Senses working overtime

On Monday, Joe and I attended the Museum Association’s event, Senses Working Overtime: Optimising interactive exhibits, which was held at the Churchill Museum in London.

It was a great day; we both met and talked to lots of interesting people. And of the many issues that came out of the various lectures and discussions my top two were:

Theatricality and experience
This was a theme that kept coming up during the day. In the good old days of digital interactive exhibits it was almost enough to simply display something on a screen that users could control by touch. The technology was captivating; users were delighted to be using it (even if they didn’t always understand what it was supposed to do). Of course, in these enlightened online days, users are not so impressed by digital exhibits; indeed, what they can see everyday on the internet - or on their home games machines - is often much more impressive than anything a typical museum budget can allow.

One could argue that the rise of the online and home gaming lifestyles are sounding the death knell of the traditional interactive kiosk. Sound familiar? Theatre thought that radio (and later cinema) would kill it; cinema then got a taste of its own medicine when television switched on in the 1950s.

So, what to do? Ross Parry from the University of Leicester came up with in interesting idea: theatricality. A little flare, a bit of the old razzle dazzle. This is not to say that style should ever dominate substance but perhaps it is time for some glamour, for exhibits which delight as well as inform.

This ties in with something I have been thinking about for a while. When television overtook cinema, it fought back by using its own USP - it was The Big Screen, a communal experience that you can’t replicate on television. And it worked; cinemas are as popular as ever.

This situation has comparisons in the exhibit world. If you think of the internet as television, taking over poor old digital interactives, then there is a clear route. What can in-museum exhibits provide that an online exhibit cannot?

Experience. The Big Experience. Reading about an object or exhibition online is fine but it cannot compete with being in the same room as it. We need to think about how interactives are integrated with the space around them. Digital interactives should communicate with real world objects; users should be able to move physical objects and see changes on screen. There should be no distinction between real objects and digital ones. Digital interactives should be as small as an iPhone or as large as a wall. We’ve reached the point where the underlying hardware is irrelevant; let’s make the most of the almost limitless possibilities the joining of real and digital afford us. And let’s do it with some style!

Time to take a breath and prepare for the next point; don’t panic, this one isn’t nearly as long.

Being social isn’t everything

This is something that came up in Ben Gammon’s excellent talk and I will do little other than regurgitate it here.

Social interaction in interactive exhibits is not always a good thing. There, I’ve said it. This might seem a little contentious in today’s social network / UGC / Facebook / Bebo / whatever world, but the real point is that we should not do anything simply for its own sake. Multi-player multi-touch exhibits are at the top of everyone’s shopping list at the moment but we should be careful: handled wrongly, multi-user exhibits are damaging, if the actions of one user can degrade the experience of another.

Ben cited a classic example from the APE project: a multi-person sand wheel that allowed users to draw patterns in the sand as it rotated past them. Imagine Frank and Alice come up to the exhibit to draw pictures in the sand. Frank draws a nice pattern using a simple tool pressed into the sand; Alice does the same but her pattern completely overwrites the one created by Frank, resulting in a less than ideal user experience.

Museum visits are inherently social affairs. Museums have been social network hubs for a lot longer than FaceBook or MySpace. We should be careful to create multi-user or ’social’ exhibits only when the content, context and desired user experience dictate it.

Lots of food for thought, I hope. Thanks to the MA for such a valuable day, and thanks to Dave Patten for the SEO Rapper, a musician to strike fear into the hearts of all bad web designers…