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Page history last edited by Nina Simon 14 years, 4 months ago

Exhibits that Network Visitors

 

    In some cases, exhibits explicitly require two or more people to play the game or work the device. In 1998, the PISEC study showed that family learning in science centers is enhanced when multiple people can get their hands on an exhibit, and many science centers have developed exhibits that allow visitors to interact together. Their actions, however, can be disruptive to each other, as in the case of the Exploratorium's "spinning blackboard" exhibit, in which visitors can make patterns in a spinning disc of sand. In the original version of this exhibit, visitors were able to easily and unthinkingly mess up each other's patterns, which led both to confusion and frustration. When the exhibit was redesigned, the disc was split into several co-located discs, so that visitors could create their own sand patterns without physical disruption while remaining in discussion range with other pattern-makers. This redesign resulted in a significant increase in number of patterns created, presumably because people were less frustrated by disruption and more able to fulfill their exploratory interests. (source: http://www.exploratorium.edu/partner/pdf/Interacty_article3_finweb.pdf) That said, the redesign also effectively made the exhibit less social by reducing the need for visitors to work together to support each others' learning. In a chaotic environment like the Exploratorium, it may be too much to expect strangers to coordinate their actions, and the potential for social engagement around objects may be reduced.

    So how do you build an exhibit that is social without being disruptive to individual learning? Remember the me-to-we concept. The challenge with the spinning blackboard exhibit was that each individual entered on her own but found the interactions of other individuals disruptive rather than additive to her experience. Each visitor's personal experience was ruined rather than enhanced by the platform that networked individual actions in community.

    That spinning disc of sand is a good physical metaphor for a poorly designed network platform, in which instead of building on individual actions, individuals' contributions were muddled and eroded by the network. Imagine a dog park in which you instantly lose your dog, or an online social network that keeps mixing up your content with that created by others. It's not appealing.

    To fix this problem, the Exploratorium reasserted the primacy of the "me" experience by separating individuals' interactions with the spinning disc by giving each visitor or family group their own disc. The question is how to retain the communal component as well. One of the simplest ways to do this (which the Exploratorium employs successfully) is to put exhibits out in the open at tabletop height and let people crowd around them from all angles. Visitors get to safely engage from their own personal space, but no one has a "better" position relative to the interaction than others. This low-tech principle is also at work in some of the most successful multi-touch table installations in museums.  When well-designed, multi-touch tables promote both personal exploration and interpersonal play. People feel comfortable crowding around these tables and engaging with each other, because each person can control their zone of the table with their own hand. No one can take over "your spot," but there are often opportunities to work collaboratively to beneficial group result. Everyone comes to the exhibit equally, and it's easy to look up from what you are doing to check out what's going on at another station or talk to another visitor. By entering via your own safe space, you are more willing to engage with others.

    The Tech Museum of Innovation houses of the strangest implementations of this concept in their Netpl@net exhibition. Netpl@net featured an installation of the three-dimensional virtual world Second Life across eight computers. This area was incredibly popular, and the computers were always occupied. It sounds like a social nightmare; a bunch of kids, staring at individual computers, engaging with each other virtually in Second Life via pixelated avatars. But surprisingly, it was a highly social exhibit. The computers were placed in a ring, with each visitor seated in front of a monitor in a circle. Kids would lean over and talk to each other about what was happening onscreen. They yelled across to each other, and they burst into laughter together as someone's avatar fell into the water or floated into the sky.  By entering the social environment through distinct, personally controlled portals, what looked like an isolationist exhibit became a highly social space.

    Another fascinating social exhibit is the Internet Arm Wrestling exhibit, which was installed in six science centers in the US. This exhibit allows people to virtually arm wrestle with other people who are not physically co-located. When you sit down to use it, you grasp a metal arm (meant to simulate your partner's arm) and are connected to another visitor at an identical kiosk. This visitor may be a few feet from you or hundreds of miles away at another science center. You receive a "go" signal, and then you start pushing. The metal arm exerts a force on your arm equal to the force exerted by your remote partner on his own metal arm. Eventually, one partner overpowers the other, and the game is over.

    What makes Internet Arm Wrestling incredible--and a bit bizarre--is the extent to which strangers feel comfortable socializing around this game. Each player watches a webcam feed of her partner as they play, and early on, some of science centers removed the audio functionality of the webcams because kids were yelling obscenities at each other through the cameras. And while theoretically the exhibit can be played by visitors who are in different science centers, the realities of time zones mean that you are more likely to play against someone in the same museum as you than somewhere remote. I watched piles of kids use this exhibit at the New York Hall of Science in 2007, socializing both at each kiosk and across the kiosks. In some cases, multiple kids would gang up on one kiosk and literally try to sit on the arm to exert force on it. Kids would push on the arm as hard as they could, then turn their heads to look and laugh with their opponents at the other kiosk, then turn back and shove on. In other cases strangers, adults and kids, would stick out their tongues at each other in the cameras or make funny faces to try to distract their opponents from the task at hand.

    Think about how unusual this is. Strangers, adults and children, engaging in highly familiar social behavior through a set of metal arms. Would you ever challenge an unknown child (or adult, for that matter) to an arm-wrestling match in a museum? Would you ever challenge a stranger to an arm-wrestling match unprompted, ever? The Internet Arm Wrestling exhibit is a social object that connects people in a social experience that would almost never happen without the object involved. The object makes the people more social rather than the other way around!

