Discovery of the brand
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Idea Research Mark Individuality Physicality
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Idea
Who am I and who are you, and why?
When I was a kid, I had a book called 9 Ways to Know About You. It was filled with different personality tests, horoscope descriptions, palm readings, and fun psychological experiments. The idea of creases in the skin on my hand telling me when I was going to get married is kind of ridiculous, but it was fun at the time. Either way, the book kickstarted my interest in the mind and figuring out how to assess the future in relation to my personal characteristics. I have always found it fascinating that most of my friends fit into certain personality types. My close friends in high school all had birthdays between the months of November and February, and my college friends follow a similar pattern. I tend to befriend people with certain names while unintentionally clashing with people that have other specific names. I certainly don’t advocate that anyone should base friends on what their names or personality types are, but admittedly it is pretty interesting to think about why these trends occur.
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IDEA
Entering the semester, I knew I wanted to work on a project surrounding psychology or personality. I wanted to study something that involved the human mind or human actions, why people speak and act the way they do. I proposed three ideas.
Personality museum
Personality products
Happiness report
A museum to study per-
Product lines for each of
A search for what truly
sonality classifications
the four temperaments
makes people happy
and their correlations
that strengthen the qual-
through interviews,
to historical individuals,
ities of each to maximize
crowdsourcing, reflection,
to explain actions and
personality or create
surveys, and obervations,
events and to apply these
equilibrium.
and a solution for how to
theories to current and
keep and share happiness.
future lives.
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Research The personality museum was my favorite idea, as well as the one that sounded the most interesting and legitimate. There is no Museum of Personality anywhere, so I began to craft the concept from scratch. I started by researching handfulls of personality classification theories, the history of personality psychology, and the benefits of personality examination. Through the research, I moved away from a historical and cultural study to a self study. I realized that I had been imagining the museum as a dry, uninviting topic. On one hand, it would be pretty difficult to discern the specific types of historical figures and how they relate to events. Furthermore, no one cares about the personality types of people they don’t even know. People do, however, love to classify themselves. After a scan through the Buzzfeed quiz list, I realized that people will spend hours labeling themselves and placing themselves into unique groups simply to have further evidence that they stand out from the crowd. Dozens of personality categorization theories of varying levels of formality have been devised by philosophers and scientists to help people understand and accept why they do what they do.
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RESEARCH
Think mood and emotion
Now I was challenged to make learning about oneself engaging. Instead of sitting down at a computer and taking a personality test, how could it be interactive? My first thoughts were of hands-on tests for several classification theories, like floor-sizes flow charts, mazes, socialization games and surveys drawn from crowd participation. The premise of the museum was well-received, but my professor urged me to push the interactivity with ideas such as wearable technology and mood-affecting environments.
“It makes you realize the negative things about yourself are not negative; they’re just part of your personality.” —classmate
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Mark
the Marriage of emotion and science
I explored marks that used scientific symbols and representations of the mind, figuratively and literally. I stuck on the idea of a color spectrum and waves as an illustration of individuality. As personality examination began in Ancient Greece, I also latched onto Ψ, or Psi, the Greek symbol of psychology.
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MARK
museum of personality museum of personality
PERSON ALITY
PER PERSON P ERSON ERS E RSON R S ON SONALIT SO O NA ALIT ALITY L TY LI Y
PERSONALITY P PE E R SO NAL Y
museum of personality
ytilanosrep fo muesum ytilanosrep fo muesum
Y TI LA NOSRE P
Y T I L AN NO OS R E P
Y TIL AN OS R EP
ytilanosrep fo muesum
I chose to work with a sketch of Psi intersecting with a triangle. This was the combination of psychology and personality with the spirit, mind, and soul; balance; and change. Thus began an 8-week long journey of stylization. Instinctively, my first comps of the logo were vector linework, but the consensus seemed to be that it was too rigid and flat. Suggestions pointed towards a hand drawn mark to emphasize humanity and character. I used ink to create tons of Psi marks and triangles by hand.
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Render something scientific in a human way
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Still, none of these seemed to be capturing the spirit of the museum. Now they seemed too weak, a weird combination of careful and handmade. Commenting on the softness of the symbol, my professor suggested merging an actual Psi, a character taken from a typeface, with a triangle.
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Too “Greek life.”
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I started working with a somewhat elegant rendition. I branched off of an idea of a flowing Psi with a rigid triangle, an exuberant personality found in a seemingly static form of reality.
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I was not crazy about this. A friend suggested I try to abstract the mark more than I already had. I pushed it to a very graphic icon (it looked a little like a witchcraft symbol) and then pulled it back to the Psi shape.
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While firm and symmetrical, I thought this solution seemed most fitting for the museum. It was a statement, bold and strong, just like a personality.
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With overlaps, rounded corners, and slight line width variation, this mark stood for a solid experience that would result in a complete understanding of a strong and unique personality.
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Individuality
How do you get people to react?
After I proposed the interactive exhibit ideas, my professor challenged me to push it further. He asked me to focus on setting the mood and creating a truly unique experince for each individual. I came up with the idea of scannable cards for visitors. A guest would receive a small card as he entered the museum, and as he completed each exhibit’s classification activity, he would scan his cards to input the results. After finishing everything, the visitor would receive a data sheet that outlined everything he had learned about his personalities.
