Designing visitor experience for open-ended creative engagement in art museums: A conceptual multi-touch prototype design

The popularity and influence of digital interaction in museum design has greatly increased along with developments of society and technology. Science museums and natural history museums treat digital interactions, such as multi-touch displays, as important tools in exhibition design that improve the interactivity of visitor experience through open-ended activities. Art museums, however, which mostly focus on displaying art collections and lack hands-on activities in exhibits, have yet to embrace this type of interactivity. The visitor experience in art museums is still relatively passive: their digital interactions are limited to catalogs of art history, which offer few opportunities for personal input. Furthermore, modern art is especially difficult for visitors to interpret and engage. This study is an attempt to address this gap in usage of interactive displays in art museums by introducing open-ended interactions as a way to engage visitors about modern art. It culminates in the design of a multi-touch application, What Inspires You?, to demonstrate possible approaches that can be used to enrich the visitor experience in art museums through educative perspectives. Museum education literature shows that constructivism is an effective theory for guiding interaction design to personalize visitors\u27 learning experiences at museums. The conceptual prototype developed in this study is informed by constructivism and a way for art museums to help visitors bridge modern art and personal experience by engaging them with the inspirations that affect art creation and then allowing them to experiment with artistic expression themselves. The prototype combines concepts of museum interactivity, pedagogies of museum education, and multi-touch interface design to enhance dynamic experience so visitors can create their own unique learning experience. This prototype is a new potential approach that can help art museums to engage their visitors more effectively through open-ended interactivity

Learning and engagement through natural history museums

This review examines how natural history museums (NHMs) can enhance learning and engagement in science, particularly for school-age students. First, we describe the learning potential of informal science learning institutions in general, then we focus on NHMs. We review the possible benefits of interactions between schools and NHMs, and the potential for NHMs to teach about challenging issues such as evolution and climate change and to use digital technologies to augment more traditional artefacts. We conclude that NHMs can provide students with new knowledge and perspectives, with impacts that can last for years. Through visits and their on-line presence, NHMs can help students see science in ways that the school classroom rarely can, with opportunities to meet scientists, explore whole topic exhibitions, engage with interactive displays and employ digital technologies both in situ and to support learning in the school science classroom. Although these interactions have the potential to foster positive cognitive, affective and social outcomes for students, there is a lack of reliable measures of the impact of NHM experiences for students. Opportunities to foster relationships between NHM staff and teachers through professional development can help articulate shared goals to support students’ learning and engagement

Supporting group interactions in museum visiting

Ethnographic study in two contrasting museums highlights a widespread but rarely documented challenge for CSCW design. Visitors' engagement with exhibits often ends prematurely due to the need to keep up with or attend to fellow group members. We unpack the mechanics of these kinds of phenomena revealing how the behaviours of summoning, pressurizing, herding, sidelining, and rounding up, lead to the responses of following, skimming and digging in. We show how the problem is especially challenging where young children are involved. As an initial prompt we explore two ways in which CSCW could help address this challenge: enabling a more fluid association between information and exhibits; and helping reconfigure the social nature of visiting

Visualizing biological data in museums : Visitor learning with an interactive tree of life exhibit

In this study, we investigate museum visitor learning and engagement at an interactive visualization of an evolutionary tree of life consisting of over 70,000 species. The study was conducted at two natural history museums where visitors collaboratively explored the tree of life using direct touch gestures on a multi-touch tabletop display. In the study, 247 youth, aged 8-15 years, were randomly assigned in pairs to one of four conditions. In two of the conditions, pairs of youth interacted with different versions of the tree of life tabletop exhibit for a fixed duration of 10minutes. In a third condition, pairs watched a 10minute video on a similar topic. Individual responses on a 53-item exit interview were then compared to responses from a fourth, baseline condition. Contrasting with the baseline condition, visitors who interacted with the tabletop exhibits were significantly more likely to reason correctly about core evolutionary concepts, particularly common descent and shared ancestry. They were also more likely to correctly interpret phylogenetic tree diagrams. To investigate the factors influencing these learning outcomes, we used linear mixed models to analyze measures of dyads' verbal engagement and physical interaction with the exhibit. These models indicated that, while our verbal and physical measures were related, they accounted for significant portions of the variance on their own, independent of youth age, prior knowledge, and parental background. Our results provide evidence that multi-touch interactive exhibits that enable visitors to explore large scientific datasets can provide engaging and effective learning opportunities

Gifting personal interpretations in galleries

The designers of mobile guides for museums and galleries face three major challenges: fostering rich interpretation, delivering deep personalization, and enabling a coherent social visit. We propose an approach to tackling all three simultaneously by inviting visitors to design an interpretation that is specifically tailored for a friend or loved one that they then experience together. We describe a trial of this approach at a contemporary art gallery, revealing how visitors designed personal and sometimes provocative experiences for people they knew well. We reveal how pairs of visitors negotiated these experiences together, showing how our approach could deliver intense experiences for both, but also required them to manage social risk. By interpreting our findings through the lens of 'gift giving' we shed new light on ongoing explorations of interpretation, personalization and social visiting within HCI

Blending Science Knowledge and AI Gaming Techniques for Experiential Learning

This paper addresses the scientific, design and experiential learning issues in creating an extremely realistic 3D interactive of a wild beluga whale pod for a major aquarium that is situated next to a group of real beluga whales in an integrated marine mammal exhibit. The Virtual Beluga Interactive was conceived to better immerse and engage visitors in complicated educational concepts about the life of wild belugas compared to what is typically possible via wall signage or a video display, thereby allowing them to interactively experience wild whale behavior and hopefully have deeper insights into the life of beluga whales. The gaming simulation is specifically informed by research data from live belugas, (e.g. voice recordings tied to mother/calf behavior) and from interviews with marine mammal scientists and education staff at the Vancouver Aquarium. The collaborative user interface allows visitors to engage in educational "what-if" scenarios of wild beluga emergent behavior using techniques from advanced gaming systems, such as physically based animation, real-time photo-realistic rendering, and artificial intelligence algorithms

Gifting personal interpretations in galleries

The designers of mobile guides for museums and galleries face three major challenges: fostering rich interpretation, delivering deep personalization, and enabling a coherent social visit. We propose an approach to tackling all three simultaneously by inviting visitors to design an interpretation that is specifically tailored for a friend or loved one that they then experience together. We describe a trial of this approach at a contemporary art gallery, revealing how visitors designed personal and sometimes provocative experiences for people they knew well. We reveal how pairs of visitors negotiated these experiences together, showing how our approach could deliver intense experiences for both, but also required them to manage social risk. By interpreting our findings through the lens of ‘gift giving’ we shed new light on ongoing explorations of interpretation, personalization and social visiting within HCI