Experiments in digital engagement
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Presentation given at a Studio Louter Cafe event in Amsterdam on the 7th November 2019. www.studiolouter.nl/cafe/
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Experiments in digital engagement
- 1. Experiments in Digital Engagement Dave Patten Head of New Media
- 2. §
- 16. • Enable access for a global audience • Bring the objects to life for audiences • Engage audiences through play • Provide extraordinary experiences • Demonstrate things when it’s too big, too small, too fast, too slow, too expensive or too dangerous to do it for real We use digital to…
- 17. Gallery interpretation strategy + Digital strategy = Gallery digital strategy
- 18. Passive One way Decision tree - v narrow & deep Active Choice but no input Decision tree - broad & shallow Interactive - two way with visitors Decision tree - broad & deep Films Projection mapping Soundscapes Audio commentaries Immersive environments where visitors are only passive observers Digital Labels Computer Information Point Find out more Immersive environments where visitors are offered a limited set of choices Games Quizzes Feedback exhibits Simulated technology visitors can operate Immersive environments where visitors are active participants - lots of choices, linked to previous decisions Types of exhibits
- 19. Map of digital interpretation
- 20. Passive X Interactive Object driven X Story driven Educational X Entertaining Real world X X X X X Imaginary world Exhibition X Experience Photorealistic X X X X X Graphic Scientific accuracy X X X X Artistic licence Robots as primary focus X X X X Robots as a lens to explore other theme Other? Experience Map
- 22. Digital Lab
- 23. The Digital Lab explores how museums can fulfil their missions in the digital age. Operating at the intersection of design, technology and content, the Digital Lab explores the new forms of audience experience that are enabled through emerging digital technologies.
- 24. The Digital Lab’s initiatives will: • explore and test emerging technologies and establish their suitability for longer term initiatives; • be agile and rapidly respond to new technologies and opportunities; • deliver prototypes products that can be trailed with audiences; • lab projects will have a short lifetime, unencumbered by the needs of long-term sustainability; • engage audiences, providing them new experiences; • share findings and insights widely both within the museum and with the culture/heritage sector; • form partnerships with technologists, companies, researchers and others who share our interests;
- 25. Areas of interest • Digital storytelling • How might digital media allow us to more effectively foreground objects in stories? • How might we use digital to layer information for different audiences, Is it possible to dynamically reorder content driven by user interest? • VR & AR • How might VR & AR enable audiences to explore collection objects and the stories around them in new, more immersive ways? • Location aware services • How might location-aware mobile technologies enable audiences to experience collection objects in the places where those objects have significance? - i.e. outside the museum • How might we use WiFi triangulation and access points to deliver new experiences to visitors such as layering of content and context? • Gaming • What kind of games might be developed that enveloped the whole museum experience?
- 26. Digital Labels
- 28. sciencemuseum
- 30. Why are we interested in VR & AR and why now
- 40. Immersion
- 52. Simplicity is good Each exhibit should do one thing and do it well Always try to exceed audience expectations
- 53. Set goals and objectives you can’t measure success (or failure) without them
- 54. • Write a brief – even if you are doing the work internally • Know your audience • Properly analyse the task (don’t leave the most challenging bits until last) • If you use cutting edge tech be prepared to BLEED • 80:10:10 • Work out who else needs input (IT, curatorial, design, Ops …) • Test frequently with the real audience (and on actual hardware) • Hold adequate contingencies (time and money)
- 55. Why bother with digital exhibits
- 56. Review of digital exhibits 2000-2019
- 57. Why, what and how • In total we have reviewed over 250 evaluation studies and academic papers conducted between 2000-2019: • 185 formative evaluations • 35 larger scale summative evaluations (SMG) • 12 summative evaluations from non SMG institutions • A number of front end evaluations (SMG) • 8 peer reviewed academic studies • A series of practitioner reviews, reports, and blog posts
- 58. Formative Evaluation - Prototyping • Identifying barriers amd opportunities in what is being proposed. • Testing with 'real' visitors from within the target audience. • Usability/Ergonomics: can visitors use it? • Motivation: is it attractive and appealing? Is it intrinsically rewarding? • Comprehension: do they understand what it's about?
