Making Participatory Processes Visible to Visitors

Let's say you spend a year working with a group of teens to co-create an exhibition, or you invite members and local artists to help redesign the lobby. How do you acknowledge their participation in a way that helps subsequent visitors connect with the passion and hard work that went into the process?

Community processes are both exciting and time-consuming. In many cases, once the final project is launched, it's hard to detect the participatory touch. The exhibition or program is of high quality, and from the visitor perspective, it may look like museum as usual. There might be a plaque listing names or a group photo of participants, but that's about it.

In some ways, this is a good thing. Not every participatory process has to scream "look at me!" to create a successful product. But it's a shame when visitors can't experience the energy that went into the making of a participatory project--when the product of a living process is a dead thing. The challenge is for designers to find a way to showcase the participatory process in a way that enhances the final product rather than just feeling like a behind-the-scenes geekfest.

Last week I saw a powerful example of this at the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg in their exhibition for children under five. The exhibition includes a large display of objects from the Museum's ethnographic collection selected by small children. The artifacts are eclectic and intriguing, but it's not obvious that children selected them, nor are there labels to help you understand why these particular objects are there (see picture at top).

An interactive changes that. In the middle of the gallery, there's a touchscreen in front of a larger projection wall. The touchscreen features a grid with all of the artifacts in the space. Touch an object, and the projection comes alive with video of small children standing behind the object, wearing conservator's gloves, explaining what they like about the object and why they picked it. I couldn't understand the videos--they were in Swedish--but I was charmed by the kids' spontaneous, infectious energy. After each short video, there was a single screen featuring a curator's comments (in text) about the importance of the object from his or her perspective.

This interactive provided context that helped me appreciate the artifacts and understand the process that had put them on display. A gallery that otherwise would have felt dead came alive with the children's voices, laughter, and antics. And even without understanding their words, I looked at the objects around me in a whole new way. I understood that the artifacts meant something to the kids I saw onscreen. It was like "staff picks" at the bookstore, but with (presumably) richer content.

How can you make the product of participation as engaging as the process itself?

Welcome to Pine Point: A Multimedia Exploration of Nostalgia, History, and What it Means to be Human

In 1990, educator and cultural critic Neil Postman described a museum as "an answer to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be a human being?"

I must admit that I've never found this definition very helpful. While I understand Postman's argument that every museum portrays a perspective on the nature of humanity, in most cases, I find that portrayal so abstract, so stripped of personhood, that it's hard to see the human in the institution. Without an explicit "I" voice, the museum's perspective on humanity is oblique to say the least.

But I came back to Postman's quote when viewing Welcome to Pine Point, a multimedia documentary about a small mining town in the Northwest Territories. Pine Point was a single-industry town, and when the mine closed in 1988, the town closed along with it. Welcome to Pine Point is a kind of virtual museum exhibition about the town, told from the perspective of Michael Simons, an artist who grew up in the nearby town of Yellowknife and visited Pine Point as a boy.

Welcome to Pine Point is not a museum project. It is an incredible narrative work that incorporates text, music, videos, and images into a lightly interactive, utterly engrossing digital story. (When you check it out, make sure to put your browser on fullscreen mode.) It is, in short, the best multimedia history project I've ever seen, and I wish more museums were pursuing projects like it.

What makes Welcome to Pine Point so amazing?

• It's nostalgic in the best sense of the word. In 2009, Dan Spock wrote a beautiful essay, In Defense of Nostalgia, arguing that history museums should embrace the emotional power of loss, memory, and personal connection that comes with nostalgia. By interweaving images, artifacts, sounds, and the human stories of the town, Welcome to Pine Point invites people with no prior connection to the Northwest Territories to care deeply about its story.
• It uses multimedia beautifully. I was really impressed by the diversity of artifacts in Welcome to Pine Point--from yearbook photos to VFW badges to video and photos from the 1980s and today. The variance and effective use of different media types reminded me of any great exhibition design, and it also highlighted how rarely museum professionals apply creative, surprising design techniques in online or media-based exhibits.
• It tells layered personal stories. The subjective "I" voice of Michael drives the whole story. Because he cares about Pine Point, you care, or at least you're up for the adventure. Michael's strong narrative voice makes jumps in location or story manageable (even if I did spend some time confused about the connection between Cosmos 954 and Pine Point). Michael also interviews former Pine Pointers, and the highly personal "then and now" features on Kim Feodoroff and Richard Cloutier are highlights of the whole project.
• It makes you contemplate your own connection to history. The first-person narration allows the project to directly address the audience with deep questions without sounding unnatural. When Michael wonders what it would be like to have your hometown disappear, he doesn't sound pretentious. He's a real person trying to figure it out, and that makes you as a viewer want to join him in figuring it out too. Some of the artifacts--government documents explaining that Pine Point will be taken off the map, videos from the final week of the town's existence--are devastating. It's impossible to watch people toasting the end of their town and not think about how you would feel in the same situation.
• It makes you think about what it means to be human. Coming back to Neil Postman's quote, and Postman's related concerns about people blindly allowing themselves to be controlled by technology, Welcome to Pine Point is an arresting exploration of the conflicts between technological progress and humanity. If a mine makes a town exist, is that good? If a mine closes and it makes the town cease to exist, is that bad? What happens to the people? How do we make these decisions, individually and collectively? These are big juicy questions that few exhibitions really force me to grapple with the way I did as I watched Welcome to Pine Point.

Welcome to Pine Point has a lot to teach all of us who strive to design exhibitions and experiences that explore history in a meaningful way. It also, in my opinion, has something to learn from the museum model. The one negative reaction I had to Welcome to Pine Point was its insistence on a linear presentation of the story. While I appreciate the benefits of a straight narrative, in this case, I think the content could have been just as powerfully presented in a hub and spoke model with freer user navigation. The "chapters" of the project were loose, and I didn't necessarily feel I needed to see them in order. Some I wanted to return to, and some I wanted to skip. I would love to see an exhibition version of Welcome to Pine Point, in a gallery where I can flit in and out of various alcoves of memory... and then talk about it with others in the cafe. This is a project that begs conversation.

I hope we can start that conversation here. Experience the project, share a comment, and let's talk.

How Useful is the "Audience vs. Expert" Dichotomy?

When it comes to user participation in cultural institutions and the arts, it's popular to launch projects that pit visitors against experts. There was Click! at the Brooklyn Museum, where you could track how people of various levels of art expertise rated crowd-contributed photographs. And now, at the Walker Art Center, there's 50/50, an upcoming print show in which half the prints will be chosen by the public, half by curators. Even ArtPrize, the "radically open" art festival that was judged last year by public vote alone, will incorporate a juried contest as well this year.

There's a sexiness to the perception of divergence between expert and public opinion. It's what keeps curators curators and the public public. But I'm not sure how much value there is to that difference. Instead, I'd like to see us asking broader questions about process, like:

• How do different people arbitrate the value of a piece of art, a historical artifact, or a piece of scientific evidence?
• What tools do we use? What expectations and biases and experience and expertise come into play?
• How do we know what we know, and how do we make judgments of preference?

I've been thinking about this as I prep some interactive prototypes for the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, a Seattle-based museum of pop culture. One prototype is based on the Billboard Top 10 charts for pop music. Every week, Billboard publishes charts based on airplay, record sales, and now, digital downloads and streaming.

For the interactive prototype, we're letting visitors construct their own "Top 10" and compare it to the Billboard charts. After some research, I decided it would be interesting for people to compare their favorites to the Top 10 over all time rather than focusing solely on the current stats. I recalled that Rolling Stone magazine had put out a list of "the 500 greatest songs of all time" a few years ago, and decided to pull it up to see how it compared to Billboard's top songs. The Billboard list was determined by normalized sales and airplay from 1958-2009, whereas the Rolling Stone list was selected by 172 musicians, critics, and industry professionals.

Here are the two lists' top ten songs:

I was pretty amazed to notice two things:

1. These lists share only one song in common, "Hey Jude" at position number 8.
2. The Billboard list is more diverse than the Rolling Stone list in many ways. It features more musical genres, more women, and more chronological spread.

Going further down the lists, the divergence between them continues. While The Beatles top both lists when it comes to artist representation, none of the top twenty artists on the Rolling Stone list are women, whereas Billboard has seven. Bob Dylan, the third most represented artist on the Rolling Stone list, doesn't even place in Billboard's top one hundred.

