Immersive theatre, part two

As follow-up to my post on theatre, I finally rescheduled a Google+ Hangout to try to unpack Sleep No More and look forward to exploring it with other attendees.

I also got an exciting email from my old friend and former colleague Catherine Hughes. Catherine started the Museum of Science’s Science Theater department back in the day, and is now the Project Director of Meet the Past at the Atlanta History Center in Georgia. Her book, Museum Theatre: Communicating with Visitors Through Drama, is a good place to learn about museum theatre in general. Here’s the scoop from Atlanta, which she kindly allowed me to post,

 I read your piece on immersive theatre and thought I’d share the most recent project I’ve directed, a fully participatory play called Four Days of Fury, which opens tonight. We’ve gotten lots of good feedback (see this and this) so far from the press opening. Fingers crossed, regular audience will feel the same. It feels like we’ve managed to do something new for a museum.

We’ve sold out each performance and are attracting a far more diverse group and having these incredible dialogues following each show. People are talking about difficult issues, race and fear, in an open forum with strangers! We’ve had the head of the Georgia Council for Humanities and the director of the Office of Cultural Affairs for Atlanta attend. We have three shows today and then next weekend. Whew. We are emailing a post-show survey to all who give us their email (we’re asking everyone) for the evaluation. Fingers crossed we get more than the usual 5% response.

So, stay tuned for details!

Drinking About Museums: Boston January, February and March. Oh my!

I’ve been remiss in keeping up with all the good socializing and networking going on.  So here’s three months of updates.

January (courtesy of Jenn Schmitt)

We gathered at he Toursphere offices (thanks for hosting!) for an hour-long Gaming Workshop run by Green Door Labs’ Kellian Adams and Marleigh Norton.  Participants learned about what makes a game fun or not fun by inventing our own games.

Kellian ran the workshop starting with about 6 different games.  We played in teams of 3 shifting games every 5 minutes.  While playing we wrote down things we liked on pink post-its and things we didn’t like on blue ones.  After three or four game switches, we took all the post-its and  lumped the pink together, building strings of similar comments, and same with the blue to see what common themes emerged.

Things that make a game fun:

• Early success, low barriers to entry
• Collaborative effort
• Tactile qualities
• Puzzles – challenging but not impossible
• Different levels for different ages

Things that make games not fun:

• So many instructions that you can’t start right away
• One game got the comment “Less fun than traffic” because it was too hard from the start with too many directions.
• Get frustrated, feel stupid

From there we were give index cards in different categories – client, goal, resources, restrictions and wild cards.  Our teams of three had 15 minutes to create a game that satisfied the requirements on the cards.

Our team started off slow.  We had a large corporate client with a product to sell, who wanted to reach athletic college students, and must include dancing and deer, we created “Don’t scare the deer”.  At college football game tailgate parties we decided Budweiser would want to engage this audience in a fun activity.   Using sensor pads like Dance Dance Revolution you would have 2 people trying to perform dances, if you did well you could get close to a deer (on a digital flatscreen in front of you).  If you did poorly, you would scare the deer.  The closer to the deer, the more points.

Another team had the challenges of a non-profit fund raiser needed a game for their big event.  They had lots of interns and a good staff support.  Thus was born “Robo-Zoni”.  On the Frog Pond in Boston, mini-zamboni robots would compete on an obstacle course.  Teams would pay to enter, each mini-zamboni would leave a colored trail behind so you could see the path for each team.  The prize would be a ride on a real zamboni.

All this took about 90 minutes and I think everyone took something fun away from the workshop.  Gaming doesn’t have to be expensive, hard, or high tech.  Just take the parameters that exist and find a way to have fun with them.

And on that note we adjourned to drink and nosh and generally enjoy excellent company. Proof follows:

Things that work to make a game fun

Reviewing game ideas

Don’t scare the deer.

Am I bitter that I had the flu and missed all this great fun? No, not much. Well, maybe a little. Grr….

February

At the beginning of the month, our local maker space, Artisan’s Asylum in Somerville hosted a workshop on making a maker space, starring Dale Dougherty and other Maker luminaries.  Liz Neeley and Miriam Langer were both in town for the event, so we had an impromptu Drinking About Museums in their honor.   We started out at the Asgard in Central Square, until the band started warming up, and then moved to the quieter confines of the Field.

Dinner beforehand.

When the band plunked this down next to Liz’ chair, we knew it was time to leave.

Later this month…

Our regular Drinking About Museums is scheduled for February 28th. It’ll be simple and social. We’ll meet at Cambridge Brewing Company at 5:30pm til whenever.  If you’re around, you should come!

March

We’re hoping to visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in March. If you haven’t yet seen their new addition, you should!

Looking ahead

But wait, there’s more! Potential future guests include Sharna Jackson from the Tate (April) and Regan Forrest (August)! Woot!

