Self-service audio-guided tours help visitors understand the "artistic secrets of Cubism"

In the exhibition hall of Picasso Museum in Paris, sunlight filtered through the blinds and fell on the canvas of "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon". Sato, from Japan, stared at the distorted human lines in the painting, frowning and constantly pressing the guide device - the English explanation merely stated "Created in 1907, the beginning of Cubism", and he wanted to know "Why did the girl's face have to be broken into geometric fragments?" but couldn't find a single explanation; the French tourist Anna, beside him, searched through the guide device menu to find the anti-war story behind the draft of "Guernica", but only saw "Created during World War II"; further away, several Arab tourists gathered around the sketchbook in the display cabinet, pointing and gesturing, but the guide device in their hands had no Arabic option and could only guess "Is this drawing doctors and patients?" at the sketch Picasso made when he was a teenager, "Science and Charity" . Such scenes take place almost every day in this art landmark that houses over 4,500 works by Picasso.

The Picasso Museum is one of the most prestigious art museums in the world. Every year, more than 2 million international tourists visit here. But "understanding Picasso" is by no means an easy task - his paintings range from melancholic blue portraits to collage art, and later he even created Cubist works where faces were split into several pieces. Art terms can be overwhelming, and the tourists come from all over the world. There is a huge demand for languages other than English, French, and Spanish. The exhibition halls have close paintings and the walls are made of stone, and the signals often fail. Yingmi has been in the audio guide industry for 16 years. She didn't take the "just get a device and solve everything" approach. Instead, she focused on the problems of the museum and developed a full-scenario voice tour solution. Without specifically mentioning any product, she relied on technical adaptation and content refinement to help tourists turn "the confusing Cubism" into "an understandable artistic life".

I. The "four hurdles" of the Picasso Museum tour, both tourists and the operators are troubled

After talking with many museum operators and travel agencies, they all said, "Taking a group to the Picasso Museum is more exhausting than taking a group to the Louvre." The difficulties in the tour of this place are all tied to "how to understand art" and "how to adapt the scene". It's not something that can be solved by adding a translator:

1. The "gap" in multilingualism is large. Tourists with languages other than English, French, and Spanish can only "guess the meaning from the paintings".

Among the visitors to the Picasso Museum, nearly 40% do not speak Spanish, English, or French - there are Japanese and Korean families with children, Middle Eastern tourists who come specifically to visit, and Eastern Europeans who are passionate about art. However, traditional tours mostly only offer three languages - German, Italian, and Portuguese are often left out, let alone languages like Portuguese, Hindi, and these small languages.

An Italian travel agency person told me that they once led a Middle Eastern group. The uncle pointed at "The Blue Self-Portrait" and asked, "Why did he paint it so sadly?" The temporary translator could only vaguely say, "Maybe he was in a bad mood," and the uncle shook his head and said, "It would be better if I just looked at the painting myself." South American tourists were even more frustrated. They wanted Spanish commentary, but the Spanish version of the traditional tour only translated the names of the works, without mentioning that Cubism was related to the shapes of Spanish folk ceramics, and after the tour, everyone in the group said, "We just saw a bunch of strange paintings."

2. Art terms are "too obscure", ordinary tourists "don't understand"

In Picasso's world, terms like "Cubism", "Deconstructionism", and "Collage Art" are difficult for ordinary tourists to understand even when translated into Chinese. Traditional tours either directly throw out the terms, such as pointing at "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" and saying, "This is the founding work of Cubism," but without explaining "What is Cubism, and why are the characters not normal with noses and eyes?" Or they only say, "This is a painting by Picasso in 1905," without mentioning that it was part of his rose-colored period and the pink tones in the picture were because he was in love and in a good mood.

As a result, when tourists look at the flat lines in "The Guitar", they don't understand that Picasso was "drawing a three-dimensional guitar on a two-dimensional piece of paper"; when they stare at the reclining woman in "The Dream", they don't understand "those soft curves hide his brief yearning for love" - the most interesting part of art is all covered up by these "term piles".

3. The exhibits are dense and "easy to confuse", the viewing rhythm is often interrupted

Most of the exhibition halls in the Picasso Museum are not large, but the exhibits are piled up closely: in one hall, there are sketches from Picasso's youth, oil paintings from his blue period, and sculptures from his rose-colored period, placed only 1.5 meters apart. The traditional guided tours have too inaccurate sensing. Standing in front of a sketch, the audio being played is that of an oil painting on the side. Tourists have to repeatedly manually switch the audio. What's more troublesome is that some exhibition walls are made of stone, and the signal gets interrupted when it encounters a barrier. Once I heard "The inspiration for the Rose Period came from the circus", just as I was about to listen more, the signal suddenly dropped, and by the time I recovered, we had already moved on to the next section.

A French local tourist complained to me: "I originally wanted to follow Picasso's life journey, from his childhood paintings to his later Cubism works. But either I missed the sequence or there was no signal. In the end, I wandered around aimlessly and couldn't even figure out how his style changed."