- 59. Museums are unique places • The setting and the expectations of the setting profoundly affect visitor behaviour: • It's a brief experience • You're often stood up • It's a social experience • It's a public experience • There are lots of distractions • Visitors expect museums to provide certain experiences, not provide others, and for these to be communicating certain things
- 60. "I liked the video interactions, not just here but across the other parts of the museum too. It kind of brings a bit of character to it rather than just looking into glass cases" [Visitor to a history museum] "It's easier to understand the object and I get deeper learning with the information from the video" [Visitor to a decorative art museum] "You went from a video to something to read, that was good, that was really mixed and I think would really work for children too" [Visitor to a history museum] "It was completely new information, so it was very useful for me. I watched the video but at the same time I looked at the statue" [Visitor to a decorative art museum] "How sunspots are catastrophic. I learnt this by playing the game." [visitor to a science museum] "It made me more curious after playing the game. I read all the stuff around it. I was drawn in." [visitor to a science museum] “I just like interactive experiences. Sometimes interactives are geared to youngsters but people our age like them too” [visitor to a science museum]
- 62. Next Steps Dissemination • Internal to teams within SMG – including the creation of a wiki portal for ease of access to report • Publication in SMG journal • Other publishing • Blog posts • FAQ list • Conferences Potential Areas for Future Research • What impact does age, gender, level of science capital etc. Have upon visitors' expectations, use and response to digital media? • Are some sections of our audience not being effectively catered for? • How do different formats and designs of digital media differ in their impact upon visitors? • Virtual, augmented and mixed reality technologies
- 64. Museums are about People Content Experiences Museums are about People Collections Experiences
- 65. They are not usually about technology. Technology just provides one way for people to interact with content and each other so that they can have those experiences Our objects and their stories are our most important assets
Editor's Notes
- Hello, My name is Dave Patten and I am head of new media at the Science Museum in London. I have a background in electronics and Computer science. I have been at the museum for over 30 years and have been developing and commissioning digital exhibits since I arrived at the museum. I manage a small core team of 6 people including software devs, hardware engineer, videographer and project managers. Depending on what projects we are running I will bring in other people on contracts. We do some in house development and a lot of external commissioning which we manage. I also manage the museums Digital Lab programme (of which more later) Science Museum Digital Lab Digital Labels Audio Immersion Review
- For those of you that don’t know us we are a large museum in central London - we get about 3.4 million visitors a year. The Science Museum’s mission is to foster a society that celebrates science, technology and engineering and their impact on our lives, now and in the future. We are part of a group of museums which includes
- The National Railway Museum in York
- The National Science and Media Museum In Bradford
- The Science and Industry Museum in Manchester in the NW of England - on the site of the oldest surviving passenger railway station, in the heart of the world’s first industrial city, today alive with innovative discoveries in science and technology.
- Locomotion Shildon . The town of Shildon has had an exciting story to tell since the earliest days of the rail industry, making it the perfect place to explore the rich seam of local railway history and discover how the railways have changed all our lives. The Home of Timothy Hackworth one of the founding fathers of the railway age.
- (90m wide and almost 300m long) and features a spacious storage hall, conservation laboratories, research spaces and photography studios.
- The Science Museum is just over 100 years old and we have a strong Science, Technology & Medical collections, We grew out of the great exhibition of 1851 - this photograph is when the collection was housed in the V&A museum and was known as the non arts collection
- We have very traditional galleries
- Spend the last 15-20 years developing mainly exhibitions with a life of between 5 and 7 years, mainly contemporary science. High level of interaction which we know our visitors enjoy And everything in between
- We have lots of objects but even so only about 7% are on display in the museum
- Labels are often necessarily short and not very informative for the general visitor
- We have fabulous objects like this section of a very early transatlantic ommucincation cable - but it only real become intesting when its story is revealed.
- And we have lots of things that are impenetrable - can anyone guess what this is?
- How do we use digital
- How do we work with exhibition
- Some tools to help plan experience
- Experience mapping - making sure we get an appropriate spread for the type of exhibition and the target audience.
- Planned the experience - on rails (seated for H&S)
- Experimentation Digital as event
- We have a long history of developing and using digital labels and I will show you some examples and talk about what works and what doesn’t (for us)
- Transparent screens - Digital interpretation, Screen based interpretation of objects difficult people look at the screen not the object. This tech allows us to keep the object in the visitors field of view
- Gateway Scences - collection of objects in a setting
- Real objects in 3 dimensional forced perspective sets - putting the obects in context
- Screen based interpretation which allows us to dig deeper into the objects, there stories and the people than we could do using traditional labels.