On getting lost

Art Gallery of New South Wales by Flickr user State Records NSW

I’ve been silent of late.  A bad flu and general busy-ness have conspired to keep me away from the blog. Which is a shame, because I seemed to have touched a nerve when I wrote about my experience at Sleep No More in December. On immersion, theatre, and museums engendered a fair bit of comment and as I dug around, I found a lot of people starting to ask similar questions. I had hoped to host a Google Hangout of a bunch of museum folks who’d seen Sleep No More and then write about the conversation as the setup for this piece. The damned flu got in the way, though, so this’ll have to precede any more digging around inside the Sleep No More experience.

I haven’t reached any clarity yet, but it seemed worth surfacing the kinds of questions that others have been raising.  I’m not sure yet how to reconcile my desire to leave visitors room for exploration, wonder, and surprise with the competing drive to tell a compelling story. One leads towards free exploration, the other towards a defined sequence of events in a plot. Here are some of the competing inspirations banging around in my head at the moment.

Getting lost versus getting herded

As a developer, I spend a lot of time trying ensure that the content we are trying to present to visitors actually gets to them. In the non-linear, chaotic flow of interactive science museum exhibitions, this can be no mean feat.  You spend a lot of time on message hierarchies and trying to make sure the Big Idea gets reiterated as many times and in as many ways as possible. And I’ve been wondering whether by pursuing complete non-linearity have we given up other ways of telling our stories that might actually be more engaging, less repetitive, and more emotional?

So, along comes Nina Simon’s post on “Should Museum Exhibitions Be More Linear? Exploring the Power of the Forced March in Digital and Physical Environments” which details her own journey from rigid, “forced march” style exhibitions, to self-directed non-linear ones, and now to wondering if linearity might not be as much of a restriction as she (and I) think it. The line that stopped me was, “Maybe we fight our own purposes when we deliberately eschew the powerful dramatic tools available in the linear storytelling format.”

It’s a nice short post. You should read it. She spends some time looking at examples in both physical and digital experiences where linear storytelling is used to great advantage. Everybody’s been raving about the New York Times’ piece, Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek and it lives up to all the praise. It’s a beautifully rendered story that unfolds as you scroll.  In the end, in good mentor fashion, she asks the community whether linear is better than non-linear, and whether they have any data to support their claim.

Space syntax and museums

Luckily for us, Regan Forrest has shared some of her PhD research. Her response to Nina, Free Choice and the “Forced March”, provides some data on visitor perceptions of navigating around gallery spaces and suggests that space syntax studies might have some light to shed on the issue.  Her alternatives to the forced march include “layouts that incorporate a common ‘home base’ – for instance a central spine off which galleries radiate (like a lot of ‘traditional’ museums) or a hub-and-spoke or cloverleaf arrangement where all galleries open off a central hub or atrium.” Nice stuff, particularly her reference to Hillier and Tzortzi’s work in space syntax studies. Their article she references is well worth the read. Go ask your librarian to get you a copy.

One idea that I found very useful was there are two key themes embedded in the spatial layout of the modern museum: organized walking and the congregation of visitors. By organizing the space into a sequence of visitable galleries, visitors can build a knowledge map as they navigate the space.  The creation of gathering spaces, what the author calls the integration core – the lobbies, atria, and other big central spaces where visitors can gather – serve to anchor visitors’ mental map of the museum.  Hillier and Tzortzi also provide a number of museum-wide studies of visitors making their way through space and propose two main models for ordering space; “the deterministic model, according to which movement is forced as circulation choices are restricted; and the probabilistic model, according to which movement is allowed to be more random…” Sound familiar?

Interestingly, many of the examples are not at the exhibition scale, but rather the whole building scale, so it’s a little hard to see how much it’ll prove relevant to the questions that interest Nina and me. But it’s grist for the mill, so to speak. Luckily, there are studies that focus on visitor navigation through exhibitions at a smaller scale.

Linearity and visibility

Louvre gallery by Flickr user 01steven

Dirk vom Lehn is sociologist at King’s College London at the Work, Interaction and Technology Research Centre (Hi, Dirk!) who has done really interesting research concerned with social interaction in museums, from how people in a group influence each other’s decisions about where to go in a gallery, to studying the dance that visitors in front of a painting do as they try to both share that space and leave space for each other. Good stuff! You should follow him. Dirk weighs in to the linearity debate and provides a bunch of references that address Nina’s question about what the evidence says. His post, Stepwise Exploration of Museums: arguments for a linear organisation of exhibits comes out pretty strongly in favor of linearity over random-access, with some important distinctions.

He makes the point that visibility is as important as linearity.  He says, “It is worthwhile stressing here that visitors are able to organise their visit in this way not only because the exhibits are organised in a linear way but because of the visibility of what (kind of) exhibit the next one is. Furthermore, visitors can see whether that possible next exhibit is occupied by other visitors.” He lists three points at the end that are worth repeating.

• * The linearity of the organisation of exhibits in the gallery coupled with a visibility of information about next exhibits can support visitors in aligning their organisation of the navigation of a gallery with that of other people.