This isn't a direct "audience versus expert" comparison. Billboard charts are far from egalitarian--particularly when it comes to the radio, money plays a big role in determining who hits the airwaves. And I wouldn't be surprised if the music industry insiders who contributed to the Rolling Stone list are the same people who helped launch LeAnn Rimes and Toni Braxton to fame.

This is not a post about power and diversity in the music industry. It is, however, a suggestion that perhaps critics and tastemakers are biased in their preferences in a somewhat homogenous way. Is the Rolling Stone list better or worse than the Billboard list? It depends who you ask. But it's definitely less broad and more reflective of a particular perspective on what makes good music.

There are really interesting questions inherent in the difference between these two lists and how we arbitrate taste in pop culture as consumers, as artists, as industry professionals, and as critics. I'm hopeful that our little prototype can help us discuss these questions with visitors at the Experience Music Project.

Ultimately, "audience versus expert" may be a red herring that distracts from a larger discussion about personal preference and cultural bias. One of the surprises of Click! was the outcome that the top 10 photographs did not diverge widely based on evaluator expertise. Five of the top ten photographs were top picks for people from at least four different levels of expertise, and all the top ten were selected by people with at least two different levels of expertise. As Wisdom of the Crowds author James Surowieckinoted, "it suggests (though it doesn’t prove) that at least in some mediums, the gap between popular and elite taste may be smaller than we think."

And maybe there are other gaps that are worth exploring.

Please Don't Send Me to My Personal Webpage

Yesterday, I visited the Experimentarium, a science center just north of Copenhagen in Denmark. There were many intriguing exhibits and a novel cellphone game (more on that in another post), but I was particularly interested in their new special exhibition on the brain. This exhibition uses RFID tags to allow visitors to save their work throughout the space--something that many institutions have been experimenting with for almost ten years now. And while the Brain exhibition has some qualities that were significantly improved over other RFID-enabled exhibitions (better scanning of the tags, more content-rich personalized welcome screens, effective timeouts if you walked away, a semi-useful group option to accommodate families), it offered an output mechanism that is dated and downright frustrating: the personal webpage.

Many institutions that are pursuing online/onsite experience connections have lighted on the personal webpage as THE way to deliver post-visit experiences. Here's the basic idea: while you are at the museum, you save digitizable content--either content you make (photos of yourself) or content you collect (museum-supplied text or media of interest). When you get home, you type a long code into a web browser or receive an email with a link. Go to that link, and you will find a custom webpage featuring all of the assets you saved or made onsite.

The personal webpage has many adherents, and some institutions, like The Tech Museum in San Jose, have been offering them for almost a decade. There are some obvious positives to this strategy. It provides visitors with a "special place" for their content, which is both highly customized to their experience and out of view from other visitors to the museum's website. But these positives are outweighed by a glaring negative: these personal webpages are (usually) an experiential dead end. They provide the bare bones of what you've created in a totally decontextualized way, outside the infrastructure of other institutional digital content and outside the social context of other visitors. These pages often look barren. They don't live in an ecosystem of other experiences. They display the assets you've created and beyond that, nothing but a link to the institution's main website.

This makes for a very low-engagement post-visit experience. For example, check out this personal webpage I produced with my partner, Sibley, at the Experimentarium yesterday. We swiped our RFID tags all over the Brain exhibition to save our actions, scores, and preferences. We spent time on a digital profile-building activity that required us to enter many fields, including name, age, gender, and four screens of subjective questions about how we think (so much that our friend Nynne didn't do it because it was taking so long). Given all of the time commitment we were asked to put into the tag system onsite, I assumed that when we got home, we'd get some kind of personal profile that showed what we'd done, how it mapped to our profiles and our behavior relative to each other or other visitors to date.

Instead, we each got a basic set of text recommendations to cultivate our brains, against a psychedelic background that provides links to the exhibition's webpage but no substantial ties between our experience and the exhibition content, or even with each other. In some cases, we were provided with the same results we saw onsite (Sibley's time in a learning curve activity... not sure what happened to mine), but onsite, we were able to explore that data relative to other visitors to date, whereas the webpage just provides a static image. At the bottom of the page, there's an option to "remove my personal data" (please don't click this) - and I found myself staring at it semi-incredulous that this impersonal website had anything to do with the data I had generated onsite.

I will not be using this webpage to dig deeper. I will not be coming back to it for more in the future. While it has generated a single click from an email to the web (and many more clicks if you check it out), it has not sent me down the road towards a deeper relationship with the content, the exhibition, or the institution. It didn't even let Sibley and I laugh at how we compared to each other! It's an outpost for some cheap content, and that's immediately obvious to me when I get there.

The Tech's system is barely better in what is provided, offering a glimpse into the actual exhibits you visited and the content (mostly photos) you took onsite. But again, this content is not connected either to more content nor to other visitors. I'd love to see my thermal camera shot in a gallery of many thermal camera shots, and learn from how other visitors used the camera to generate strange images. Instead, I just get my narcissistic output, which may be a reasonable souvenir but is little else.

How can museums improve on this personal webpage strategy?
Contextualize the output with more content. There are some museums which, instead of giving you your content on a bare webpage, create an "account" for you on a more dynamic and content-rich site. The US Holocaust Memorial Museum's Take Action website does this. Associated with a small exhibition on genocide in which visitors can make personal pledges (extensive coverage here) that are digitally tracked, the website allows visitors to "log in" with their pledge number to access custom content--but that content is layered into the multi-media site rather than living in a barren online outpost. This means that visitors are encouraged to keep exploring the rich content on the site related to genocide, rather than checking out their creations and then closing the page.

Contextualize the output socially. It's perhaps even better (and cheaper) to wrap visitors' digital creations in a social enviroment than to do so with authoritative content. You don't even need your own platform to do this. Exhibits that produce content that goes to social websites like YouTube or Flickr are automatically presented in relation to other visitors' productions. When you make a video in the Mattress Factory's iConfess booth, it shows up on the iConfess YouTube channel. When you augment a photo in the Chicago History Museum's Get Lincolnized! system, your image becomes part of a Flickr stream. This allows each visitor to see her actions in the context of what others have done, and to become part of a light "community" of participants.

The Holocaust Museum's Take Action website incorporates this social context with a digital display allowing online and onsite visitors to browse pledges made and see their own words amongst those of others. Particularly for activities that emphasize the collective power of many individuals working toward the same goal, showing how each visitor's action is connected to the larger effort is essential.

Finally, if visitors are saving their activities in competitive environments like games, being able to see your score relative to others--either in your party or overall--is incredibly engaging. Imagine the return visit potential if the institution could automatically send visitors online alerts that someone else has bumped their top score off the chart, or if it challenged dad to try a comeback game against mom next month.

Motivate further active engagement. Remember, the people who chose to produce content onsite--to track themselves, to play games, to make pledges, to mess with their photos--were drawn specifically to active participatory experiences. They may not be the same people who are driven to read or consume lots of authoritative content on a topic. And so while some may appreciate deeper content experiences based on their initial entries, more may seek further ways to actively engage with the institution. If visitors make stop-motion animations at the museum and come back to the web to view them, why not provide a tool or links to places where you can make really complex animation products (which can also then be shared with the visitor community)? If visitors make pledges to reduce waste or stop genocide, why not provide more activities for them to do and ways to track them? I worked with the Boston Children's Museum on a project called Our Green Trail (check it out!) that encourages visitors who play games at the museum related to green behaviors to keep doing those behaviors and playing associated games online in a social virtual world. In this way, Our Green Trail tries to keep people motivated and focused on the activities that initially attracted them while opening up more and more content and social experiences to fuel continued action, in their own lives and on museum visits.


What online/onsite connections have you seen that work particularly well or poorly? What do you want from the digital component to your next cultural experience?

Designing Talkback Platforms for Different Dialogic Goals

"Where were you last night?"

If someone asked you that question, how would you answer? Answers will differ depending on who's asking, but they are also influenced by the designed environment in which questions are asked. People answer questions differently in harshly lit interrogation rooms than they do in welcoming therapists' offices or in the privacy of their own computer terminals. We have different conversations on the phone than we do in person or in internet chat rooms. The outcome of our conversations is dependent on the diversity of designed environments in which they occur.

