Discovery of the brand

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4 Idea6 Research8 Mark20 Individuality29 Physicality

4 IDEAIDEA

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.

Idea

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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

A museum to study per-

sonality classifications

and their correlations

to historical individuals,

to explain actions and

events and to apply these

theories to current and

future lives.

Personality products

Product lines for each of

the four temperaments

that strengthen the qual-

ities of each to maximize

personality or create

equilibrium.

Happiness report

A search for what truly

makes people happy

through interviews,

crowdsourcing, reflection,

surveys, and obervations,

and a solution for how to

keep and share happiness.

6 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.

Research

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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

8 MARK

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.

PERSONALITYOO ALSSSSRR NNN YYYRRRPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPEPPPEPPPPPPPPPEPEPEPPE

PERSON ALITY

PERSON ALITYPERSON ALITYTYP NPERSON ALITYRSONALITYTYLIAONSORPERERSON ALITERSOPERSON ALITYLS YAP NPERSON ALITYPERSON ALITYPERSON ALITYPERSON ALITYTYNPERSON ALITYYASONALITEPERSON ALITYYPERSON ALITYPERSON ALITYR TYLIASORP

museum of personality

museum of personality

museum of personality

PERSONALITY OOAL SSSSRRNNNYYY RRR PPPPPPPPPPPPPPPPEPPPEPPPPPPPPPEPEPEPPE

PERSONALITY

PERSONALITY PERSONALITYTY PN PERSONALITY RSONALITYTY LI A ON SO R PERERSONALIT ERSO PERSONALITY L SY A PN PERSONALITY PERSONALITY PERSONALITY PERSONALITYTY N PERSONALITYY A SONALIT EPERSONALITYY PERSONALITY PERSONALITY RTY LI A SO R P

museum of personality

museum of personality

museum of personality

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I chose to work with a sketch of Psi intersecting

with a triangle. This was the combination of psy-

chology 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 rend-

ition. 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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20 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 com-

pleted 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.

Individuality

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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.

98 IDEA

99OBJECTIVES

29PHYSICALITY

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 render-

ings 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, trans-

parent 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 ex-

change 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