• * It is not only the visibility of next exhibits that people use to navigate museums but also they use the visibility of exhibits coupled with the visibility of other people’s actions at these exhibits to fashion their own action at the current exhibit.

• * A practical viewpoint of research in museums highlights how the organisation of exhibits can help people with little or no preconception of the detailed layout of the exhibition to (practically) organise their museum visit.

Oh boy… So what does this mean? I’ve always resented being stuck in linear exhibitions. How to integrate this with my desire to be more immersive , more magical and to do more showing and less telling? One thing that seems clear (at least right now) is that this idea of being able to orient in a space and know where to go next is important. When I think back to my least favorite linear exhibitions, the thing I really resented was not the linearity as much as the inability to know how far into my “forced march” I was. Were there two rooms left or seven? Was I almost done or did I need to husband my strength for more marching. Maybe my idea of “linear” needs some adjusting…

The other interesting thing to me is that all the preceding studies look at the physical process of getting through museum spaces and basically ignore what visitors are thinking and learning.  The content equivalent of this spatial navigating is narrative. What is the role of the story, and how can it lead visitors through space and interactions?

Connecting with the story

Steve Almond wrote an intriguing opinion piece in the New York Times, Once Upon a Time, There Was a Person Who Said, ‘Once Upon a Time’ where he posits that in our shift from an oral to a visual culture, we have lost an essential wayfinding aid – a narrator who guides us through their storyworld. “In evolving from readers to viewers, we’ve lost our grip on the essential virtues embodied by a narrator: the capacity to make sense of the world, both around and inside us.” The piece is a bit overly-dramatic in its dire warnings of the existential threats we face as a result of this shift, and the increasing ease with which we can distract ourselves. However, his lament that “we’ve traded perspective for immediacy, depth for speed, emotion for sensation, the panoramic vision of a narrator for a series of bright beckoning keyholes.” rings true on some level for me, particularly in regards to my experience of Sleep No More. I felt both intense sensation *and* complete emotional detachment. I had little moments of discovery while feeling completely adrift when it came to the larger story unfolding around me.

Jonathan Gottschall, author of the Storytelling Animal, has an interesting essay in Fast Company called, Why Storytelling Is The Ultimate Weapon. He specifically addresses how businesses can use story to sell products, but the museum implications are also pretty clear.  Humans use narrative to make sense of the world and one of our challenges, particularly in communicating science is that people aren’t moved by data. As Eric Siegel said at MCN 2012, we live our lives anecdotally, not statistically, so translating data into narratives is an essential requirement for reaching visitors. The evidence for our impact on the natural world is vast, but it seems to take a focused narrative like the National Film Board of Canada’s Bear 71, which retraces the life of a single bear in the Canadian wilderness using data from its tracking collar and remote wildlife cameras to provide us with a story with which we can emotionally link.

Gottschall runs down some of the recent scientific literature and concludes that,  “fiction seems to be more effective at changing beliefs than writing that is specifically designed to persuade through argument and evidence.” The money quote for me is this,

“[T]here is an important lesson about the molding power of story. When we read dry, factual arguments, we read with our dukes up. We are critical and skeptical. But when we are absorbed in a story we drop our intellectual guard. We are moved emotionally and this seems to leave us defenseless.”

So, this is a challenge, because I want visitors to be critical and skeptical *and* emotionally invested.

The exhibition as a campfire?

Campfire by Flickr user Jelles

Paul Rissen, a BBC User Experience Architect has the first part of a series of articles which ask the question whether we should be aiming to recreate the classic campfire experience. “Around the campfire: closing the gap between storyteller and audience”  is a great example of how experimental even big, old institutions can be.  Rissen highlights one aspect of campfire storytelling that is ripe for more exploitation, personalization. He is particularly interested in the way digital technologies could help us return to the days when “the storyteller could adapt their work to suit the audience ‘on-the-fly’, as it were. We all know this is nothing new – live performance[s]… thrive on the interplay between audience and performer – but they all rely on spatial proximity and community. How might technology step in, when physical geography is still a barrier? Indeed, with the full gamut of software engineering skills at our disposal, what opportunities does technology afford us?”

Rissen is talking about the BBC’s particular challenge, but I think you could substitute the physical distance of his radio audience with the temporal distance of the developer or curator who has constructed a narrative before the audience has arrived in the museum or at their website or app, and ask the same questions.

So, do you see any deep order here? Let me know. I’ll try to get that Sleep No More hangout to happen again, so I can add some different viewpoints on the event to the conversation. 