If you want to design opportunities for visitors or users to respond to questions or engage in conversation, you need to think not only about what you want to ask visitors but how you will design conditions that are conducive to the types of answers that interest you. I'm not talking about guiding content; I'm talking about guiding form. If someone asks you a question on Twitter, you can only respond with 140 characters. We don't have the same limitations when designing talkback stations and other physical platforms for conversation, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't intentionally design the conversational tools offered. Many institutions do this unintentionally--by providing post-its or comment books, pens or crayons. Each design choice impacts the amount of thought and efforts visitors will put into their responses and the extent to which they will stay on-topic or proactively build on other visitors' arguments.

Here are a few design rules I use to think about what kinds of designed dialogue environments are right for different experience goals. I encourage you to share your own rules and thoughts on this in the comments.

If your goal is to encourage visitors to perceive themselves as partners in the content co-creation experience, make room for their thoughts sooner rather than later.

You don't need an entire gallery to frame a social question, but you do need to think about how the question or questions will be designed into the experience for maximum impact. The most common placement for questions is at the end of content labels and the end of exhibitions, but this location is by no means the most effective. Positioning questions at the end of labels accentuates the perception that they are rhetorical, or worse, afterthoughts. Similarly, making the only space for dialogue at the end of an exhibition ignores the thoughts that visitors brought with them into the experience or had along the way. If you are hoping for visitors to discuss their responses to questions with each other, or to share their answers with the institution, you can't end with the question; you need to provide several opportunities for questions and responses.

If your goal is to encourage visitors to share complex, personal responses to questions, consider offering private booths and progressive questions for visitor responses.

This technique was used in the Slavery in New York exhibition at the New-York Historical Society and continues in the popular StoryCorps project. When you want visitors to spend a long time reflecting and sharing their thoughts, you need to design spaces for response that are comfortable and minimize distractions. In the case of Slavery in New York, the end of the exhibition featured a story-capture station at which visitors could record video responses to a series of four questions about their reactions to the exhibition. The story capture experience averaged ten minutes, with visitors being given four minutes to respond to each personal, relatively imprecise question about how the exhibition affected the them. Richard Rabinowitz, curator of exhibition, noted that the progressive nature of the questions yielded increasingly complex responses, and that "it was typically in response to the third or fourth question that visitors, now warmed up, typically began relating the exhibition to their previous knowledge and experience." A lone "What do you think?" question station is not necessarily enough to elicit the rich personal reactions visitors might have to exhibitions. Rabinowitz commented that "as a 40-year veteran of history museum interpretation, I can say that I never learned so much from and about visitors." It was the lengthy progressive response process that turned what is often a series of brief and banal comments into a rich archive of visitor experience.

If you feel that your audience needs monitoring or social support, position the talkback stations in open settings.

This is the opposite situation of the previous design goal, one typical in science and children's museums. Placing feedback stations in the open lowers the probability of socially inappropriate behavior, and it also allows parents and teachers to help struggling visitors answer the questions at hand. There was a wonderful example at the Ontario Science Center in their Hot Zone area, which features several voting and commenting kiosks popular with teens. There was one kiosk in particular that was drawing several inappropriate comments, until it was moved from a corner into an open space close to the entrance to the women's bathroom. In its new location, under the watchful eyes of moms and other visitors, the inappropriate behavior diminished.

If your goal is to motivate dialogue between visitors and objects, questions and answer stations should be as proximate to the objects of interest as possible.

Visitors can speak more comfortably and richly about objects that they are looking at than objects they saw 30 minutes earlier in the exhibition. In many cases, visitors encounter talkback opportunities so infrequently throughout a visit that they seize on those opportunities to share many off-topic thoughts about their overall experience. This can frustrate museum staff, who wonder why the visitors are straying so far from the question posed. The more frequent explicit talkback opportunities are, and the more tightly and consistently connected to specific exhibits, the more visitors will focus on the experience at hand.

If you want to invite a wide range of visitors to respond to questions, it is best to design them into a context where visitor responses are of comparable aesthetics to the "official" museum content in the exhibition.

If a label is printed beautifully on plexiglass and visitors are expected to write responses in crayon on post-its, visitors may feel that their contributions are not valued or respected, and may respond accordingly. One of the things that makes the visitor stories contributed in the Denver Art Museum's Side Trip exhibition so compelling and on-topic is a design approach that elevates visitors' responses to comparable footing with the predesigned content. The vast majority of the signage in Side Trip was handwritten in pen on ripped cardboard, which meant that visitors' contributions (pen on paper) looked consistent in the context of the exhibition. The image at the top of this post is from one of their simple visitor feedback interactives which was built into a familiar, casual rolodex. By simplifying and personalizing the design technique used for the institutional voice, visitors felt like they were part of a natural conversation with the institution.

If you want visitors to answer questions collaboratively, whether in real-time or in a distributed manner, make sure your question and answer structure clearly supports visitors building on each other's ideas.

Unfortunately, most talk back walls don't support the grouping of visitor contributions or attempt to encourage conversational threads to develop. The Signtific game does this virtually by encouraging players to respond to each other by "following up" on other players' entries. But you could easily imagine doing something similar in physical space, either by using different color paper or pens for different types of questions and responses, or by explicitly encouraging visitors to comment on each other's responses or group their thoughts with like-minded (or opposing) visitor contributions.

If you want visitors to consume and enter in dialogue each other's responses, make sure that the visitors' answers are displayed in locations that makes them most useful to others.

A colleague recently called me to discuss an idea for a low-tech recommendation engine in which visitors could mark places on paper museum maps that might be of interest to other visitors like them. We talked about the fact that while visitors were most likely to be able to generate their maps of recommended spots as they walked through the institution, the completed maps would be of most value to subsequent visitors on their way into the museum rather than the way out. In this case, we talked about placing a large physical map of recommendations in the lobby rather than at the "end" of the experience, where visitor feedback often lives. This may sound obvious, but I think we often think about the creators and consumers of visitors' content as being the same people, whereas they are often visitors at different stages of their experiences with different needs.

What design techniques do you use to create successful visitor dialogue experiences? What have you seen work well, and what have you seen fail?

Technology for Experience's Sake: Guest Post by Bruce Wyman

In this guest post, Bruce Wyman, Director of Technology at the Denver Art Museum, shares his process for developing interactive technologies to extend familiar experiences in art museums. You may remember the Denver Art Museum from this post about their newest (highly interactive) exhibit space, Side Trip.

It's a running joke at the museum that I'm frequently the person in the room that doesn't advocate for the very things that I'm responsible for (technology). It's not that I don't firmly believe in the power and potential of what technology has to offer, it's just that so often it's a red herring when we're designing experiences for our visitors. I want the technology to disappear. I want the visitor to have an amazing experience in general at the museum, and not leave thinking some piece of technology was the thing that stood out. More often than not, if the technology is memorable, it's usually in a negative way -- something didn't work as expected.

So, let's make it easy on ourselves and start off by largely ignoring the technologies that we could be using. Frankly, visitors frequently don't care about the technology and I agree with them. Give them something rewarding, some meaty bit of fun and engagement and concentrate on designing what that experience could and should be. Once you get a good sense of that, the technology begins to fall into place and you stumble across new kinds of experiences that have the power to delight the visitor and probably more efficiently serve your original goals.

Of the different sorts of things that we've design at the Denver Art Museum during the last five years, it's unusual that I have a particular technology in mind at the outset (I'm sure someone could easily call me out on that, but let's pretend together, shall we?). Our standard practice is to deliberately ignore the possible implementation and tease out the details of what will make the experience compelling for the visitor. If we're going to show a video, how is that different? What will make the video compelling? Is there a particular *kind* of interaction that's important to satisfy the experience? etc.

At some point, as you begin to think about how visitors might interact with whatever your experience could be, you start to draw on real world analogies and natural patterns of behavior and interaction begin to emerge. The real world doesn't always have the *best* interactions, but it is filled with interactions that people already know and understand. The critical behavior in making the shift to designing in concert with these interactions is to get in the habit of just watching people all around you and how they engage with the rest of the world.

Let's consider a quick possible scenario. I work at an art museum and one of my long term desires is to know what works a visitor finds interesting without having to deliberately make them punch a button or use some piece of technology that interferes with a visitor's rapt
attention with our artworks. In this theoretical situation, my simple interaction goal is to concentrate on the *capture* of information rather than delivering something back to the visitor. I'm simply trying to find a clean way to judge visitor interest.

