Our Voices - Telling the stories of New Zealand youth at Auckland Museum | NDF25

Um, in 2024, Tamira Oakland War Memorial Museum embarked on a collaboration with our voices. Our voices is an innovative project funded by the Ministry for Business Innovation and Employment for the purpose of seeing what shapes the well-being of young people in Alterora, New Zealand. The project sampled a group of young people uh 13 years old to be specific from the growing up in New Zealand study and utilized an innovative new research method the app tomato leena our journey and this was to be a fun and friendly environment for young people to share their lived experiences as part of their mahi our voices aimed to create a visitor experience in collaboration with Oakland Museum that would allow the public to hear the voices of young people in the research in an engaging and exciting way. This project would prove very fast and at times challenging, working with an external uh research project to make a visitor friendly experience aimed at our core family audience of children ages 8 to [Music] 12. Um, so for this project, we wanted to, like Nick said, create an engaging interactive experience that allowed our visitors to hear the voices and opinions of the young participants that took part in the Growing Up in New Zealand study. It was important for us that the aspect of hearing these young people's voices was emphasized. Um, our learning outcomes for this uh experience were that um visitors should be able to gain an understanding about what young people have to say on big issues that are relevant to them. That visitors should come away feeling inspired by examples of young people's voices making a difference in Alteora. and that exper the experience is enjoyable for our young target audience. So, a bit about the experience itself. Um, we went with a approach that paired both visual and audio mechanics to create an accessible experience that was simple and engaging for visitors. Motion activated spotlights were used to trigger the audio voices and graphics that were displayed on a large projection screen um area in the space and the directional speakers were used above each spotlight to give the visitors a sense that the voices were speaking to them. Uh a clear visual approach was developed with our creative partner PHQ that drew on aspects of the R Journey app and was adapted for this experience. The recognizable characters from our Journey app were used to embody the voices of the study's participants as well as colors and other visual elements. And here is a quick video showing you how the experience worked. [Music] Uh the first step of developing the experience was to prioritize pieces of research uh that would be of greatest interest to the public. So these run everything from school and support systems to big societal issues that we all face like the CO 19 pandemic. To get the data from the Our Voices study into a form that would excite the public, uh we decided to use anonymized voice recordings to represent the voices of the real research participants. These would bring the voices of the 800 young people to life as well as adding another sensory layer to the experience. Um, after auditioning some very talented young people, we used a cohort to record the responses and bring them to life in this studio. I'm going to view a little sample of the children. Talking to my sister helps me get rid of things on my mind. Sleeping helps me not think about it at all. My friends are really good listeners and comfort and support me. If we don't accept each other and our differences, we haven't achieved equality yet. If something is not right, I can give my opinion and support and try making a difference. During the development of the experience, we regularly worked with and updated the Our Voices team, taking their feedback on board and making sure we were staying as authentic as possible to the voices of the young research participants. As previously mentioned, we worked closely with a creative partner, PHQ, to bring this experience to life. We wanted to find a partner that we ideally had an existing relationship with and who had a proven track record of developing similar experiences. Um, as this project had a fairly tight turnaround time, we went out to a small number of creative agencies with a brief outlining the project's vision and aims to which they responded with some creative solutions. Once the creative solution was decided on by our internal project team, we got to work with the development of this experience. We found that the process of developing and testing the experience went fairly smoothly um due to the fact that we did have that pre-existing relationship with the creative partner and that both internal and external team members aligned on the aims and goals of the project. Working with a Tamaki based creative partner meant that we had the advantage of including them in the on-site testing process which allowed for fixes and adjustments to be identified and made during these testing sessions. Um after a successful launch followed by visitor analysis over last summer, the experience met its intended learning outcomes with flying colors. In terms of the key outcomes of knowledge, inspiration, and enjoyment, uh 91% of adult visitors gained insight into the views of young people, 75% were inspired, and around 87% enjoyed the exhibition. The target audience of actor to 12 was well represented with additional interests from ages 0 to 7 who enjoyed the interactive elements. Uh solo adults and adults in groups were surprisingly well represented in the visitation for the experience with many enjoying the ability to engage with the thoughts of young people. We had a wide range of very positive feedback from adults and children alike with surprisingly high appeal to the adults that I mentioned. So children connected with their older peers learning in a tuana older to younger sibling way whilst adults appreciated the maturity of thoughts of young people and reflected on their perspectives. Overall the experience successfully elevated the young voices of Rangatahi in Altereroa. So just some info about the um visitation and usage of the experience. Uh we were able to gather some great data on the usage and interaction of the experience including most popular days um spotlights and busiest days. And we also found that um we had around a 30% of total visitors visitors to the museum throughout the duration of the project were interacting with the experience. um which when we compare that to interaction data with some of our digital kiosks and other experiences, it's um shows a really high level of visitor engagement. So overall, we feel that this project was successful both in terms of learning outcomes and project team collaboration. We were able to bring together the right internal interpretive research and technology team members as well as a highly capable creative partner to create an experience that met our research partners' goals and vision for the project. The Our Voices project allowed us to work collaboratively and creatively across teams and disciplines to offer an interactive experience to our visitors that stands out from our digital interactive offering at Tamaki Panga. Thank you. Um and then uh uh Jess and Nick on the growing up in New Zealand project. Um the question is is there any thought going into making the experience a tiring exhibit? I assume that was supposed to be touring. Um uh or so is it touring or is there uh any potential for the uh content to be shared online or in other forms? Um, in short, not as of yet, but I think it could be quite a fun touring show for sure. Um, and I think it's, yeah, it it was really cool because we the data, like I said, the 800 the cohort that were sampled for experience was from all over the country. So, in some ways, it could be quite meaningful to actually do that at some point. Fantastic. Thank you.