4. "Lack of depth", missing the "life stories" behind the creation

Picasso's paintings were never "created just for the sake of creation" - "Guernica" was painted after he was infuriated by the Nazis' bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica. The bull in the picture symbolized violence, and the horse represented suffering; the pale blue background in "The Boy with a Pipe" was his reminiscence of his youth. But traditional guided tours rarely mention these "behind-the-scenes stories", only saying "What's the name of the work, and when was it painted?".

Tourists can only look at "How strange does this painting look?" but don't understand "Why did he paint it this way?".

I conducted a small survey before, and only 15% of the tourists could know through traditional guided tours that "Picasso's Blue Period was due to the suicide of a friend, and the Rose Period was because of his first love"; even fewer, 10%, knew that "The inspiration for 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon' was half from African masks and half from Spanish bullfighting" - actually, the most important thing to see in an art museum is these "lives hidden in the paintings"

II. Yingmi's "Art Adaptation Plan": Follow the tourists' needs, turn "un-understandable" into "understandable"

When Yingmi came up with the plan for the Picasso Museum, she didn't rush to tell people "How technically advanced we are", but actually sent several people to the museum for a full week of observation - following tourists from different countries, observing where they stopped, where they frowned, which sentences they repeated, and taking a full notebook of notes. The final plan, without any fancy explanations, was all based on the real needs of the tourists:

1. Exhibition Adaptation: Accurate sensing + Stable signal, without interrupting the viewing rhythm

To address the problem of "dense paintings and easily obstructed signals" in the museum, Yingmi's plan focused on two key points:

One was "Accurate sensing", using the RFID-2.4G star distribution technology. Simply put, when a tourist is within 1 meter of the painting, the explanation comes out precisely, and it doesn't jump to the adjacent sculpture - once I tried it in an exhibition with an extremely dense collection of paintings, standing in front of Picasso's "Science and Charity" from his childhood, the explanation happened to be about this painting's story, and there was no need to manually switch the audio; the other was "Stable signal", using the 4GFSK anti-interference technology, which can pass through stone walls. I had tested it in the stone exhibition hall of the Acropolis Museum in Athens, and the signal interruption rate could be reduced to below 5%, even in the underground exhibition hall where the museum stored drafts, the sound could be heard clearly.

And for battery life, it takes about 2.5 hours for tourists to visit the Picasso Museum, and the equipment used in the plan was Yingmi's own PMU security lithium battery, which could be charged once and used for 12 hours. There was no need to look for a charging socket in the middle, and the equipment was made lightweight, so it didn't cause hand soreness after wearing it for a long time - unlike some traditional equipment, which became heavy halfway through and was not wanted to hold.

2. Content Depth: Follow Picasso's "life journey", turn art into "little stories"

Yingmi consulted scholars from the Paris Art Institute and the Picasso Research Center to jointly discuss the content of the explanation. The core was: "Don't talk big theories, break Picasso's artistic life into stories that tourists can understand."

For instance, when discussing the Blue Period, one might say, "After his friend's suicide, Picasso was depressed, so he used blue tones to paint beggars and street performers - look at the heavy postures in 'La Vie', the blue color shows loneliness." One would also mention, "He met his first love, so the colors turned pink, and he painted acrobats and clowns - 'Boy with a Pipe' has soft pinks, showing his happy mood." When discussing Cubism, it would be broken down even further: "Picasso broke figures into geometric shapes and showed front and side views at the same time - look at 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon', the women's faces are split, that's how he broke the traditional perspective."

The content also includes a reminder for visitors to "find it themselves", such as, "Look at the lines in 'The Guitar', how did Picasso use planes to create a sense of three-dimensionality?" "Look for the woman's arm in 'The Dream', isn't it like a soft, curved line flowing?" This way, visitors are not passively listening but actively observing and remembering it more firmly.

Conclusion: Let Picasso's "Artistic Life" be understood by more people.

The charm of the Picasso Museum is not "displaying a bunch of Picasso's paintings", but what is hidden within these paintings - an artist's journey from sadness to happiness, from following old rules to innovating on their own, an art transformation history spanning half a century. For visitors, coming here is not to take a "photo with 'Les Demoiselles d'Avignon'" but to want to know "why Picasso painted like this, what kind of mood these paintings hide".

Yingmi's guided tour plan does not have any fancy functions. It just does these three things well: "explain the language thoroughly, have precise responses, and have deep content". It is like an art guide, not forcefully imparting knowledge, but guiding visitors to watch slowly, in the melancholy of the Blue Period, the tenderness of the Rose Period, and the breakthrough of Cubism, gradually helping visitors understand Picasso's artistic code. For clients, choosing such a plan is not only to make the visitor experience better, but also to truly enable the art museum to "transmit culture and interpret art" - this is the most important meaning of the guided tour plan.