When I'm a visitor, if I'm interested in sharing something with a friend, I might point at it. If I'm walking around in an art gallery, I'll pause in front of work that interests me. If I'm really interested, I'll lean in or get closer to the ubiquitous tiny label nearby to read a spot of info. Those are all things people already know how to do and have been doing for thousands of years (in the latter example, the thousands of years that art museums have existed, certainly). So, without even having considered the eventual technology application, I've determined that I'm interested in tracking a visitor's location, proximity to known objects, and time spent in a location. I can then begin to consider ways to do that -- vision tracking, possibly sensing a handheld the visitor may be using to gather information, or RFID tracking a membership card on their person. Given privacy concerns, I'm not sure that I actually want to do any of those, but the important part of the process is that I'm defining an eventual solution by the visitors and their interactions, not from the starting point of specific technologies we want to implement.

The Select-A-Chat in our Western Galleries had an interesting evolution. The final implementation is essentially a small theater space in our galleries. As you enter the area, there's a wall projection resting on our jauntily angled interior walls. Next to you is a comfortable sofa and a coffee table in front of it. The top of the table has a graphic depicting a number of artworks from the nearby galleries with different interview questions superimposed. To select a particular topic, there's a coaster-sized metal 'X' that the visitor places on the table. Simply, the whole interaction is described in one sentence: "X marks the spot." If you want a more detailed tour of the Select-a-Chat, check out this video.

The goal of the experience was to interview selected artists and give visitors some insight to their efforts and process. We wanted artists that felt very human and dispelled the idea that the creative process was a magical one but rather took real effort with some days being great, others not so much. The real strength of the overall interactive is the videos themselves, so we recognized early on that we wanted a relaxed environment where the process of choosing the videos largely disappeared for the visitor.

With these ideas in mind, it became substantially easier to brainstorm different approaches to how we might achieve a simplified end result. In an early iteration, we imagined something very direct -- giving voice to the artist -- in which the table would be more akin to an old telephone operator switch board. The different artists would have headphone jacks for mouths and you'd plug directly into the display. Moving on from that, but still with the same idea, we imagined a large set of fabricated lips as being the object moved around on the table. We quickly moved on when we started to imagine the mockups of photoshopped artist faces without mouths and were left with a decidedly unsettling image. The metal 'X' was a response in trying to step back to what the actual mechanism was, but by that point, we had a good idea that the general interaction was right.

Our visitor testing satisfaction surveys support our belief that the experience works well. People find the experience easy to use and at the same time, we've added a little bit of magic to the interface. The visitor *can't* do anything wrong -- if the 'X' is on the table, the experience works. It's easy to figure out and if you watch someone else do it, you learn what to do in an instant.

On a slightly different note, while we spent a lot of time thinking about the experience before getting to the technology, having a solid understanding of our goal let us think through a few permutations of how to implement the technology. At one point, we'd abstracted the interaction design so far that we considered using the building's new security system. The same system is in use at airports around the world and is particularly good at detecting potential terrorist threats -- the system is able to detect a piece of unattended luggage left in a terminal after a certain amount of time. When that happens, the system triggers a video feed in a central control room. Our problem was the same; an object left in a location (an 'X' on the table) triggers a video feed (different artist videos). We ultimately developed an alternative solution when it became apparent the cameras wouldn't have the resolution or view that we required.

Our visitors have responded well to this approach in our technology design. Not only with the Select-A-Chat, but our visitor surveys in general indicate that the Denver Art Museum's interactive components are easy to use, effective, and enjoyable. We don't always get it right the first time, and we've had to accept that, but we do believe in an iterative approach based on what we learn over time. Even better, from an internal point of view, we accept technology as part of the visitor experience and not as a competitive element that happens at the exclusion of other parts of the visitor experience.

Querying the Environment: A Smart Model for Pull Content

In my continuing quest to find elegant ways to integrate technology into the museum experience, we come to interpretative material and the simple question, "How can you create natural ways for visitors to retrieve the information of most interest to them relative to an artifact or exhibit?"

Here's one lovely answer: Meta.L.Hyttan. This project in Avesta, Sweden, in which visitors use special flashlights to explore a historic site and reveal interpretative content of interest, is an elegant example of how museums can innovative the label experience.

First, a little explanation about "pull" content techniques. Pull techniques invite visitors to actively retrieve content of interest, rather than consuming content "pushed" indiscriminately by the museum. "Pull" techniques don't just allow multiplicity of content; they also emphasize the visitors' active role in seeking out information. Of course, visitors are always somewhat active in their pursuit of interpretation--they decide whether or not to read the label, whether or not to watch the video, whether or not to click into the interactive. But requiring visitors to take a physical action to retrieve interpretative material imparts a certain power to visitors--they choose what to reveal, not just what to look at. It's not surprising that research has shown that information retrieved via "pull" techniques is retained better than that which is pushed. You may not remember what your teacher lectured about, but you probably do remember the answer she gave you to a question of particular interest.

The most familiar pull learning tool we use daily is Google. It's certainly possible to plunk a computer into the gallery and let people google to their hearts' content, but that activity doesn't fit naturally into the flow of museum-going. Nor does hitting different buttons on an audio guide or even a cellphone feel entirely natural in the context of the physical and visual exploration of exhibits. The technology distracts and breaks a bit of the power of the museum experience. And while I believe in letting people use their own technology (i.e. their phones) to access information, I think there's potential for other kinds of devices and environmental interactions to add value in a way that enhances, rather than detracts from, museum-ness.

Which brings us back to Sweden. In 2004, the firm Smart Studio created a unique flashlight-based interpretative interface for exploration of a historic blast furnace site in the old Swedish steel town of Avesta. The site itself has no interpretative material--no labels or obvious media elements. But each visitor is given a special flashlight, used both to illuminate the space (for general exploration) and to activate interpretative experiences include light projection, sound, and occasional physical experiences (i.e. smoke and heat). There are indicated hotspots in the site which activate interpretative material when the flashlights light on them. Smart Studio launched with two layers of content in the hotspots--educational (how the blast furnace works, explanation of certain elements and history) and poetic (imagistic stories from the perspective of steel workers, based on historical content). Visitors can walk through the blast furnace site and receive none of the interpretative material if they choose, or they can use their flashlights to activate content.

I love this project for several reasons:

• They used a technology that fits well conceptually and practically into the experience of exploring a historic site of this type. You use the flashlight to see the site, and you use the flashlight to see deeper, hidden layers of history as well. The metaphor is consistent and the object interaction is intuitive.
• The flashlights function in a magical, surprising way that stems naturally from their typical use. If you were given a crazy pointer and told to use it in this way, it would not be as surprising or exciting as this new "activation" of a familiar object. This gives the sense that there is something magical and unusual happening at the historic site, giving it an aura of mystery and enhancing the uniqueness of the experience.
  
• The minimal intervention of the interpretative material allows purists to experience the site without additional media elements if they so choose.
• Unlike an audio tour, the light-based interpretative material can be shared socially. A family could explore the space together and use flashlights to "show" new content to each other.
• The act of illuminating the interpretative material gives visitors the sense of personal agency in the discovery and exploration of history. Again, the flashlight metaphor evokes the experience of other explorers and archaeologists, and lets visitors play at uncovering history. But they are also in control of the content experience, revealing stories on demand.
• The infrastructure can support a layered, changing set of content pieces. In their original proposal, Smart Studio alluded to this potential for multiple languages and interpretative contexts, but I'm not sure whether they have pursued it and added additional interpretative material over time.

You don't need a device like a flashlight to design elegant pull interfaces. But you do need an understanding of how people conceptually think of themselves when visiting museums. How can you create an environment or an object that invites visitors naturally to pull more content? What is the physical manifestation of "googling" in your museum?

Diamond-Encrusted Skull Spawns Video Feedback Interactive: News at 11

In December, I saw Damien Hirst’s piece For the Love of God while it was exhibited at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. It’s a platinum-cast skull encrusted with over 1100 carats of diamonds: a hype machine in death’s clothing. Advertisements for the skull blanketed Amsterdam, and other museums even tried to get in on the buzz generated by its presentation. Entering the exhibit involved standing in line in galleries full of Dutch masterpieces (mostly ignored) and then emerging into a dark room with guards and the skull terrifically lit in the center. You weren’t sure how much time you were supposed to spend with the object or what to get out of it. There was no interpretative content in the room, and you were not allowed to take pictures. I walked in, self-consciously watched myself watching other people watching the skull, then walked out.

The reason I’m writing about For the Love Of God is not the skull but the post-visit feedback interactive that accompanied it. At the physical museum, visitors who wished to provide feedback on the skull were instructed to leave the building and walk into a temporary structure that served as both a For the Love of God gift shop and feedback environment. The feedback stations themselves were little closed booths where you could record a video with your opinion about the skull.

