Designing Platforms for Social Objects

    Museum exhibitions are typically designed to support visitor experiences around objects. Designers often focus on promoting one or two types of experiences, and may particularly provide aesthetic, narrative, multi-sensory, educational, entertaining, or interactive environments. Only rarely are exhibitions intended to be social, and few exhibitions are designed to promote the exhibits or artifacts within them explicitly as social objects.

    What does it mean to design an exhibition as a social environment? The extent to which an exhibition is social is governed not by what designers provide but what visitor actions and social behaviors they support. Let’s compare the actions supported by a traditional exhibition to those provided by an online social network, Flickr, in the context of the presentation of photographs.

    First, consider supported visitor actions in a traditional museum photograph exhibition. In galleries, visitors can look at photos hanging on the walls. They can read information about each photo and its creator in label text, and they can probably also access information about how the photograph is catalogued in the museum's collection database. In some cases, visitors may be allowed to take their own pictures of the photographs; in other cases, they are prohibited from capturing any likeness of the artifacts or even their labels. In some installations, visitors may be able to share personal thoughts about the photographs in a comment book at the entrance or exit to the gallery. The institution also typically offers visitors the chance to buy images of the photographs in a catalog or postcard set in the museum's retail shop.

    Now, let’s turn to the social web and the visitor actions supported by Flickr. On Flickr, users can look at photos. They can read information about each photo and its creator, as well as additional information about how, where, and when the photo was taken. They can leave comments on each photo. They can mark particular images as favorites in their personal collections of favorites. They can make notes directly on sub-areas of photos to mark details of interest. They can add tags that serve as descriptive keywords for each photo. They can view the comments, notes, and tags created by other users who have looked at each photo. They can send personal messages to each photo's creator, or to other commenters, with other questions or comments. They can invite any photographer to submit the photo to special groups or collections hosted in other areas of Flickr. They can send individual photos to friends by email, or include them in blog posts or entries on other social networks. They can talk about each photo on Flickr and elsewhere.

    It’s apparent from this comparison that Flickr supports a long list of social behaviors that are not available in museums and galleries. This doesn't mean that Flickr provides a better overall photography exhibition experience; on the contrary, from an aesthetic perspective, it is much more appealing to see photographs beautifully mounted and lit than arranged digitally amidst a jumble of text. In the case of the "notes" function in Flickr, the social activity of adding notes deliberately distorts the view of the photo by covering the image in rectangles indicating the locations of noted details. Activating an object in a social way has design implications that can seriously diminish the visual and evocative power of the artifact.

  But providing social functions around objects also promotes other kinds of user experiences that are incredibly valuable. Consider this photograph, taken by John Vachon in 1943 and titled "Workers leaving Pennsylvania shipyards, Beaumont, Texas." In January 2008, the Library of Congress offered this image on the Flickr Commons, a special area of Flickr reserved for images from public institutions like museums and libraries. This image is not on display at the Library of Congress. You can view it in the Library of Congress' online database, but that image is smaller and less attractively presented than it is on Flickr. In other words, there was no pre-existing way for visitors to experience this image in a designed context that promotes its aesthetic or historical power. But now, there is a way to experience it socially on Flickr.

     As of August 2009, this image had 53 user-supplied tags, 8 user-created notes, and 14 community comments. It was included in a Flickr group run by Peruvians about "People - costumes and customs no limits." And it was featured in an unknown number of blog posts and personal emails sent from the site. The comments and notes on the Flickr page include several compelling and useful discussions. People answered each other's questions about why the "Pennsylvania" shipyards were located in Texas. Two people shared personal recollections of growing up near these shipyards, and one added historical links to a race riot that happened in the town of Beaumont the same month the photo was taken. Several people commented on the both the integration of the men and the physical separation of the black and white workers; as one user noted, "Looks like 'quitting time' was as segregated as the rest of life." 

    These Flickr users weren’t just saying, "nice pic." They answered each other's questions about the content, shared personal stories, and made socio-political commentaries. They did things that are not supported for people who visit the real collection or view the photo in the Library of Congress database, and it arguably created a more engaging, more educational experience with the content.

    Is all of this social value worth the aesthetic tradeoffs that Flickr's design implies? That depends on the institutional goals and priorities. If the Library of Congress’ goal was to encourage visitors to engage with each other about the stories and information at hand, then Flickr was the ideal choice. And similarly, if you want to encourage visitors to engage socially around your content, you should consider ways to build social functionality into exhibits, even if it means diminishing other aspects of the design.

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