Related Posts:

Nina Simon – Museum 2.0 -  “Should Museum Exhibitions Be More Linear? Exploring the Power of the Forced March in Digital and Physical Environments”

The New York Times - Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek

Regan Forrest  – Interactivate - Free Choice and the “Forced March”

Dirk vom Lehn - Stepwise Exploration of Museums: arguments for a linear organisation of exhibits

Seb Chan – Fresh and New(er) - On Sleep No More, magic and immersive storytelling | Fresh & New(er)

Steve Almond - Once Upon a Time, There Was a Person Who Said, ‘Once Upon a Time’

Jonathan Gottschall - Why Storytelling Is The Ultimate Weapon

Paul Rissen - Around the campfire: closing the gap between storyteller and audience

On immersion, theatre, and museums

Souvenirs of Sleep No More

Over the Christmas holiday, my lovely and talented wife and I went down to New York City for a few days to see friends and go to the theatre. I had been meaning to see Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, an immersive, participatory theatre experience that had run in Boston for months without us going, and had almost completed its New York run. Seb Chan had written a longish piece about his experience months ago, and several friends who opinions I value had raved about it. I’ve been thinking and writing a lot lately on alternate models for developing exhibitions and it sounded like a model worth exploring to see how it might inform what I do.

So, with high hopes for an “aha” moment, Jennifer, a friend and I walked up to the McKittrick Hotel on West 27th and got in line. Three hours later, we were discharged onto the street; tired, conflicted and unsure of what we’d seen and done. Weeks later, I’m still not sure whether I liked it or not, but I’d still probably go back and see it again. That is a first for me as a theatregoer. And I still recommend it to museum people. I’m hoping to convene an online discussion amongst a group of folks who’ve seen it to help me process what the experience was like. There might even be a conference session in there… We’ll see.

So, what happened when we went to Sleep No More and how might it apply to museums?

What is it?

For those of you who are coming at this fresh, Sleep No More is a theatrical experience (not a play, per se) that combines elements of Macbeth, film noir, and uses an abandoned hotel as the setting. The audience are all given white masks and instructed to remain completely silent throughotut the performance. Actors move about the hotel, up and down stairs, and scenes take place throughout the builidng over the course of a night. The performances build to a climax, but aside from that, you don’t really get any guidance on how to experience the night. Some people follow actors, some camp out in a space, all of which are extensively decorated and full of objects that reflect something about the plot. You can rummage around in desk drawers, open doors and wander as the events play out around you. Parties are encouraged to split up, and while I was there, I saw a couple actively separated by ushers and deposited on different floors as we rode the elevator up. Definitely not your typical night at the theatre.

Our night started with us handing in our tickets and getting playing cards in return; two kings and a queen. We were ushered into a nightclub with a 1930s vibe and waited for the event to begin. We also got masks. Before long, everyone in the club with a queen card was called and ushered out of the room. After a few more minutes, they called the kings and off we went. Jen had been in the bathroom when the queens were called, so she managed to stay with us as we crowded around an actor in evening wear who gave us an orientation.

Getting lost in a play

I’m a big fan of Jasper Fforde’s Thursday Next series of novels, which imagines an alternate Britain where it’s possible to enter the storyworlds of books. Being in Sleep No More is very much like the theatrical equivalent, only you’re a ghost. We wandered through a series of rooms dressed as offices, taxidermy shop, a 1920s witch’s lab (?) and a creepy bedroom full of dimembered dolls. I looked under curtains, inside desks, and around corners. It was fascinating to feel the freedom to go wherever I wanted. And I wanted everything to tell me the story. I picked up every phone I saw on the off chance there might be somebody else on the line. Along with all the other ghosts, I flitted around, looking for signs of life. As we got deeper into the hotel, we started to encounter actors silently moving about, casting meaningful glances at one another, and interacting, sometimes violently. I knew enough to want to know who I was seeing. Is that guy Macbeth? Who’ s the pregnant woman? Are those two lovers? It was a bit maddening to have the actors standing right in front of you and not know who they were and what they were doing. The actors don’t speak, all the action is done through gesture and dance. The only sounds are a powerful ambient soundtrack piped throughout the hotel and the sounds of people moving.

We watched several quick scenes happen and were immediately faced with a decision point. When the actors left at the end of a scene, you as an ausience member had to choose how to react. Do I follow Actor A? B? Stay here? Or wander? Nothing about the scenes gave me a sense of how to make an informed decision. It seems like the creators wanted to keep the audience off-guard and on their toes throughout the whole event. This became a theme of the evening for me; feeling like I was having to make decisions based on no information. I didn’t like it. It made wandering around a high-stakes affair. Was I leaving someplace where something was going to happen in a moment? What if this actor I was following was a bit player and not one of the main characters? I did manage to find a couple of of pivotal scenes; Macbeth murdering the king and Lady Macbeth’s “out, out damned spot” bit. But by the time the finale rolled around, I still had no sense who most of the characters were, or what their relationships to each other were.

Immersion, immersion, immersion

The set design was incredible. Whole rooms full of intrguing, evocative objects, a nightime forest, a graveyard. And all in a black-box theatre! I loved being able to really get into each space, root around, and interact with the environment. And for the scenes I did stumble into, it was very powerful to have actors performing a scene all around you as if you weren’t there. And on the occasions when an actor would suddenly lock eyes onto an audience member and stare them down? Powerful, powerful stuff. The one time it happened to me I kept saying to myself, “Please don’t let her drag me off through some unmarked door!” Not the relationship I usually have with actors in the midst of a performance. Being able to be that close made it a very different experience, more like modern dance or performance art.