By positioning the feedback stations outside the flow of the museum (and within a solely skull-branded structure), the resultant videos were more topical and focused than museum standard. But the thing that makes this project stand out is the way these videos are shared on the Web. They are displayed on the For the Love of God website, which was created for the museum by an outside vendor, skipintro. The format is reminiscent of Jonathan Harris’ We Feel Fine project, allowing users to view the videos by country of origin, gender, age, and some key concepts (love it/hate it, think it’s art/think it's hype). The videos were automatically chromakeyed (i.e. masked or cropped) so that each person appears as a floating head, which creates an eerie, appealing visual consistency. The browsing experience is somewhat clunky and the filters are not always accurate, but the overall website is impressive in its display and aggregation of videos. Note that not all of the recorded videos were used on the website; videos were culled for volume, and "harsh and insulting" ones were removed.

This is the first attempt I’ve seen to meaningfully aggregate visitor feedback videos and present them in a way that is consistent with the rest of the exhibit experience. It’s no coincidence that Hirst is known for art that aggressively courts and plays with hype. The visitors' videos on the website are couched in self-conciousness buzz, with a welcome screen informing you that, “never before has a work of art provoked as much dialogue as Damien Hirst’s ‘For the Love of God.’” Oh really? Never?

Whether true or not, the website implies that the visitors’ videos are a justification for this claim, a demonstration of the rich dialogue supposedly surrounding this skull. In this way, the visitors’ videos are integrated into the larger art piece and are arguably as much a part of the skull experience as the posters, the lines, and the guards. The existence of controversy is part of the intentional setting of the skull, and so visitors are encouraged to talk.

Are visitors’ reactions really proof of dialogue or controversy? No. But I'm enthused by the suggestion that feedback stations needn't be just an add-on to pander to visitors, but instead, a supporting framework for the overall goals of the exhibit. If you are creating an exhibition about controversy, how are you promoting controversial actions and reactions by visitors? If you are creating an exhibition about democracy, how do you encourage visitors to behave democratically during their visit? How can you create participatory elements that support your overall exhibit goals?

Unfortunately, you can't look to the For the Love of God website for a perfect answer. The interface is lovely and portrays the videos in an artistic way, but the content doesn't convey dialogue or controversy. The visitor videos are interesting for several reasons—the range of languages spoken, the presentation of the floating heads, opinions expressed about one singular piece of art rather than general commentary on the museum visit--but they are fundamentally individual, discontinuous sound bites. They are grouped, but they aren't threaded or placed head-to-head in a way that would convey dialogue. From the perspective of the hierarchy of participation, For the Love of God, like Free2Choose, straddles the barrier between level 3 and level 4. It has some "me-to-we" elements, since each person's video ("me") is aggregated into various filtered "we" groups, but there is no way for an individual to connect with anyone else, to comment on their video, see what else they've said, or express their support or lack thereof for the opinion expressed.

The result is an overall viewer experience of dislocated, strange beauty, not discussion about art. If the designers had really wanted to promote the dialogue around the skull, they might have created feedback stations that required visitors to interview each other, or answer questions posed by other visitor videos. Instead, they created a prettier visualization of the same old system.

I'm still waiting for the video feedback system that truly encourages visitors to engage with each other by curating and commenting on each other's videos, let alone recording videos in reference to each other. For the Love of God is an attractive website that values visitor feedback as part of the meaning-making around a piece of art. But provoking dialogue? We’ve still got a long way to go.

Free2choose and the Social Dimension of Polling Interactives

Early in the life of this blog, I stumbled into a taxonomy of how social platforms work that I call the hierarchy of participation. The hierarchy comprises five levels, shown above, from passive consumption of content (level one) to collective social engagement (level five). I’ve argued that you can only achieve level five engagement by moving “through” the intermediate levels. This post provides a tangible example for the why behind that argument.

When I talk about the hierarchy, I use the theoretical construct of an issue-based museum exhibit. At level one, the museum preaches to visitors about the issue. At level two, the visitor has some interactive experience (pushing buttons, etc.) with the issue. At level three, the visitor is polled about the issue and sees her result compared to the cumulative aggregate. At level four, the visitor has some awareness of how other distinct visitors respond to the issue and can access their comments and opinions. At level five, the visitors start discussing the issue together.

Last week, I visited a museum with an exhibition that powerfully illustrated the barriers that prevent people from jumping from level three to level five. It is a small exhibition called Free2choose at the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

Free2choose is a very simple exhibition. It is one room, with a long, semi-circular bench with cushions and room for about 30 people to comfortably sit and stand. Every few feet on the bench, there is a small box about the size of a lightswitch with two buttons on it, one red and one green. The visitors on the bench face a large projection screen. The screen plays an interactive show that invites visitors to vote on a variety of issues related to human rights. The setup is always the same. A one-minute video clip presents the issue (for example, whether students should be allowed to wear headscarves to school). Then, a screen pops up with a statement like “Students should be allowed to wear religious symbols in school.” Visitors see a ticking countdown and are told to vote by pressing either the green or red button on one of the small boxes. Green indicates yes, red, no. At the end of the voting countdown, the results are shown, both for “Visitors Now” and for “All Visitors.”

Free2choose is a walk-in exhibition—visitors can freely enter and leave at any time. Each issue takes about 90 seconds between the setup video and the voting, and the entire loop takes about 20 minutes. I spent over an hour in Free2choose on a Sunday afternoon, and while it was not as busy as the rest of the museum, it had 20 to 40 occupants at any time. People stayed through several topics, many as long as ten minutes. The show content was compelling, but the voting was what really energized people.

What did people like so much about the voting? Pressing the buttons was not particularly thrilling, and I never saw kids playing the usual bang-on-the-buttons game. The thing people liked was seeing the results. Every issue cycle was the same: visitors would watch the video in silence, and then as soon as the voting opened, a murmur of conversation would run through the room. It increased to a loud buzz when the results were displayed, and then cut off when the next issue video began.

What's so interesting about the results? When you take a poll alone, there’s no suspense about how you voted. I vote yes for headscarves, and then I see that 65% of other visitors over time agreed with me. But Free2choose was more like being part of a deliberating jury than acting as a solo judge. In Free2choose, I voted yes for headscarves, saw that 65% of all visitors agreed with me, but also saw that only 40% of the people currently in the room agreed with me. When the results of the room differed greatly from those of “All Visitors,” the surprise was audible. I was in one group where 100% of us voted that Protestants should be able to parade through Catholic areas in Northern Ireland, and we looked around with wonder and complicity when we saw that only 60% of “All Visitors” agreed with us. Every group was different, so every outcome was different.

Free2choose is powerful because it introduces social tension. When I voted in the minority, I felt that I was in the minority not just conceptually but physically, in that crowd, in that moment. Because the room was often full, I found myself looking for people “like me" in the crowd. But I had no way to identify them in the faceless group of button-pushers.

And that’s where the social dimension of Free2choose is limited. There is no component to the exhibition that highlights the specific selections made by individuals in the room, and no vehicle to incite conversation among differing groups. Yes, there was lots of talking in that room—but only in whispers among familiars. At one point, I was standing next to a group of British people who voted that flag-burning should be illegal. I had voted the opposite. We were standing close enough—a few inches apart—that I could “spy” on them as they hit the button, but I was not comfortable asking them about it or having a discussion about why.

Right now, Free2choose is a game that illuminates diversity of opinion on tough issues. But it could go further. It could become a game that encourages people to talk with each other about these issues. There are many ways that the game could do this:

• Voting could be (more) public. There could be spotlights in the ceiling that would illuminate different areas of the room in different colors of light corresponding to those who had selected red or green when the results are shown.
• Instead of voting in place, visitors could be directed to vote by moving to one side of the room or another.
• After the results are up, the screen could instruct visitors to find someone in the room who voted differently from them, or just to ask their neighbor what they think about the issue and or the results.
• The game could instruct people to share voting stations and to use a brief discussion to come to a consensus vote. As it was, there were too few stations and people awkwardly looked on as others used them.

There are many other options. They aren’t hard to implement and they needn’t dramatically change the exhibition, but they could dramatically change the social experience. Free2choose is a perfect example of the limits of a level three experience. Even though you are densely packed in a room with other people expressing your opinions about important issues, you don’t turn to your neighbor and start talking. The social stigma is too great, and the tools don’t help you cross those barriers. You vote and see the results (level 3), but the voting mechanism is not a social object that mediates and motivates engagement with others (level 4). And so, even though you are all together in the same room, grappling with tough issues, you will never launch into group discourse (level 5).

