Museum Techmuse

Social issues: visitors as animations

As museums become more audience-centered, a major trend over the last 20 years, our exhibit interactives also focus more on the visitor experience. What is their experience?  How do they react to the topics in our exhibits?  Visitors' communication about their own experience is central to exhibit-based learning, as Minda Borun, Lynn Dierking and others have been telling us for years.

For our recent installation at the Illinois Holocaust Museum, we had an interesting challenge -- to develop an engaging format that encourages kids to talk about how the would react to difficult situations they might encounter, such as bullying, assimilating to a new culture, and neighborhood violence. We developed an animated program that allows visitors to become an animated character, recording their reactions, then seeing themselves responding in the context of the animation. I'm very happy with the result, and the way it provides a structure that encourages communication based on individual experience.

Opening animation: bullying

Visitor records a response

Visitor becomes part of the animation

Health Education: post-visit behavior change

Gave a presentation at the annual National Association of Health Education Centers (NAHEC) conference recently, and it struck me that few groups are as focused on the mission to encourage long-term behavior change among visitors as health education centers. By it's very nature, "health education" depends on behavior change.

I had three main points to my presentation:

• We need to design with post-visit behavior change in mind. (This built off the paper Paula Sincero and I presented at Museums and the Web a few years ago).
• We need to plant a seed for later followup during the visitor's museum experience. Based on our work with StoryKiosk where visitors create stories, art works, and videos for upload, visitor creativity is that seed.
• We can tap into existing online community structures to nurture that seed. Visitor postings to Flickr for example can help maintain involvement, with a few caveats about the signup process...

Refugee Life Exhibit

"Torn From Home," the exhibit on refugee life developed at the Lied Discovery Children's Museum, opened last week, and I'm pleased to have developed a StoryKiosk installation for this groundbreaking exhibit. Visitors experience walking through a refugee camp, and at the end they record their reflections on the experience.

It is a challenging topic: visitors generally come to museums to learn and enjoy their time together in exhibits, so an exhibit on refugee life would seem from the start to be at odds with that experience. But the exhibit manages to strike a masterful balance between providing a novel experience and introducing a topic of international concern. Families can create a shelter together: an intriguing challenge that is engaging, and at the same unsettling as you imagine families living in this structure. The display of toys created by kids in refugee camps is inspiring as you see the creativity that went into their creation and disturbing as you imagine the circumstance of the child who created the toy.

Thanks and appreciation to Stacey Mann, Elaine Bole, and the team at Lied who helped create the exhibit. More info here, and at the Website we developed for the exhibit.

 

the Boston Museum: Choosing to Participate

Last night was the debut of our latest StoryKiosk booth, installed in the "Choosing to Participate" exhibit at the Boston Public Library. The installation provided an interesting first for me: it exists and is running even before the museum itself (the Boston Museum) has been built. It is up and running and gathering stories about choosing to engage in the community based on powerful examples in the rest of the exhibit, which was developed by the acclaimed Facing History and Ourselves educational organization.

It's an interesting use of a media installation: to use it to as part of a way to demonstrate the type of engagement an upcoming museum will have with its community. My appreciation to Katy Abel at the Boston Museum, David Michaud who designed the booth, and the team at Facing History.

(click to enlarge images)

Visitor-created art: Young at Art

Finished the Storykiosk installation at Young At Art museum in Davie Florida last week. I'm delighted to see the variety of images created by visitors when given a palette of backgrounds and tools to create something with.

The interesting challenge: how do we build a structure to support visitors' creativity in a very short period of time (5-10 minutes) in a way that allows them to take ownership of their creation and make it an expression of themselves? Allowing them to talk about their creation (and record their statement about their art) is one of the key steps. Then, after recording their statement, visitors can print their art out in the gift shop for $5.

ASTC Flickr experiment

I'm in our exhibit hall booth now on the second day of the ASTC conference. We've had one day of visitors stopping by our booth and recording their answer to the question "What invention would improve your life here at the conference?"  In addition to sending visitors an email of their recorded story, we're also uploading a picture they create of themselves to a Flickr set, which you can view here. Fun to see the variety of images.

Quite exciting to see this evolve. It is pointing toward using Web 2.0 technologies in a way that can build extended post-visit community. More on this later...

Austin: Technology design for girls as well as boys

A few months ago I mentioned we are designing an installation for the Austin Children's Museum, and that we wanted the interface to appeal to girls as well as boys. (The program gathers visitors stories about their creations in "Tinkerer's Workshop" and is running in conjunction with the upcoming Maker Faire). You  might want to take a look at some of the design considerations that arose as we pondered this.

Here was our first draft of the recording screen:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An attractive screen, but in view of the considerations above, we wanted to show girls (and boys) enjoying making things, so included a slide show of about 5 images that appears before the video window. This is the first of those slides:

"CSI: The Experience" opens in Boston

Here are a few photos from the CSI exhibit, now at its second venue at the Museum of Science in Boston following it's debut at the Museum of Science and Industry a few months ago.  As I noted in my blog entry back then, it was a pleasure to install the StoryKiosks in the exhibit. The overall goal: encourage visitors to make and share their observations in exhibits. Visitors record their observations and email those recordings home to build a post-visit connection, which includes a greeting by a CSI cast member.

(click on photo to enlarge)

Wild Music Exhibit: Science Museum of Minnesota

The Science Museum of Minnesota's richly textured and evocative "Wild Music" exhibit is traveling now, focusing on the "sounds and songs of life", exploring biological origins of music.  I was pleased to develop a StoryKiosk for the exhibit focusing on visitors' strong memories of music in their own lives. We ask visitors: "Listen to a song and describe the memories it evokes for you" and "Describe an intense musical experience you've had."

I was especially interested to see if we could encourage visitors to sing a song in the exhibit, because the act of singing itself I think evokes memories, and provides a nice fit with Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences approach to exhibit development.

 

Local History and Storytelling: Oklahoma Heritage Center

Stories are an essential part of the fabric of content for local history museums. Not just well-documented stories from renowned residents -- also stories and snippets of "this is what life was like" from everyday visitors. This was our goal at the Oklahoma Heritage Center, to help draw out from visitors these quick portraits of life in Oklahoma. We ask visitors questions such as "How has Oklahoma changed in your lifetime?" and "Tell us about a place in Oklahoma that is especially important to you." Visitors record their stories, and play back those from other visitors, developing an evolving base of stories connected to the community. The StoryKiosk is part of a building-wide exhibit development led by Northern Light Productions.

Visitors record and browse other visitors' stories and can email their story home. (Click to enlarge)