Losing the story, or not finding it

After it was over, we spent a long time talking about theatre, and inevitably comparing Sleep No More to other shows. One of my favorite theatre experiences of the past decade was seeing Elevator Repair Service‘s Gatz, which is a verbatim recitation of “The Great Gatsby” done as a play within a play. Though it’s a slender book, when you read every word, it still takes seven hours, or in our case, two stints of 3.5 hours with dinner in the middle. Going into it, I thought I might be making a terrible mistake. But at the end of seven hours when the narrator finally said, “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”, the house erupted into deafening applause. As the cast were taking their bows, Jennifer leaned over and said she wished they’d lower a picture of F. Scott Fitzgerald, because we were really applauding him. And she was right. His prose, so easy to read, turned out to be as easy to speak. The story was so compelling that seven hours flew by, in a way they didn’t at Sleep No More, though I worked much harder to try to put a story together.

At the time I wondered if knowing as much as I did about Sleep No More had interfered with my ability to suspend my disbelief. If I was coming at it fresher, would it have made more sense to me, been more moving? My friend, who knew nothing, felt the opposite. As we sat over drinks, recapping the night, it seemed clear that none of the three of us had a clear grip on the plot. Jennifer and I argued over which bits might be from scenes we rembmered from Macbeth and Peggy just felt lost.

…and the museum connection?

In some of my more recent posts, I’ve started trying to work out a different model of exhibition development than the one I learned of objects in cases and texts and graphics. Sleep No More seemed like a potential example of how to make the kind of exhibit experiences I’d proposed as part of the Making a Museum from Scratch series. It’s opaque, it’s participatory, it offers its users tremendous freedom to construct their own experience. But I left it profoundly conflicted over whether I’d had a meaningful experience or not. I’m still not really sure. But I have come to some preliminary conclusions about the night and what it mean mean for how I might conceive of exhibitions in the future.

The solo thing isn’t for me

The masks and enforced silence really rubbed me the wrong way. I didn’t go to the theatre to be alone. Going to a museum is a social event by and large, and I don’t think making it a solitary experience would engender much goodwill from our public. In some ways, the whole faceless silent ghost thing reminded me of watching live streams on my computer, where there was something happening in the real world that I was spying on though the Internet.

Nothing immerses like complete immersion

Duh. But it’s something we do very rarely. It’s expensive. It’s hard. It takes a lot of work to make it “real”. But when it works, wow!

Interactions with people are more satisfying

Strangely enough, the one museum-like experience I could think of to compare Sleep No More to was visitng a living history site, like Plimoth Plantation. The difference, of course, is that the interpreters at Plimoth interact with you, and are brilliant at immersing you in their world.  Someday, I’ll write up the story of the strange afternoon I spent at Plimoth with a bunch of Soviet rocket scientists…

Being able to find a way in, out and about is key

Getting lost can be fun when the stakes are low, but when your enjoyment relies on being able to get around, it’s not nice to feel lost. I felt that too often in Sleep No More. I tend not to like exhibitions that channel you down one path from room to room, but I also don’t like feeling abandoned in a space. Unlike a storyworld game like Myst, where my action drove the narrative, in Sleep No More it was happening on its own timetable and I’d better keep up. Sink or swim doesn’t seem like a workable mindset for an enjoyable exhibition experience.

Story is king

Sure its a hoary old chestnut, but it’s truth is undimished by how it often its been repeated. Why did plain old Gatz keep me glued to my seat for seven hours while Sleep No More couldn’t hold me for half that time? The story. My main takeaway from the night might be that no amount of innovation and technical proficiency can overcome a weak story. The museum implications of this are obvious, I think. It doesn’t matter how cool your interface is if the content in your CMS is rotten, or incomplete, or just boring. Same for your exhibition, program, or event.

•••••

I’m sure there are others that will continue to bubble up to the surface. I’m looking forward to talking to others who’ve seen it. After that happens, I’ll add a postscript with whatever interesting thoughts come out of the discussion. If you’ve been, I’d love to hear what you thought of Sleep No More.

 

Review: The National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) in New York City

The National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) in New York City

The Entrance to MoMath.

These impressions are based on a quick visit on a crowded Friday afternoon during a school holiday two weeks after the grand opening of the institution.  So bear that in mind as you read on and give MoMath some mad props for trying to tackle mathematics in an interactive science center format. They do a great job of portraying mathematics as colorful, surprising, and capable of both producing beautiful results and having a deeply beautiful order.  I’ll definitely be going back after they’ve had a chance to hit their stride…

 No front-of-house, just house

When you enter MoMath, you’re confronted with a row of machines vending the badges that visitors have to wear in the museum. No staff, no elaborate instructions, just machines that dispense these.

