Museum Techmuse

Twitter experiment: applications for cultural exhibits?

Long ago (as in 15 or more years ago), Apple Multimedia Lab did an experiment where they gave a boy (11 years old?) in a forest in Brazil (I think) an audio recording device, and asked him to record every time he had a question during the course of the day. Then they compared it with the questions that a child here in the US recorded.  Very interesting...

I remember the boy in Brazil (who lived in an interior region without much technology) asked questions like "What is the height of the highest waterfall?"  And "What is the place with the most gold?"  It really struck me how much these quick questions reflected his daily life, environment, and world view.

Twitter offers the same capability in a new way. I'm experimenting with it today, making a twitter entry (here) every time I have a question. Would be interesting to compare this with someone else who records their questions throughout the day in Twitter. How are our lives similar? And different?  Do the questions reflect this? (If anyone out there wants to try this, let me know...)

Austin project: Technology design to engage girls (as well as boys)

For our Austin Children's Museum project, running in conjunction with the Maker Faire from Make magazine, we're focusing on the issue: how do we design the media to appeal to girls as well as boys, drawing them both into the traditionally boy-focused endeavor of making things with technology? Becky Jones at the Museum provided helpful notes drawn from a past issue of ASTC Dimensions:

• Emphasize design/creativity/inventiveness (not just "solving problems")
• Focus on collaborative nature of projects
• Show how design/engineering serves social and environmental benefits, makes the world better
• Provide images of role models; show that the activity is "not just for geeks"
• Provide a "take-away" that participants can show to parents/friends

These all make a lot of sense, and we most likely would design toward these principles even if they weren't articulated directly. But it is helpful to develop screens with these in mind. (I'll post the resulting design in a couple months when it is installed).

Multiple Intelligences and Exhibit Media

After my recent posting on the Wild Music exhibit, I was reminded how central Howard Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences has been to many exhibits. In fact, by their nature, many children's museums have appealed to a wide range of "intelligences" even before Gardner's work. (See this quick summary from the Strong Museum for a review of the intelligences). But other, less child-centered museums have focused on broadening their appeal as well, for example in this project at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Most of the time we don't design literally to appeal to each of the intelligences. But it can be a very helpful step in the design process to review the intelligences and see if this might spur thinking about using music or tracking body movement with the technology, for example. In a 1997 article I wrote for the Association of Children's Museums, I suggested that we can ask these these questions during exhibit design:

• Does the program complement the variety of experiences available in the exhibit (or website)?
• Can the program be shaped to appeal to a form of intelligence underrepresented in the exhibit, such as musical, kinesthetic, or interpersonal?
• Is the program accessible to a wide range of people?