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INDIVIDUALITY
What would you want to see when you walk into the museum of personality? I was urged to keep thinking of how to push the museum beyond the bounds of a museum. The experience didn’t have to be so ordinary. My professor proposed the above question, which was the spark I needed to reinvent the concept. What would you want to see when you walk into the museum of personality? I would want to see myself. In a place dedicated to learning about my mind, I would want to see my own self. So how do you see yourself? Mirrors, spotlights, color, attention, choices. How can I immediately hit guests in the face with the concept?
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I first decided that the entrance to the museum would be lit with spotlights just inside the doors, illuminating the guests. Instead of a huge ticket counter, the foyer would be filled with private tables for each party to buy tickets individually. Workers would escort the visitors from the entrance to one of the tables, a service and experience similar to the individual attention one gets when visiting the Apple Store Genius Bar. While fun, this was maybe a bit lavish, not to mention this would require a massive museum staff and possibly a bunch of confused guests. I shifted gears. I kept the spotlights by the doors. There would be one ticket counter but it would still retain individuality. There would be six employees at the counter, and each register would display a different color. Theoretically, a guest would be drawn to his favorite color to buy his ticket. (In case he just chose the shortest line, the workers would confirm his favorite color.) My professor suggested incorporating wearable technology, so my scannable card turned into a scannable bracelet with a luminescent triangle. Upon receiving a ticket, the guest’s bracelet would be activated with his favorite colors. This immediate individual experience immerses the guests in the concept right away.
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Inside the museum, all of the exhibits would branch off of one central room so a guest could choose the order he experiences the activities. Each classification test would correspond to a particular hue, and each result of the test would be represented by a value of its hue. As he finishes each activity, the guest would scan his bracelet to input his results, adding the matching hues and values to his bracelet. Through this process, each guest develops his or her own individual triangular spectrum specific to his or her personality. In the central room, screens allow guests to scan their bracelets and look at their progress, as well as to view information on how common their personalities occur in relation to all museum guests, which rooms currently have the most people inside that are similar to them, and how their personality traits relate to guests at the museum that day and in all time.
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For weeks I maintained the idea of creating a unique spectrum for each guest based on his activity results. Intitally I imagined a gradient, a typical idea of a spectrum, but when I began the design process it proved less attractive than I had envisioned. Gradient spectrums appeared too muddy or too much like a rainbow. The triangle shape that I wanted to contain the spectrum in did not accommodate any direction of a gradient very well, either. I tried creating a mesh and ended up with something that looked topographic, I started breaking the triangle to create a pattern, and I used the blend tools to fade a series of lines between colors. None of these solutions looked appropriate—or good at all, frankly.
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All of this made me flustered so I scrapped everything. I took a step back and proposed the question: “If you were going to make a spectrum in your own unique design style, what would you do?� After some quick thoughts on how I create and what makes my design distinctive, I started to fracture the triangle, adding a new color with each break. To create the idea of blending, I applied a soft light effect to the pieces and added luminescence. This retained the concept of each guest building a uniquely colored triangle while applying a modern, attractive twist on the notion of a spectrum. A spectrum was a great way to represent a personality, as it is composed of many colors that overlap and merge to produce a kaleidoscopic whole.
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IDEA
OBJECTIVES
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Physicality Luckily, one of my super helpful friends was an architecture major and therefore super savvy with 3-dimensional rendering software. For an exchange of some ice cream and cookies, he was able to construct realistic models of several exhibits. I created all of the exhibition designs and the floorplan. A little extra editing was necessary after to manipulate the mood of the rooms and add guests in context. These renderings were a huge asset to explaining the concept, look, and feel of the Museum of Personality.
PHYSICALITY
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Previous page: All of the museum exhibits branch of of a central room. On screens in the room, guests can scan their bracelets to see their progress. Right, top: The screens also allow guests to look at their statistics compared to other guests, and to find which rooms in the museum contain the most people similar to or different from them. Right, bottom: Extroversion, one of the Big Five Personality Traits, is measured by recording length of social activity. A guest scans his bracelet upon entering the glass room and is then expected to talk with other guests in the room. He scans again when he exits the room, determining his level of extroversion.
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Right: A guest finds which of the Four Temperaments he corresponds with by following along a flow chart that sprawls across the floor. Walking along, the visitor answers questions and chooses his path to his classification.
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I used a sheet of thermotropic (heat sensitive) paper to mock up an addition to the Type A & B Personality Theory exhibit. These four types correlate strongly with particular moods, and mood often corresponds to body temperature.
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I had originally planned a solid colored cover for the museum information pamphlet, but I stumbled upon some colorful translucent paper that seemed absolutely perfect. With the gradient overlays in the individual triangle marks, transparent paper that could overlap was appropriate.
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The museum tickets cycled through several unfortunately expected trials.
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A friend suggested I use the triangle emblem in the branding as the actual shape of the ticket. I created a square ticket that became a triangle when torn in half by the ticket collector.
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Upon purchasing a ticket, each guest receives a bracelet with a luminescent colored triangle. It is activiated with the guest’s favorite color and is modified based on his individual activity results. To create the bracelets, I printed on a thick paper that had a slightly plastic-y feel. I cut the triangles out of clear acrylic.
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After visiting all of the exhibits and completing all of the classification activities, guests exchange their bracelets for unique data sheets. The sheets break down their results and explain their specific personality characteristics, helping guests learn more about themselves.
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I considered what most museums sell in their gift shops and designed select merchandise for the Museum of Personality.
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All in all, the Museum of Personality is designed to entice each guest to discover his distinct attributes and how they affect his daily life. Comprehension of these qualities helps each guest examine his actions, reactions, and interactions, and to appreciate and accept his individuality and that of others.
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ALYSSA PHILLIPS
2015