Actively engaging museum visitors & why it matters
When it comes to creating meaningful museum experiences, offering moments for visitors to actively engage is essential. How can interaction design be used as a tool for connecting audiences to an exhibition’s message?
Lest We Forget, a highly interactive temporary exhibition in Abu Dhabi developed by GSM Project. The exhibition was created for a major grassroots arts and heritage initiative launched by students at the Sheikh Zayed University that aims to archive, preserve, and share vernacular photographs and oral histories of the United Arab Emirates.
Exhibitions, whether temporary or permanent, have always been a museum's enduring means of communicating with the public. So, when it comes to an institution’s mission of sharing knowledge or preserving cultural heritage, for example, an exhibition’s ability to communicate a compelling message that touches, inspires or even changes a visitor’s perspective, ultimately has to come from a place of common ground. Stories that make a subject socially and culturally relevant become the bridge to learning, to understanding, to remembering. But how do we create experiences that are captivating and culturally significant? First, we need to question the way we speak to and engage with our audiences.
In the context of museum exhibitions, preserving and sharing knowledge, ideas, and history all come down to education. We set learning objectives for an exhibition; we want visitors to discover new ideas, we want to broaden their understanding of the world around them. But, audiences aren’t exactly consuming information the same way they used to. With a sea of data - text, images, videos, gifs, and other digital artifacts at our constant disposal, the internet has greatly changed the way we receive and filter information. We’ve become increasingly unwilling to dedicate all of our attention to any one given thing. Serina Tarkhanian, Interaction Designer at GSM, explains that “in the museum context, when we’re designing for the visitor experience, we know that we really don’t have more than 30 seconds to spark a person’s interest, communicating something meaningful, before they’re on to the next thing.”
The Ajax Experience in Amsterdam is an interactive sports experience and museum dedicated to the legendary Dutch football club AFC Ajax. While chronicling the history of experience, the museum also immerses visitors in the team's training program. Interactive stations present visitors with soccer challenges related to things like technique, speed, agility and strategy.
Traditionally, museum exhibitions encourage audiences to follow a predetermined path, observing objects and images, reading text and contemplating the connections between them. President of GSM Yves Mayrand breaks it down to something universal: “Humans are multi-sensory. We are constantly using all of our senses, whatever we are doing, wherever we are. Despite this known fact, too many exhibitions only use sight.”
What’s also missing in this communication model is feedback. How is the visitor responding to an exhibition’s content? Can a museum become more of a living, breathing, empathetic being able to adapt to the visitor’s natural instinct for discovery? Like the world of education, museums can and should be exploring the realm of alternative learning. For this reason, interaction design has become a pillar to creating experiences that actively engage visitors and adapt overtime based on their interests.
Star Wars™ Identities is a touring exhibition experience that investigates the concept of human identity through the memorable characters of the Star Wars films. Every visitor is presented with an interactive quest that is unique, meaning that no two journeys are alike.
The Cosmodome invites visitors to live a series of emotional and interactive virtual space adventures while inspiring curiosity about space and astronautics in the young and young at heart. By selecting their own missions, every visitor experiences a different journey into space travel.
At the core of this practice is the idea of considering the myriad ways visitors will interpret and experience an exhibition and it’s content. It may seem obvious, but as Interaction Designer at GSM Erika Kiessner explains, "every exhibition experience is a collection of small personal interactions and pivotal moments along the visitor’s journey, supporting a broader subject and learning experience. Since each journey is a little different, no two visitors will experience an exhibition in the same way." These interactive moments within an exhibition can come in many forms: digital interfaces that allow you to explore a series of stories, images, films or other content, mind games that encourage visitors to tackle complex ideas, or even physical interactions that stimulate the senses, expressing complex phenomenon through doing rather than simply looking.
At the Lest We Forget exhibition in Abu Dhabi, a workshop-type space was created as a nod to the university context where the Lest We Forget photo project first took shape. In it, three custom-designed interactive games brought the art of archiving, sorting, and tagging photographs to life, shining a playful light on a subject that could otherwise be considered dry.
But, when it comes to interaction design, it isn’t just about integrating technology into a visitor experience for the sake of it. It should always start with a learning objective - technology should be used as a means to education rather than simply an end in itself. That’s why we always put content first. As Yves Mayrand explains, “be it objects, knowledge or stories, exhibitions are content driven. It’s the designer’s job to reveal - rather than conceal - the content …”.
As Erika explains, “it’s often not enough to simply observe an artefact. Sometimes it can be really cool. But, you definitely get a deeper, more powerful experience, if you can be active in your exploration of an exhibition’s content.” Visitors end up walking away with memories of things they were able to test first-hand. What they remember is a fulfilling experience rather than a bank of facts. They remember an experience that sparked conversation, that offered insights they’d never considered before.