    There's a multi-player online game called Just Letters that operates on the same principle. Just Letters is an online version of refrigerator magnets in which you use your cursor to move around letters to make words. There's no particular goal or scoring mechanism: what makes Just Letters special is the social experience. Just Letters is a multiplayer activity; log on, and you are shifting around letters with 20 or 30 strangers. Sometimes it's collaborative, but more frequently, you'll find yourself exclaiming the game's tag line: "Someone keeps stealing my letters..."

    And that's what makes it unpredictable, lively, and fun. The online interface enables strangers to do something that would be considered rude in person--to steal and swap without asking. If you encountered a similar experience in a museum--a giant magnetic poetry wall, perhaps--it's likely that people would interact with the wall singly or in their pre-determined groups, reading and creating their own poems. But I doubt that visitors would often interact real-time with other users of the wall--even to ask nicely if they could borrow a word. The social barriers to interaction among strangers are too high.

    Just Letters is mediated by two layers of social objects: the letters, and individuals' computers. The fact that individual users engage from the safe dominion of their own computers empowers them to play games together, debate each other on discussion boards, and connect on social networking sites. Plus, the anonymity of the web decreases the chances for social stigma and judgment. Of course, there's a downside to these technology-based interactions; the same disassociation that makes users comfortable enough to share with one another makes them comfortable enough to "flame" each other with cruel remarks that would never pass muster in the real world. However, when the context is respectful and/or the interaction limited, most experiences are positive.

    It's interesting to think about how the same trick that makes Just Letters work could be employed in museums to help people overcome discomfort in interactions with strangers. There are many interactives in which multiple inputs from different visitors can affect the output; however, it's rare that the input of strangers is construed positively. Usually, you're just staring frustratedly at that kid who's "screwing it all up" by interacting in a way that doesn't support your vision or goal.

    But there are some examples that work, and they usually work by encouraging visitors to interact with one another through the lens of technology. Consider, for example, robots. If you put a bunch of visitors in a pen and asked them to try to grab the most balls, few would aggressively steal balls from others. But give those same visitors remote controls for robots in a pen, and all bets are off. The robot, like the online persona, serves as an "extender" that imparts your energy and motivation without making you or other visitors uncomfortable.

    I'd love to see more interactive design that focuses on promoting social behavior, whether collaborative or competitive. Imagine a real world version of Just Letters where there are two magnetic walls, back to back. They look disconnected, but as soon as you move a word on one side, a word on the other side moves too. Suddenly, you start peeking around the wall, wondering what the heck that other person is doing. The literal barrier between you creates a social environment for play, a bridge for stranger-to-stranger interaction.

    One of the most powerful designed, highly repeatable social object experiences I've seen of this type is in the queue for the Mummy ride at the Universal Studios Islands of Adventure theme park in Orlando, Florida. As people shuffle through an eerie, Egyptian-style abandoned movie set, there's a point at which visitors occasionally scream and jump as they are hit by a blast of air from the floor (an active, provocative social object). The blast of air is not run by the ride system; instead, it's controlled by guests further along in the line.  Those guests can covertly watch people approach the air-blaster, and can shoot it off at just the right moment to elicit an exciting reaction. The activation of the air blast is a transitive act that connects the blasters to the blasted in a highly physical, provocative, and personal way. The physical separation of the two activities means that each group can enjoy the social experience on their end without feeling mean-spirited or intimidated by the other group.

    Not all mediating social objects are successful. A notable example of objects that may reduce, not enhance, social experiences are overly human-like active objects (robots, puppets, dolls). I'm not talking about Roombas or robots that move around soccer balls but humanoid objects that chat with you at cocktail parties and in some technology museums. While people are mostly comfortable and emotionally responsive in a positive way to explicitly non-human intelligent objects like the robotic baby dinosaur Pleo (and most pets), objects that attempt to engage in human-like interpersonal discourse can be off-putting or downright creepy. This uncomfortability is caused by the "zombie effect," otherwise known as the "uncanny valley," in which people respond with revulsion to objects that are too similar to humans without being human themselves. Roboticists have been studying this effect since the 1970s, and have documented its impact on everything from the way people respond to physical robots to the way they respond to computer-generated characters in films and video games. People are happy to respond emotionally to explicitly non-human objects, but when you slide into the grey zone between human and non-human objects, things get too uncanny for comfort. I raise this issue not because I expect robots to take over museums, but to point out that there are ways that designing social objects can go too far for its intended purpose. Just as you can imagine ways to create something too personal, too provocative, or too active to be appealing to visitors, it is also possible to create objects that are too social to succeed.

 

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Comments (1)

hadrasaurus said

at 5:43 pm on Nov 8, 2009

Years ago the Liberty Science Center in New Jersey had an exhibit that featured a (then) new plastic rod and connector construction toy called K-nex. In addition to the very large ferris wheel and other items built for exhibit there was a large supply of K-nex that the visitors used to build their own items. One of the few rules was that visitors could reuse visitor-built items or parts if they were not being worked on for ten minutes. This had the interesting effect of encouraging builders to share and exchange pieces or to wait patiently to built on or modify someone elses creation. Soon the visitors were sharing tips and techniques with each other for construction and showing off their constructions to each other. There was an added feature that you could purchase your construction (no counting pieces, prices were based on a per pound basis). This created an additional encounter with a museum store clerk. The clerk was very soon the proud recipient of detailed explanations from visitors of what was built and why.

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