MoMath doesn’t give you tickets. You get a badge. Makes it seem like everybody works there…

Surprisingly, they worked really well. We got our badges in short order and, I have to say, I was pretty impressed with how smoothly it all worked. The lines moved quickly, and people got about their visiting with minimal fuss.  It is a nice solution to the dilemma of collecting admissions without having to resort to hiring typically low-paid staff to be both ambassadors and money collectors.  It’s a job I held myself once, and it’s often not fun.  I’m glad to see institutions trying to find ways to provide service without doing it the way it’s always been done.

I’m reminded of a conversation I had recently with a director who was getting rid of the task setting up projectors for meetings as a someone’s job. I professed amazement, and I think I even said “Then who’ll set up the projectors?” The reply, of course was that staff would have to learn how to set up their own projectors. Having a specialist technician who did this job was an obsolete task in the same way that organizations used to have highly-trained specialist typists, who learned how to use expensive electric typewriters and were able to type letters quickly.  Now, everybody is expected to type their own dang letters, and in some organizations they have to figure out which end of the plug goes into the projector. Progress occurs in strange ways.

A square-wheeled bicycle that rolls smoothly. A crowd pleaser to be sure!

MoMath and digital media

Barry Joseph at AMNH was at MoMath a week before us and wrote a nice review focusing on their use of digital media. It’s worth reading.   I was less taken with their overall strategy for using digital media to carry all the interpretive content, though I am very excited to see how well some of their strategies work out.

Playing with inclined planes. Galileo would be proud.

Where’s the math?

MoMath has obviously made the decision not to provide interpretive content at the exhibits, just minimal instructions. If you want to get the meat of the educational content, you have to go to a separate kiosk, several of which are scattered around the exhibit halls.  Sometimes, just figuring out which exhibit went with the content on the screen was difficult. “Is this the Coaster Roller? No it’s that car thingie over there.” Doubling and tripling up of exhibits covered in each kiosk certainly cuts down on screen clutter, but I felt that as a strategy, combined with too-clever titles, it introduced too much of an obstacle to getting at the content I sought. I thought, too, that the separating of the experiential (doing the interactive) from the educational (using the kiosk) seemed like a way to both please visitors who were already mathematically-inclined, while allowing those weren’t to skip having to ingest any icky math.

A typical information screen.

Choose your level

My favorite part of our visit was seeing the concept of customizable digital content implemented at a decent scale. And done with no fanfare, too. I’ve listened to people talk about digital labels for years, decades, even. MoMath has developed a scheme that provides visitors with three levels of content and lets them switch on the fly seamlessly.

Close up of the level selector.

That’s it. At the top right of each screen there’s icons of three fractal triangles corresponding to the levels of content available. They seem to always default to basic, but you’re never more than a press away from changing it.  I loved it, but found that the actual implementation was spotty. Some labels had identical text at progressively smaller type sizes. Hopefully they’ll flesh it out as time goes on.

Where’s the math?

A projection that uses an image of your body to make a fractal display.

A multi person math maze.

Despite liking the idea of presenting customized digital labels, one concern I had as we muscled our way through the happy vacation crowds was the dearth of real math available as part of doing the activities. I knew enough to be able to see the connections between what people were doing and mathematics, but I wonder how much new math most of the visitors were acquiring.  This disconnect between experience design and informal education is one I’m seeing a lot of these days and it’s a little disheartening. It’s engaging, sure, but is it reaching the ostenisble audience? We’re actually looking at a possible research project to study what kinds of engagement lead to long-term knowledge gains.

An out of order sign, I think. It’s hard to tell sometimes. The clever writing’s a bit over the top.

I’m past clever signs, in case you hadn’t noticed. This out of order sign is a classic example of being clever at the expense of saying what you mean. I watched two different groups of visitors try to use the exhibit these signs were attached to because the signs don’t actually tell you anything useful, like “Don’t push the button because nothing’s gonna happen”.  I’ve written about my views on writing before. Museum writing shouldn’t be about demonstrating one’s cleverness. It should be clear as glass.

The exhibit titles, too I found really unhelpful. “Mathenaeum”? What happens in there? No idea… The point of an exhibit title is to allow someone to decide that they want to approach an exhibit closely enough to maybe use it.  Opaques titles may draw in some curious passersby, but they’ll turn away just as many. MoMath was full of those. If you knew a fair bit about math, then the plays on words could be amusing. If you didn’t, then they didn’t make it any easier to figure out what those exhibits were about.

So there you have it. It was a quick visit at a busy time in a brand new place that is taking on a steep challenge. And judging from the audience, they’re on a path with promise. Go see for yourself next time you’re in NYC.

Next up: Sleep No More!

Natural’s Not In It

Tis the season for existential doubts, it seems, because I think I don’t believe in exhibitions anymore. A number of factors have come together recently to make me question whether the way we develop exhibitions is the way we should be developing them.