- Working models - linking a model to an object showing how things work
- The museum is really interested in using more audio both to deliver content but also to set context and ambience. Sound scapes - Robots, the sun, medicine
- Analysts chair in new medicine galleries - talking therapies.
- Telephone exchange - oral histories linked to the actual object
- 3D scan of plane
- Soyuz TMA19
- People want digital Yes (and not just in this museum and not just children and families) Consistently the most heavily used elements of an exhibition, typically engaging over 60% of the visitors observed in galleries All quotes are from adult visitors
- Paper vs report – context of paper Review is building on the 1999 paper that collated everything we had learnt over the previous 10 years about how visitors at the SCM use digital exhibits Covers the research we conducted over the last 20 years from 2000 - 2019 In total we have reviewed over 250 evaluation studies and academic papers. Most of the findings have been drawn from 185 formative evaluations, we have also drawn data from 35 larger scale summative evaluations of completed exhibitions at SCM. Additionally we have drawn upon summative evaluations conducted at the BM (5), V&A (4), California Academy of Sciences (1), National Museum of Scotland (1), Te Papa Museum, Wellington, NZ (1). Further relevant data was found in 8 academic studies published in peer reviewed journals. Finally we were able to draw some broad conclusions from a series of front-end evaluations at the SCM and other Review focuses primarily on 3 key questions: - what are the potential barriers to visitors using, enjoying and learning from digital media exhibits? - what are the common characteristics of digital media exhibits that are appealing, accessible and achieve their LOs? - what are the pros and cons of different exhibit interfaces?
- Prototyping - what is it (as the majority of the data covered in the report comes from this sort of research) Purpose is to identify the range of problems that a visitor may encounter when using the exhibit and to identify ways to remove these problems. Conducted in the development phase of an exhibition project when changes to the design and content can still be made without incurring undue additional costs - Because of this must be conducted quickly, often using partially finished, partially functional versions of the exhibit Sample sizes small – typically 5-15 pairs or groups of visitors - so result are qualitative Focusses on 3 main issues: - Usability - Motivation - Comprehension Designed to be iterative with 3 or more rounds of testing to ensure the design and content changes have addressed the problems previously identified and to ensure that new problems have not inadvertently been incorporated
- Museums are unique places. These differences profoundly affect how visitors behave in museum settings, including the ways in which they use digital media. E.g: - It's a brief experience – compared to the time people would invest playing a game at home - In most cases they're standing up (and often viewing the screen at a less than ideal angle) - It's a social experience – visitors want to share the exhibit with friends or family - It's a public experience – other people are seeing what you are doing (and occasionally interfering with your experience on purpose or unintentionally) - There are lots of distractions - Visitors expect museums to provide certain types of experiences, not provide others, and for these exhibits to be communicating certain things and not others
- People want digital Yes (and not just in this museum and not just children and families) Consistently the most heavily used elements of an exhibition, typically engaging over 60% of the visitors observed in galleries All quotes are from adult visitors
- Social Often claimed that digital can inhibit social interaction among visitors - potentially a very serious challenge since social interaction has been shown to be a vital facilitator of learning in museum settings. However, our research, and that of other museums, consistently find the opposite to be true. In most cases digital media exhibits are used collaboratively by 2 or more visitors, often with one person operating the controls and the other(s) providing advice, commentary, background info, help reading text We have observed visitors engage in extensive conversations and sharing of information at digital media exhibits in Atmosphere, Energy: Fueling the Future, Energy Hall, Engineer Your Future, In Future, Information Age, Our Lives in Data, Who Am I? In Energy: Fueling the Future a 3rd of visitors in family groups and all visitors in school groups were observed using digital exhibits in collaboration with someone else Observations of visitors at the Design A Coat of Arms exhibit at the V&As British Galleries found that a third were using it collaboratively Many more... Far from inhibiting social interaction, the weight of evidence across a wide range of museum settings demonstrates that interactive digital media encourages and sustains it
- Next steps - dissemination & future research
- Museums are about people, our collections and experiences
- Museums are not usually about technology - technology just provides one way for people to interact with content and each other to have those experiences. Our objects and our stories are our most important assets.