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