1) I’ve read a number of articles (that I maddeningly can’t lay my hands on) problematizing exhibitions as money pits and resource drains on museums, at the expense of other things. Exhibitions are slow, they are expensive, and they tend to be rigid frameworks within which it’s hard to innovate. I am working on exhibition projects at the moment that are three or fours years away from opening. One project will have taken almost a decade by the time it opens. A decade. That’s a long time. And a lot of it will be spent in testing and evaluating and making sure it addresses the formal education frameworks and standards that govern so much of what we do nowadays. And in all that measuring, I often remember the sociologist W.B. Cameron’s quote that “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.”

2) While cleaning my office, I found a cryptic piece of note paper covered with random words like “magic”, “storyworlds”, “metanarratives” and more. After a few minutes of deciphering, I realized it was my scrawled notes from a talk Seb Chan and I had at the bar the New Media Consortium retreat last year. We’re both been interested in why there isn’t more “magic” in science exhibitions, and by that I mean that sense of wonder and mystery, not card tricks and disappearing rabbits. I’ve been having versions of this conversation for over a year and I just can’t shake it. The brilliant folks at the Medical Museion in Denmark have in their manifesto, “Jealously guard a place for wonder and mystery” and I think it’s advice not enough of us take.

3) In part, the series of posts I’m writing on Making a Museum from Scratch flows from this same impulse, particularly the concept of a continuum of transparency, with collections being most transparent and exhibitions being least. I am certain there’s something there, and we’re missing an opportunity to engage visitors differently.

4) I recently worked on an interactive for interpreting a period room. When I wrote the first spec for the application I realized that from the visitors’ vantage point, the room looked a lot like a scene from Myst. And that brought back a flood of memories of playing the game with my lovely and talented wife when it first came out. We’d come home from our jobs, make supper and look at each other across the table afterwards, “You wanna maybe play some…?” “I get to drive this time!” and ZOOM! we’d be at the computer, ready to spend a few hours getting lost in the game world. How would one make an exhibition that prompted that same kind of response?

5) All the museums on my list of must see places are ones that don’t do traditional exhibitions. I think they are all, at their core, emotional experiences; Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), the Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, the Museum of Broken Relationships in Zagreb, the Museum of Hunting and Nature in Paris…

This dissatisfaction with exhibitions has left me wondering what would an exhibition that’s not an exhibition look like? What’s the opposite of an exhibition?

Exhibition/Inhibition

Thanks to my Greek teacher in high school, I have an abiding love of knowing roots and meanings. The opposite of ex-hibition should be in-hibition. So I went to see what the etymology of the word might tell me. And this what the Online Etymology dictionary said:

exhibition (n.) 
early 14c., from O.Fr. exhibicion, exibicion “show, exhibition, display,” from L.L. exhibitionem (nom. exhibitio), noun of action from pp. stem of exhibere “to show, display,” lit. “to hold out,” from ex- “out” (see ex-) + habere “to hold” (see habit).

inhibition (n.) 
late 14c., “formal prohibition; interdiction of legal proceedings by authority;” also, the document setting forth such a prohibition, from O.Fr. inibicion and directly from L. inhibitionem (nom. inhibitio) “a restraining,” from pp. stem of inhibere “to hold in, hold back, keep back,” from in- “in, on” (see in- (2)) + habere “to hold” (see habit).

To hold out or to hold back? The minute I read this, I thought,”Oh, that’s interesting!” Revealing versus concealing is deeply involved in this, but “inhibition” is such a weird word with so many other meanings that it didn’t seem quite right as the opposite for (and antidote to) “exhibition”. When I threw all this in a document and showed it to Suse Cairns, she shared an article from Psychological Review, entitled “Power, Approach, and Inhibition” and I realized the piece that had been eluding me: power.

Power, Approach, and Inhibition
The authors start their article with a quote from Bertrand Russell, “The fundamental concept in social science is Power, in the same sense that Energy is the fundamental concept in physics . . . The laws of social dynamics are laws which can only be stated in terms of power.”

Here’s the abstract:

This article examines how power influences behavior. Elevated power is associated with increasedrewards and freedom and thereby activates approach-related tendencies. Reduced power is associated with increased threat, punishment, and social constraint and thereby activates inhibition-related tendencies. The authors derive predictions from recent theorizing about approach and inhibition and review relevant evidence. Specifically, power is associated with (a) positive affect, (b) attention to rewards, (c) automatic information processing, and (d) disinhibited behavior. In contrast, reduced power is associated with (a) negative affect; (b) attention to threat, punishment, others’ interests, and those features of the self that are relevant to others’ goals; (c) controlled information processing; and (d) inhibited social behavior. The potential moderators and consequences of these power-related behavioral patterns are discussed.

The authors’ basic argument is that people’s feeling of power in a given situation determines whether they feel like engaging (approach) or holding back (inhibition). This power influences the balance of approach and inhibition tendencies. So, elevated power activates approach-related processes, and reduced power activates inhibition-related processes.