Not all people would want to go to the next level and have a conversation with strangers, but it was clear that people did want to talk about the results (based on their conversations with companions) and were absorbed by the overall experience. And in an international city like Amsterdam, in a museum focused on one girl's extreme story that has touched the whole world, it seems to me there is an enormous opportunity to go to the next level and facilitate cross-cultural discussion. Why do you oppose flag-burning? How is it related to your nationality, your age, your gender, your experience? I was aching to ask these questions. It would have made for an extraordinary and unique museum experience in line with the overall mission of the Anne Frank House.

As it stands, I had an interesting time comparing the results from different groups in my head. But I didn’t understand why those groups were different, and I didn’t gain more insight about how different people think about complicated issues related to human rights. I wanted more than just a fun interactive—I wanted to understand the other people in the room. And I don’t think I was alone in that feeling. Perhaps we should have put it to a vote.

Chatbots and Non Player Characters as Instigators for Visitor Feedback and Reflection

How do you get a good story out of someone? I've come back to this question again and again. Whether you want memories or insights, offer comment books or touchscreens, it's hard to design ways to invite meaningful visitor submissions. Finding great questions to ask can help. So does making the output significant in terms of display and usage. Most of all, you need great listeners. And this week, I had an aha moment about a designed listening technique: conversations with computers.

We all know that direct verbal communication is a powerful way to get feedback. The problems are scale and comfort. You can't talk to everyone, and not everyone feels comfortable talking to you. The fabulous Storycorps project partially sidesteps these problems by requiring participants to bring their own conversation partner to the booths in which they record life stories. The facilitator is functionally another visitor, one with whom the participant is not only willing but eager to speak.

But Storycorps still requires facilitators, and it asks a lot of its participants. What if there was a way to have a one-on-one conversation without ANY other human--staff, friend, or otherwise? Could a computer be a good conversationalist?

This week in the Mind exhibition at the Exploratorium, I met D.A.I.S.Y., an artificially intelligent chatbot. Daisy is a computer program designed to mimic human verbal communication that lets you have a text-based “conversation” with a machine.

You've probably seen Daisy or something like her before. You type and the computer answers. Daisy learns new words and syntax with every interaction, but the computer program can be reset to "newborn," so her learning is bumpy. The experience of text chatting with Daisy is chaotic and her speech is often nonsensical.

But despite her incoherencies, Daisy evokes an emotional response. Visitors relate to her--or try to. As one of the evaluators commented, visitors want to make meaning out of their interactions with Daisy. Visitors interact with her over several lines of text even though they're getting little back content-wise.

"Jeez!" I thought. If visitors will spend ten minutes chatting with an inane computer program, why don't they spend as much time at the talkback station? Why do they just type "I like cheese" at the talkback and then run away to talk more with Daisy?

Because the talkback station doesn't listen. Daisy may not be complex, but she's highly responsive. She wants to understand you, and you want to help her understand. This is what separates Daisy from all the instructional graphics and "What do YOU thinks?" we can put on screens. She makes you feel like she actually cares what you think. And that makes you feel listened to, and makes you want to speak. A good listener isn't someone who knows all the words (or even how to put them into complete sentences). A good listener is someone who focuses on you and your words. And that's Daisy's whole reason for being.

How do you make a listener like Daisy? Responsiveness is more important than complexity, no matter the venue. In the gaming world, Daisy would be called a non-player character (NPC). NPCs are the trolls and wizards that roam through video games dispensing clues and forked paths. Interactions with NPCs often feel staged. You don't feel like your part of the conversation matters--it's just a vehicle for them to tell you about the crystal sword. Over time, game designers have tried to improve NPCs by making their linguistic skills more complex. But some of the best, most emotionally evocative NPCs are silent, simple creatures that express themselves solely in relation to you. A rock can more responsive than a photorealistic human if it rolls after you in just the right way.

And the things that make NPCs and chatbots emotionally engaging isn't all virtual. Some libraries employ dogs to sit and watch struggling readers intently as they work their way aloud through books. Why? Because they look like they're listening. They appear to care, and that's what matters. Ironically, some of the early chatbots were used to parody psychotherapists, repeating your statements as questions and asking to hear more. Cheaper than an hour on the couch and almost as useful.

Daisy has no physical representation beyond her words, so her language is all she has to make her seem fake or real. In a strange way, her nonsensical text makes her feel more human than a complex character with a range of stock phrases. You can't spot the gaffes where she didn't respond to your words precisely, since she never responds to your words precisely. It's always a little random, and that feels human too.

One of the Exploratorium designers explained that Daisy can be primed with a small vocabulary set that tends to focus her conversation around particular topics. In MIND, they've primed her with content around consciousness. But they could just as easily give her a vocabulary of words like museum, exhibit, and questions like "what do you think?"

It's sort of maddening talking to someone like Daisy. But she makes you care, makes you want to engage. And isn't that what we want for our visitors?

Interactive Comfort: Wading Deep

It’s one thing to experience and or be confronted by content that is uncomfortable, either in the form of an exhibition or a program. But what about interactive exhibits that give visitors active roles in the uncomfortable situation?

Two examples, both from science museums.

The first is Goosebumps! The Science of Fear, currently on display at the California Science Center. The exhibition starts with four interactive rooms in which you can confront your own fear: fear of creepy crawlies, fear of loud noises, fear of electric shock, and fear of falling. For me, terror resides in the creepy crawly room—not so much because I’m afraid of bugs, but because I’m afraid of the unknown, which they did a wonderful job conveying. Aquariums featured live dangerous spiders and snakes (not scary). The aquariums had thick black PVC tubes that appeared to lead from the animal enclosures to curtained troughs where you were expected to put your hand (very scary). There’s no explicit statement about what is behind the curtain, but the implication is that there are MORE tarantulas etc. lurking there—and the label told you to stick your hand in.

Heck. I’m a rational person. More than that, I’m a museum person—I KNOW they wouldn’t put real animals—dead or alive—behind a curtain and say “grab here”. And yet I was paralyzed by fear, unable to foroce myself to stick my hand inside the curtain. I started to feel stupid, then ashamed. Why wasn’t I willing to try what others did so easily? In the end, it was an experience that was uncomfortable, yet manageable. It left a strong impression, albeit one of partial humiliation.

Example two comes from the Exploratorium’s Mind exhibition, mentioned last week. In it, they have created a card game version of one of the Implicit Association Tests (IAT) in which people are instructed to match up four kinds of words: male names, female names, work-related words, and family-related words, with two categories. The first time, the categories are male/work and female/family. The second time, it’s male/family and female/work. In the Implicit Association Test, most people are shown to more quickly group male names with work and female names with family. It’s an uncomfortable truth about our hidden associations/stereotypes.

As I watched people race to sort cards into the right categories, I wondered why the Exploratorium chose the gender/work/family test instead of the most famous IAT, the Race Test. The Race Test, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, asks people to associate black and white faces with words related to good and evil. The unpleasant result is that most people, black and white, associate white more readily with good and black with evil.

Finding out that you associate women with family feels less icky than discovering that you associate black people with evil. (I won't go into the reasons...) Does that make it a more comfortable experience? Does it make it a less impactful one?


Visitors put their trust in us when they engage with an interactive. They expect to give us some time and their bodies, and expect that we will give them a good experience, something valuable in return. If we give them something disgusting, unsettling, or cruel, we start to lose their trust. Then again, I'd argue that few museums do that--at least not intentionally. Too often, we give them something dull, insubstantial, broken. We keep their trust that we will keep them safe, but not that we will keep them entertained.

What do interactives need to be risky yet safe?

Let people watch. Stepping into a secret, individual room can be uncomfortable on its own. In some cases, that's a good thing--unsettle, then amaze. But most of the time, it helps to put uncomfortable experiences in public locations where you can play voyeur before playing yourself. It helps you acclimate to the experience to watch someone else get shocked--even if you know it won't diminish the associated discomfort. (Interestingly, Goosebumps! switches this arrangement, putting the watching stations on the back side of the fear interactives, so people who have already gone through the interactives can watch. At that point, it becomes more performative, which is entertaining, but doesn't help newcomers to the interactives.)

