What’s So Funny? explores the connection between humour and well-being. The exhibit is aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 3: Good Health and Wellbeing, which aims to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.”

Our exhibit supports this goal by exploring the ways that humour is interconnected with well-being; in both the mental and physical, past and present, and individual and interpersonal.

I focused on ideation, research, writing, design, and material selection. I also was able to experiment with electrical work via an MP3 trigger board.

Conceptualizing a museum exhibit from idea to full pop up involved not just design thinking skills, but collaboration skills with non designers who did not always understand the importance of certain design processes.

To combat misunderstandings, a Team Charter was created that outlined expectations and feedback/conflict styles of each team member. This greatly facilitated cross-disciplinary collaboration due to mutual understanding.

Design thinking was used as the main disciplinary framework, with a series of design constraints and criteria created.

Using the double diamond process, we generated 22 ideas, fighting the urge to judge them prematurely. We narrowed them down to 8, then used dot voting to decide on humour and wellness.

The second diamond involved creating a mind map of the different connections between humour and wellness. Upon conducting research, we decided to cut three topics based on our design constraints.

We then narrowed the scope of our research, trying to focus in on key themes according to our criteria.

Multiple hurdles were encountered. These included issues in demonstrating the importance of design decisions to some of my colleagues, as well as multiple issues in the procurement of materials. Multiple compromises had to be made, whether it was switching to a new material, rearranging letters to make mistakes look intentional, or reducing the scope of an interactive activity.

Hurdles were usually dealt with through the 70% buy-in rule from our design criteria earlier, so that everyone in the group was at least happy enough with the decisions that were being made. In the case of group members falling behind, a few encouraging words didn't hurt either!
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Feedback was taken from our course instructor, a museum expert, and a subject matter expert.

More importantly, we fulfilled our criteria of a high-execution exhibit that provided new, unexpected insights on a framework that can often feel more tired than empowering.