In 2011 Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation—the philanthropic arm of Deutsche Bank—awarded the New New Yorkers Program with a grant to develop the Queens Museum’s first mobile application. The app will center on the Panorama of the City of New York—QMA’s crown jewel—and will take on both informative and interactive (user generated) aspects. Early on NNY decided to crowd-source the development work for the app. That is, we asked our Users to undertake much of the research and pre-production work that would shape such an application. Our hope is that by taking the process to our audience before writing the application, we will produce a more useful engine for interaction and avoid the folly that happens when applications and devices are deployed “top-down.”

On Sunday, April 14 we installed an exhibition featuring the work done to date through four of the courses we designed with the app in mind. We organized a series of workshops led by interactive artists and designers that would look into the principles of good design and purposeful interaction. We offered these courses in Spanish, English and Mandarin. Each class met weekly for two months. The participants learned about interaction, studied examples of other apps, and studied our collections carefully in order to develop proposals for a QMA app.

Through these workshops we have confirmed some features which we already had in mind (like mapping), and discovered new ones which we had not thought of (like souvenir pictures inside the Panorama by way of a green screen.

All this data will be very useful when talking to developers later this year, so I want to congratulate all the participants for their hard work and enthusiasm: Ana Reza, Doris López, Gabriel Rivera, Jorge Miranda, Luz Aguirre, Magaly Barzola, Marianna Giacalone, Rocio Venegas, Fiona Yuen, Gary Yuen, Maximino Sosa, Patricia Sosa, Angela Liao, Chuankui Jiang, Jenny Chang, Mansa Wang, Penny Fei, Tammy Wang, Tracy Shih, and Vicky Wang.