Keep personal stuff private. There's a traveling race interactive, which I first saw at the American Visionary Art Museum, in which you take a photo of your face and then morph it into different races. It feels a little naughty, to giggle at yourself with stretched cheeks or overlarge eyes. But it's also instructive. And doing it behind a curtain, alone (or with your family) keeps you from feeling self-conscious about your self-interest. I think many people would be willing to engage in interactives about tough issues--money, stereotypes, sex--if they can interact in a personal, private way.

Provide an Escape Route. I love scary movies, but I never watch them at the theater. Why? Because at home, I can pause whenever I want, or even leave the room. While some interactives call for comfy chairs to ease you in, others call for quick potential getaways or pause buttons--so you can enjoy the intensity on your own terms, and walk away if you feel the need.


What interactive experiences have you had that crossed the line? What design criteria would you add to an uncomfortable interactive?

Performance Anxiety: Visitors and their Audience

I had a great conversation with Darcie Fohrman yesterday about visitor input exhibits like video kiosks. She told me an anecdote about an experience with the Stanford Art Museum exhibition, Question, which included a keyboard where visitors could type their own thoughts about art, to be projected on a wall along with quotes by famous people. One day while Darcie was observing, some kids took charge of the keyboard and started keying in some swear words. A guard stepped in to stop them--and then Darcie stepped in to pull back the guard and let the kids be.

This story highlights the existence of the audience for visitor input exhibits. Arguably, all exhibits are relational--you lifting the giant lever affects me as an observer and fellow visitor. But by displaying visitor content, visitor input exhibits take this relation to the next level. Who is the visitor input experience for? Is it for the inputter, who has the experience of recording their thoughts? Or is it for the inputtee, who sees those thoughts displayed? What is the relationship between visitors and their audiences?

My impression is that most such exhibits are designed to be inputter-focused. But the audience can't be ignored. At Stanford, the kids were the inputters/performers, and the guard was the audience--an audience who didn't like what s/he was seeing. Were the kids aware of their audience? Was the idea of other people seeing "Shit" projected on the wall part of its appeal? Or did they do it for themselves?

We're already comfortable with the idea that museum exhibit and program designers create content for an audience. That audience--our visitors--expects that museum content has been developed with them in mind. If the Stanford Art Museum had chosen to exhibit a quote from a famous person that included an expletive, the guard probably wouldn't have raised a complaint--he or she would have rationalized that the exhibit designers had a good reason for including the swear word.

But are visitors as audience-minded as we are? It depends. It's partially our choice. One of the design considerations when creating visitor input exhibits should be signaling who the audience is and how the input will be displayed, if at all. A video booth with signage that says, "Record your thoughts for our archives" might garner different submissions than one that says, "Record your thoughts for inclusion in this exhibit." This signaling may result in different content, or, more significantly, different users.

Some people are excited by the idea of performing for an audience; others get scared off. In museums, there's rarely clear signaling about how or where visitor input will be displayed, so the museum gets neither the positives of audience awareness (desire to do one's best and be "famous") nor those of the private experience (potentially more personal content). Perhaps designers should think about the kind of content they want to elicit, and whether a public or private display best accomodates that.

The Experience Music Project in Seattle is a great model for skillful use of both audience-centric and private visitor experiences. Creating music can be both a private and public experience, and they address both. I appreciated getting to be behind closed (sound-proofed) doors, banging away on instruments I didn't know how to play. Had I been recorded and broadcast, I would have put the drumsticks down. But I also enjoyed the sound stage where you could "perform" a song for a crowd. Sometimes you want to be famous. Sometimes you just want to be alone with your guitar.

Of course, even when signaled, different people interpret their own actions differently. This is a fascinating component of Web 2.0--the balance between public and private audiences. Is your MySpace page a vehicle to promote yourself to the world, or a personal place to communicate with friends? Is your Flickr page a handy place to store photos, or a public exposition of your travels and exploits?

We do a disservice to our visitors when we don't encourage them to consider these questions, to consider their own audiences. One of the things that makes YouTube successful is the overt presence of the public audience; it makes you aware that people are going to watch your content and judge it. It makes you feel like there are people out there who want your content--people you are doing this for. The same goes for blogging. I could be writing this for myself in a journal, but I'm sharing it with you instead. I'm thinking about you as I write this. I'm wondering how you'll react, where I got too long-winded, etc.

And that awareness, hopefully, makes my content more useful to you. If visitors were more aware that their input was being produced for an audience--whether online, in the collection, or in the museum--they might take the input experience a little more seriously, and spend less time just giggling at the webcam. Or, maybe they'd hijack the opportunity and use it to put on their own off-topic, inappropriate shows. Either way, the resulting content would be made FOR someone, not just by someone. The visitor experience wouldn't just be input--it would be an output experience as well. Instead of just using the exhibit, visitors would get a slice of what it's like to create an exhibit, on a small scale, for someone else. And when that happens, we can start honestly talking about visitors contributing to the museum experience.

Treasure Hunts, Tactile Domes, and Other Layered Beings

Last week, I met a woman named Ellen, an orthopedic surgeon, who hunts for treasure. I'm not kidding. She was telling me the story of how she ended up in Santa Cruz. She had a high stress job in clinical trials, and finally needed a break. She found a great opportunity to join a practice here in Santa Cruz, but first, she narrowly avoided a mid-life crisis by taking four months off to go treasure hunting.

At this point in the story, like most reasonable people, I stared. She was already talking about spine surgery and I had to go back. "What do you mean, treasure hunting?" It was as if I had finally met a real pirate.

Ellen explained that in 2005, when she quit her job, she discovered A Treasure's Trove, a children's book by Michael Stadther, in which fireflies and grasshoppers coexist with layered puzzles and mysteries. At first listen, the book sounded like a childhood favorite of mine, The Eleventh Hour, a lavishly illustrated whodunit riddled with ciphers and a solution in a sealed envelope.

But A Treasure's Trove is far more than an armchair adventure. When the book was released in November 2004, Stadther announced that he had placed 12 gold tokens--one for each creature in the book--in twelve locations throughout the U.S., and that each location was indicated in some way by the puzzles in the book. Since then, Ellen and tens of thousands of other treasure-seekers have engaged with A Treasure's Trove and its sequel, gallivanting all over the states looking for various tokens and symbols hinted at in the book. A few may do it for money (the treasures, when first found, are redeemable for valuable gems), but most do it as a way to bond as a family and take their love for puzzles on the road. Ellen, for example, connected with her gruff Korean father when they went on a wild expedition that involved a car breakdown, no jackets, and a lot of snow--but they overcame all their frustrations cracking puzzles into the night in a Motel 6. Similarly, in the bulletin boards and forums that have risen up around A Treasure's Trove, people tell stories of whole families devoting evenings to puzzles instead of TV, and spending vacations on some serious adventures. It's so wholesome I half-expected Ellen to morph into a Pound Puppy.

I was enraptured by her description, not because I wanted to revisit cryptography class, but because Ellen and thousands of others had been spurred into hours and hours of engagement by a single children's book. It was the most extensive, dedicated "post-visit" to a book I can imagine. It changed the way I think about narrative game design.

Here's the problem I see with museum-based narratives and games: people don't revisit exhibits the way they revisit games. When I get a new board game, I expect to play it many times (if it's any good). I expect it to take a couple tries before I have a handle on the basic game mechanics, and then I expect to keep enjoying it on repeat experiences. If it's a computer- or web-based game, I expect that there may be a narrative that keeps me coming back again and again to progress (even if that narrative is as simple as "save the princess" in Mario). If it's a book, I expect to move on to the next one in the series, or, to glumly accept that it's over and move on to other parts of the library.

Not so with museums. If an exhibit asked visitors to come back next week for level 2, it's highly unlikely they would ever see people progress through the ranks. This is even true of museum programs--in my experience, while you can certainly attract repeat program attendees, it's hard to fill programs that progress from 101 to 201; not enough people think of museums as places where the experience evolves over time. This is also a challenge for Web 2.0-style design integrating evolving visitor content--people aren't visiting the museum with enough frequency to be part of a meaningful dialogue happening there. Sure, they can offer a comment, but it's a one-off, not a continuing relationship or engagement.

And herein lies the beauty of A Treasure's Trove. All the content and the tools to unlock it are preexisting in a book. There's no gradual rollout of more complicated levels or additional puzzles. It's all right there from the beginning, and it's up to the reader to read in deeper and deeper to access more content. And readers have created their own structures outside the book to connect with one another and "continue the story" by sharing their own adventures. It's generously, delightfully cross-platform, and the core experience is fairly concise.

