Low-Tech Socially Networked Exhibitions

    What is the exhibition equivalent of the Living Library? How do you design physical infrastructure that ties individuals together in meaningful ways? Designing physical environments or institutions that operate on stage four principles is incredibly difficult. It requires that each individual have a personalized profile that evolves with her growing relationship with the institution. It requires that these user profiles be networked in some common system with rules for how different profile items interrelate. And then it requires an output mechanism that helps visitors physically connect to the people and experiences with which they have network affinity. Throw in the real-time nature of a cultural experience, the pre-existing families and social groups who visit, visitors' reticence to participate socially in formal institutions, and archaic data systems, and this may sound downright impossible.

    But designing an entire institution that functions this way might not be the goal. The goal is to promote social learning, participation by visitors, and interpersonal exchange around museum content. And with these goals in mind, there are low-tech ways to perform or simulate every component of a stage four system, many of which are more effective than their high-tech counterparts. 

    Consider the example of people being able to save their favorite exhibits and share them with others. We can all imagine complex ways to do this with mobile devices (and many such systems are under development as of early 2010). A visitor could register her phone with the museum, so that her number is uniquely associated with her personal profile. As she moves through the museum, she could use a web-based application to tag her favorite exhibits, or perhaps she could text a rating for each exhibit to SMS short codes posted at the bottom of each label. She could choose to "send" her favorites to individuals, or to broadcast them to the whole network of people using the system. As an even higher-tech alternative, you could imagine a system in which visitors' motions are tracked, and standing in front of an exhibit for an abnormally long period of time would trigger an entry marking that exhibit as "compelling" whereas exhibits that occupy just a few seconds might be marked "dull" or "skipped." Again, the technology today may be unsavory or clunky, but these possibilities are on the horizon and there are some institutions experimenting in this domain.

    Want a low-tech alternative? When the Science Museum of Minnesota launched the exhibition Race: Are We So Different? they knew it would generate conversation. Paul Martin, VP of exhibits, took several photos of people in the exhibition over its run, and he noted something strange: there were many photos in which someone was pointing at an exhibit label, artifact, or component. Often visitors were pointing at things that are frequently considered dull interpretation--quotes, statistics, facts and figures. But the statistics and facts were shocking—covering topics like income disparity among races or the genetic similarities among people of different races. The design was simple, but the content was so remarkable that visitors felt the need to just to consume it but to point it out to others. As Martin commented, "you don't point at things when you're alone." Pointing is an incredibly low-tech version of the favoriting system. When you point at something, you are effectively suggesting to the people around you: "look at that." Visitors see things that intrigue them, point at them, and other visitor look. The Race exhibit served as a facilitation of potential dialogue based on a very simple finger-based exchange.

    Pointing is a social behavior that works best in physically proximate, real-time situations. Past incidences of pointing in Race or any exhibit are not saved and networked for future use; you can't look at the exhibit label and see that "57 people pointed at this in the last week." Nor would that information necessarily be compelling to most visitors. The thing that makes pointing compelling is the fact that it is an interpersonal interaction. When you point something out to a stranger, you are taking a risk. You are effectively saying, "this thing I am pointing at is so important, so cool or special or surprising, that despite the fact that I know next to nothing about you, I think you should see it." It makes the pointee feel special to be singled out (even if only selected for physical proximity to the pointer), and both people enjoy the intimacy of a shared experience. This intimacy and specialness is lost if you move to a more generalized "57 people pointed at this" networked system. That statement has very little meaning to most people because it is entirely decontextualized. What do I care what 57 random visitors thought? I only care what a stranger points at if they are pointing it out to me.

    Of course, the riskiness of the exchange also makes stranger-to-stranger pointing quite rare. You are more likely to point something out to a friend or companion. The better you know someone, the more you can tailor the things you point out to them in a variety of settings. When interacting with the social network of people whose profiles are known to us, we are able to meaningfully abstract the pointing experience. That's where it becomes useful to send certain tidbits of information to particular people or groups of people. The news I want to share with my rock-climbing friends is different from that I want to share with my museum friends. When I'm with them, I point out different things.

    The "pointiness" of an exhibit is a metric that reflects the extent to which the content motivates visitors to share things with strangers and friends alike. What affects how likely a visitor is to point things out in an exhibit? The content certainly matters (and we'll discuss that in the next chapter on social objects) but so does the extent to which visitors feel that they are pointing things out to friends or associates rather than strangers. The better individuals can express their unique interests and orientations, the more easily they can form affinity networks with other visitors, and the more likely they are to perceive those people as less strange.

    Consider the story of the Worcester City Museum in the UK, which ran a “Top 40” activity in the summer of 2009 in which they encouraged visitors to vote for their favorite painting on display. The rankings were re-tabulated each week based on visitors’ votes, and visitors were encouraged to submit comments and photos about their favorite paintings. The goal of this project was to promote … (from Philippa interview)

This exploration of Race and Top40 boils down to two design questions:

   1. How do we let people personalize their identity in the museum such that they feel less like strangers and more like potential associates?

   2. How do we design spaces that support sharing and intimacy among associated visitors?

    These questions take us away from the design of nonsensical "pointing data networks" and towards something more essential: supporting interpersonal connections. If we think about network effects not in terms of data collection but in terms of a useful outcome for visitors and institutions, we can design platforms that reflect our participatory values. For some institutions or exhibits, promoting dialogue may be a value, in which case the "pointiness" of an exhibit is a useful goal to work into the design process. In other cases, other values, like creativity, authentic sharing, group collaboration, or reflection on others' experiences might be primary, in which case different platforms (and related metrics and mechanisms) would be more appropriate.

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