to keep up the project’s participatory values, usability goals are oriented
towards real-time collaboration, effective visualization, and true modularity as the
determinants of the features of the first version. The user-centered approach is
employed here in service to the project’s broader participatory framework, which is to
build the groupware with the participating women and with features that empower
them and other non-design stakeholders to voice their opinions in the collaborative
process.
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Figure 4. Prototype of the filtering process
Figure 3. Wireframe of the content review
Figure 5. Wireframe of the curation screen
Figure 6. Functional prototype of curation screen
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4 Conclusion
An interdisciplinary research team is working with community participants in diverse
geographical locations. The team desires to engage in real-time, participatory, and
reflective collaboration with geographically remote participants to collaboratively
curate each site for an upcoming touring exhibition of the community-built archive.
To do so, designers and design researchers on the project have employed user-
centred design methods to plan, design, and develop a collaborative curation
groupware tool. The application of user-centred design for an otherwise participatory
design centred research project demonstrates how multiple design and design
research mindsets—with their own sets of methodologies—can come together to
contribute in multiple ways for large interdisciplinary, community-engaged research.
5 References
Brier, J. (2009). Infectious Ideas: U.S. Political Responses to the AIDS Crisis. University of North
Carolina Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9780807895474_brier
Lake-Hammond, A., & Waite, N. (2010). Exhibition Design: Bridging the Knowledge Gap. The
Design Journal, 13(1), 77–98. https://doi.org/10.2752/146069210X12580336766400
Namioka, A., Schuler, D. (1993. Participatory Design: Principles and Practices. Retrieved from
https://www.crcpress.com/
Figure 7. Workflow of the groupware
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Podgorny, M., Walczak, K., Warner, D., & Fox, G. C. (n.d.). Internet Groupware Technologies-
Past, Present, and Future 1. Retrieved from http://www.centra.com/],
Treichler, P. (1987). AIDS, Homophobia, and Biomedical Discourse: An Epidemic of
Signification. October, 43, 31-70. doi:10.2307/3397564
Trischler, J., Pervan, S. J., Kelly, S. J., & Scott, D. R. (2017). The Value of Codesign. Journal of
Service Research, 21(1), 75–100. https://doi.org/10.1177/1094670517714060
Wizinsky, M. (2019). “HIV saved My life”: toward a translational model of design research
through participatory design in public history and public health. Design for Health, 1–23.
https://doi.org/10.1080/24735132.2019.1583400
Women’s Interagency HIV Study. (2017). Retrieved from
https://statepi.jhsph.edu/wihs/wordpress/
About the Authors:
Matthew Wizinsky is Assistant Professor of Communication Design at
University of Cincinnati, and Design Director for History Moves. His creative
and research projects blend graphic, interaction, and exhibition design with
participatory research practices.
Neha Mann is a Master of Design (MDes) student at University of Cincinnati,
DAAP, formerly from India. She has contributed to maternal and neo-natal
care through Ethnography and Graphic Design, a field she continues to
explore in her graduate research.
James Lee is Associate Professor of Digital Humanities and Academic
Director of the Digital Scholarship Center at the University of Cincinnati. His
work has been published in PMLA, Cultural Analytics, New Media and
Society and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities among others.
Johnathan Avant is a special projects student for the Digital Scholarship
Center at University of Cincinnati. His research interests include data science,
text analysis, machine learning, and computer vision. He has developed new
insights in Spanish literature using text analysis methods.
Erin McCabe is a digital scholarship library fellow from Ithaka-JSTOR, where
she was a publisher service associate. She previously held positions at
Baruch College, Long Island University, and is a member of the NASA
Datanauts.
Gifty Arthur is currently pursuing her MS-IT at University of Cincinnati.
Formerly from Ghana, she moved to the United States in 2013 to earn her
B.A. degree in Computer Science, followed by an MBA with specialization in
Data Analytics.
Acknowledgement: This work has been supported by a grant from the MAC
AIDS Fund, a division of MAC Cosmetics and a Catalyst Award from the
University of Cincinnati Digital Scholarship Center, supported by an
institutional grant by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
