AKRON, Ohio - She's smart, she's sassy, and she uses artworks at the Akron Art Museum to get you talking with your friends about art and life and the connections between the two.
Meet Dot, the museum's new chatbot digital tour guide. She's got dark-frame glasses and a pink pageboy hairdo and she's been designed to spark conversations among museum visitors via texts on Facebook Messenger app, the social network's instant message function.
Unveiled on Thursday with a special launch party, Dot is the outcome of nearly two years of research and development by the museum, funded by a $173,000 grant from the Miami-based Knight Foundation.
The foundation challenged four American art museums - the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia, the Perez Art Museum Miami, the Institute of Contemporary Art Miami and the Akron museum - to develop new ways to engage audiences through digital technology.
The grant is part of a larger series of projects undertaken by Knight to encourage museums to use digital technology as a way to stay relevant with younger and digitally-oriented audiences.
Chris Barr, Knight's director of arts and technology innovation, said the foundation's digital thrust has been inspired in part by innovations at the Cleveland Museum of Art, recognized nationally for its 2013 ArtLens app and 40-foot-long interactive screen displaying works in the permanent collection.
"They've been a pioneering force within the museum technology field," Barr said.
Akron staffers decided after researching how visitors interacted with art and with each other at the museum that they didn't want to use their Knight grant to produce digital videos or revamp their website.
Instead, they wanted to encourage more of what they saw happening right in front of them - groups of visitors were using encounters with art to kick off lively conversations among themselves.
"It's a recognition that people are coming to these spaces not to learn about art, but to learn about themselves," Barr said. "That's what art does for us. It gives us a way to challenge ourselves and create meaning in our lives."
Speaking for herself, Dot says in a text "My job is to connect you and your crew to the art and to each other."
A silent introductory video available at the museum instructs visitors to open the Facebook Messenger App and log on to the museum's WiFi network.
Dot introduces herself as a guide who will take a squad of visitors through a six-stop "choose your own adventure" tour of the museum's permanent collection, offering choices that engage visitors in designing the experience.
Multiple tours bring the total number of objects discussed by Dot to 60. She also navigates viewers from one object to another with succinct directions.
In front of each object, Dot provides tidbits about the artwork, the artist or the process involved in making the object, and then poses questions designed to users talking to each other about life, not specifically about art.
"We knew we wanted to keep it light and fun, but we also wanted some sort of important fact, and we also wanted to draw a personal connection between the people here," said Jennifer Shipman, the Akron museum's chief of staff and director of special projects.
In front of the colorful Sol LeWitt mural in the museum's lobby, Dot informs visitors that the artist "never actually came to Akron to paint this mural. Instead, he sent the plans to a drafter who drew the mural directly on this wall.
Dot cheekily informed users that LeWitt's process "is called delegating. (You know, like when your boss asks you to finish something that he/she started?)"
Dot then asks visitors to consider "what part of your job do you wish you could assign to someone else?"
In front of a 1966 Lee Bontecou construction that resembles gnashing mechanical teeth emerging through the surface of a painting, Dot informs visitors that the artist made the work during the Cold War while listening to news on the radio. She then asks visitors "How do you cope with anxiety brought on by news and politics?"
The museum developed Dot while working with consultants at Maya Design in Pittsburgh, Form Group in Shaker Heights, and Cleveland-based designer Jordan-Elise Perme.
Perme in particular helped the museum imagine Dot's cute, brainy but approachable look, Shipman said. The museum tested various concepts for her by polling museum visitors.
"We tried brunette hair, we had purple hair, blue hair, a bun, glasses, no glasses - the whole thing," Shipman said.
Consultant Seema Rao of Cleveland-based Brilliant Idea Studio LLC helped the museum create a conversational tone for Dot that eliminated any hint of art historical jargon.
"It was a lot of work but it was really great fun work," Shipman said. "We're really excited to see how visitors utilize it, but also hear their feedback as well."
The museum will collect data on how visitors use Dot, but Barr said the numbers matter far less to Knight than how developing Dot changed the museum as an institution.
"The way that they built the research and built out the technology - my hope is that some of that sticks and that they really bring that into the work that they do in the future."