What if museum exhibits were designed this way--to encourage visitors not to see the new thing but to find more things in what they already saw (and to find those things both in and outside the museum)? I had a little of that experience last month at the Exploratorium in the Tactile Dome (a pitch-black walk-through dome), where, to my initial surprise, they let you go through several times in a row. Each time, you find something attached to the walls you didn't feel before. The base experience is short and simple, but there's complexity to uncover on successive trips through. Instead of creating an hour-long program that builds up to or begins with the Dome, the Dome itself is the hour-long program, iterated over and over. It's a very efficient way to use real estate and to engage visitors for a longer time.

Every time we found something new to us in the Tactile Dome, we were excited to tell everyone around, "hey! I found a broom." And then all these people would shuffle over in the dark to feel the broom. The darkness created layers of discovery that weren't present in the well-lit, well-labeled parts of the museum, where it seemed like everything was on display for easy access (and appeared to hold no mystery nor layers).

A few years ago at ASTC, some Exploratorium exhibit designers gave a talk on dos and don'ts of interactive design. One of the things that kept coming up was the idea that you need to make the "primary" phenomenon totally achievable and self-evident so that people don't get caught up in secondary, unintended phenomena. For example, if you have a big thing that spins and moves around some water (and the water is the "important" part), you want to make sure that spinning the big thing isn't so cool that it overwhelms the water's motion. This leads to confusion and to visitors feeling let down--"why did they just make a big thing to spin? I don't get it."

One solution to this problem is to streamline design to totally focus visitors on the primary phenomenon, concept being that visitors only approach exhibits expecting to learn or interact with one thing. I do it, I get it, I move on. But it doesn't have to be that way. I think we can design exhibits with clear primary objectives/elements and equally clear secondary, or deeper layer ones.

Of course, many exhibit designers might argue that this is how all good exhibits are--there are deeper, special kernels that can only be accessed and or appreciated over many visits and much reflection. Well, there may be lots of fascinating layers to a painting or a phenomenon, but if it's not clear to me how to start unlocking that content, I'm unlikely to dig deep enough. And these revelations still have to happen at the exhibit, in the museum. How can I keep unlocking the content once I'm back at home?

Many museums are working on using technology to personalize and connect various parts of the museum experience. Self-generated webpages, emails back to you from the museum--all these things are good, but the visitor response to them is often low. What if, instead of getting to mail home the content from the exhibit, you got to take home the secret parts, the parts you couldn't figure out or get to in the museum? What if an exhibit explicitly started a story, a mystery, or a discovery that was so compelling it sent you home thinking about the solution?

This relates to the question of "who owns the museum experience." Too often, we think about exhibits and programs in terms of outcomes instead of instigations. We ask, "what did you learn at the end?" rather than "what are you going to do with this information when you leave?" It's a good question. And maybe a mystery, a set of ancient museum coins hidden out in the world somewhere, is a good place to start.

What's the True Cost of Live Facilitation?

In honor of tomorrow’s book club post on Elaine Gurian’s essay, Free at Last, a preliminary post on the ecomonics of high quality interactive experiences.

I now reside next door to the most popular attraction in Santa Cruz County: the Mystery Spot. Spend enough time driving on the west coast, and you’ll see more of their yellow bumper stickers than I BRAKE FOR VEGANS. Every day, there are hundreds of cars waiting for the privilege to park in the Mystery Spot parking lot, filled with tourists waiting to experience its strange wonders.

What makes the Mystery Spot wondrous? For the unanointed, the Mystery Spot is one in a string of roadside “gravity holes” and “vortexes” that claim to turn Newtonian physics on its head. Balls roll uphill, tall people become short, and GPS navigation systems go out of whack. How is this “mystery” demonstrated and explained? It’s not high-tech. Most of the mystery resides in the simplest of items—a hill, a compass, a carpenter’s level. And yet the experience is enthralling, memorable, and strangely educational. Why? Because of the guides. The guides pull you, teach you, challenge you, and entertain you. They are magicians who turn simple illusions into truly engaging mysteries.

Live facilitation has a varied role in museums. In children’s and science museums, explainers are everywhere. In special immersion exhibits like Dialogue in the Dark, in which visitors are led through a pitch black experience by a blind guide, or live action games like Operation Spy, facilitators are a necessary part of the experience. From a financial and management perspective, however, many museums try to minimize live facilitation as much as possible. Exhibit designers think of their products as needing no introduction—especially not from some high school volunteer in a blue jacket. Hiring, training, and scheduling floor staff is expensive. Operating officers want to keep the bottom line down. Development costs are one-time; operation lasts forever.

And yet. There are some great bottom line reasons to invest in floor staff. One is about guest attraction and retention. Many peoples’ most memorable museum experiences come from interactions with staff. In the hospitality world, positive interactions with staff are the single greatest factor in establishing guest loyalty and increasing word of mouth advertising. Likewise, in museums, these interactions turn first-time visitors into repeat visitors, and repeat visitors into members.

And it’s worth doing a little cost-benefit analysis on different forms of interactive content distribution. Interactive exhibits are expensive to develop and maintain. A good interactive might cost $80,000 to take from concept to the floor, and twenty of them might keep a $60,000 per year IT/maintenance person busy. Add in-house developer/designer time and you have roughly $2M over three years of development to get interactives live on the floor of the museum. Amortized over those same three years of operation, and assuming a (sadly) generous $12/hour for live facilitators, museums could take half of that exhibition development budget and hire ten full-time facilitators who could be on the floor within 3 months, delivering content. Which investment will provide better return in terms of education and guest engagement?

I’m not suggesting that live facilitators replace interactive exhibit development entirely, but I think we’ve been closing our ears to visitor voices about their value for too long. Imagine your average science museum explainer, who unlocks the secrets of cool exhibits, who answers your questions, who approaches you as you gaze at some pretty phenomenon and challenges you to think about what’s really going on. Why aren’t there such staff members in art or history museums? Yes, I could take the 2pm tour, but what if I’m wandering through, disaffected, not yet engaged enough to even consider taking the tour? Who’s going to help me get there?

A few years ago at ASTC, Eddie Goldstein from the Denver Museum of Natural Science spoke about a very simple, highly effective element they added to their in-gallery offerings; a roving staff person with a laptop computer connected to the internet. The staff person was available to answer questions, but also to help visitors find websites of interest related to the content (which were then emailed to the visitor at his/her request). Why did the DMNS choose to make this a facilitated experience instead of just plopping down a computer at the end of the exhibition? This simple facilitation exercise turns the exhibit experience, in which the museum pushes content at the visitor, into an interactive, personal one, in which the staff member helps the visitor pull out the parts that are of most interest to them. It's hard to make that leap as a visitor on your own from a passive recipient to an active researcher. The staff member is an informed partner in that transition, and hopefully an enabler of more active engagement by the visitor.

This desire relates to another benefit of live facilitators which connects directly to ideas out there about "Museum 2.0." 2.0 design means prioritizing users and social connections among them, and it means flexibility to be responsive to their interests and needs. The more money we sink into exhibit development, the more locked museums are in static content distribution and interpretation. Staff are the ultimate flexible, modular content distributors. Investing in staff can create museum spaces that are more adaptable to current events and visitor interests. Implementing 2.0 experiments via staff rather than through new exhibition models and web/database development can be relatively cheap and quick to develop, and can adapt or be terminated easily (plus, there's the added employee benefit of involving floor staff in exciting new projects). Of course, this requires a new respect and reliance on floor staff as valuable members of the content creation team. Some museums are already struggling with this in the question of who is allowed to blog on behalf of the museum; similarly, museums might ask themselves who is allowed to educate, to design, and in what ways.

Floor staff may also be the most efficient vehicle for transforming museums into social spaces. Web 2.0 succeeds by focusing on the personal interests of users and connecting users to each other via their interests. If we truly want museums to become places for social engagement among visitors, why not re-envision floor staff, who are trained to interpret the collection, as community organizers, trained to encourage and support interactions among visitors?

You may be thinking, "most visitors don't come to museums for a social experience." And it's true that many current museum-goers may be turned off by the interjection of staff into contemplative, personal experiences with content. But the whole point of this 2.0 stuff is to envision and create new kinds of museum experiences that will excite and connect the great unwashed for whom, right now, museums do not provide a valuable experience. No matter how fabulous your exhibit or interactive is, disaffected visitors may pass it by as "just another museum thing." A live person, engaging you personally and connecting you to the content, is much harder to ignore.