Or as Gang of Four put it,

“Natural is not in it,
Your relations are all power,
We all have good intentions,
but all with strings attached.”

Natural’s Not in It, Gang of Four

Sounds kinda like an exhibition team, doesn’t it? We wish visitors only good things like learning, and enjoyment. But only to the extent that they are willing to do it on our terms. The power balance is entirely on the exhibition’s side.

If you can find the article, it’s an interesting read. Of the authors’ 12 propositions, several of them express things I’ve witnessed in exhibitions I’ve worked on or visited.

• Elevated Power Increases the Experience and Expression of Positive Affect
• Reduced Power Increases the Experience and Expression of Negative Affect
• Elevated Power Increases the Sensitivity to Rewards
• Reduced Power Increases the Sensitivity to Threat and Punishment
• Elevated Power Increases the Likelihood of Approach-Related Behavior
• Reduced Power Increases Behavioral Inhibition

So I wonder if it’s a question of empowering visitors, or is it rather a question of inhibiting ourselves more in how we exhibit, in being less strident and overt?

Shifting the balance in the power equation
Power, Approach and Inhibition made me think that maybe what I want to do is be more explicit in inhibiting the dominating power of the exhibition so that visitors have more personal agency and power within the space. I think it’s a zero-sum game so raising everybody’s power level doesn’t sound plausible to me. So how do we push the power balance further in the visitors’ favor without totally abrogating our responsibility to be accurate, honest, and authoritative? How could we inhibit the exhibition?

The first thing that popped into my mind was another tidbit from Copenhagen, “Use exhibitions to find out, not to disseminate what you already know”, which has a certain power to it. If the process of making an exhibition were itself more of a discovery process, and less of a dissemination process, that might inhibit us more, since we’d be coming from a place of uncertainty, and learning as we went along, just like we want our visitors to learn.

The more I thought about it, though, the more I kept coming back to the idea of storyworlds.

The exhibition as a storyworld?
I think one of the most obvious ways could be to treat them more like immersive narratives than as collections of discrete experiences that are thematically linked, which is what I’d argue most non-art exhibitions are nowadays. If you’ve read this blog for any time, you know I’m no booster for gamification (ack!). That said, there are valuable lessons to be learned from game theorists. Chris Crawford (I think) first proposed the notion that a game is a world in which a story occurs and that players are free to move through this bounded space and time and encounter pieces of a story, or follow a story arc. This has clear parallels to what museums do, and addresses a lot of the concerns I’ve voiced about what exhibitions lack..

This kind of storyworld is by nature immersive. There is enough to it that the player (or visitor) feels part of it, and is able to move through it in a self-directed way. It is also decidedly non-linear, which museum exhibitions have to be.

A storyworld is a narrative. There is a premise, and (at least) one plot unfolds over the course of the narrative. They may intertwine, double back, and perform other gymnastics, but they are there contiunously throughout the experience.

A storyworld is a constructivist endeavor, and therefore deeply personal. You put together the elements as you navigate the space, and your edifice of knowledge will look different than anyone else’s. This was at least half the fun of Myst. I’d decide that everything we’d learned meant one thing, and my wife would often have constructed a completely different narrative. Part of our playing the game was the dialogic interaction we’d have about what was going on.

Storyworlds allow visitors to have more of a personalized experience, without the technological backflips we try to do to encourage them to “personalize” the experience. Sleep No More is a great example of this. The audience decides where they want to go, and can follow the action, follow a particular character, or just wander randomly through the story of Macbeth.

There are probably other parallels as well, but I haven’t had the time to let this idea season. I’ve been sick for days and hope you will be able to make something of this, or point out the obvious flaws in my thinking. Or give me examples or counterexamples.

 

For More:

Keltner, Dacher, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson, “Power, Approach, and Inhibition” in Psychological Review, 2003, Vol. 110, No. 2, 265–284

Drinking About Museums:BOS, December 12th, 6pm

Cocktail Time by Flickr user ambernambrose

Next Drinking About Museums

Wednesday, December 12th at 6pm
Cambridge Brewing Company, One Kendall Square

Come join us at the  Cambridge Brewing Company in Kendall Square, Cambridge.  We’re rolling low key for December; beer and conversation. We’ll also be tossing around ideas for 2013 gatherings, so if you have something you’d like to share or do, let us know! I know some of our game designer friends are interested in trying a fun activity for January, so don’t be bashful.

Please RSVP to Jenn Schmitt (if you haven’t already) so we can give CBC a head count and hopefully avoid some of the table devouring we did last month. They were good sports about it, but it’d be better if we warn them.

I’ll be there a bit before 6PM and try to scope out a good spot. Call or DM me if you need directions.

See ya there,

Ed

P.S. As always, forward this to your friends and colleagues you think should join us!

P.P.S. Mr Koven J. Smith, The Godfather of DAM, has started a Google+ community for the global DAM community. If you’re a Google+ type, look us up and join in.

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