Exhibits « The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

If you’re a fan of “Project Runway,” you’re no doubt familiar with Tim Gunn’s signature phrase. He employs this particularly around the point in each week’s process, where the designers have chosen their fabrics and made at least their first efforts at turning their design into reality. It’s at about this time in the process where the designers have to forge ahead or take the last chance to start over and re-conceptualize.

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This week, it feels like that’s where we are with the FCL Lab. We’re about one-and-a-half years into our five years of funding, and about a year behind on technology development. Which means, we’ve got the ideas, and the materials, but haven’t really gotten as far along as we’d like in the actual putting it together.

For us, it’s a bigger problem, too; the development (in this case, the video booth as well as the exhibit itself) is holding up the research. As Shawn put it to me, we’re spending too much time and effort trying to design the perfect task instead of “making it work” with what we have. That is, we’re going to re-conceptualize and do the research we can do with what we have in place, while still going forward with the technology development, of course.

So, for the video booth, that means that we’re not going to wait to be able to analyze what people reflect on during the experience, but take the chance to use what we have, namely a bunch of materials, and analyze the interactions that *are* taking place. We’re not going to wait to make the tsunami task perfect to encourage what we want to see in the video booth. Instead, we’re going to invite several different folks with different research lenses to take a look at the video we get at the tank itself and let us know what types of learning they’re seeing. From there, we can refine what data we want to collect.

It’s an important lesson in grant proposal writing, too: Once you’ve been approved, you don’t have to stick word-for-word to your plan. It can be modified, in ways big and small. In fact, it’s probably better that way.

Awhile ago, I promised to share some of my experiences in collecting data on visitors’ exhibit use as part of this blog. Now that I’ve actually been back at it for the past few weeks, I thought it might be time to actually share what I’ve found. As it is winter here in the northern hemisphere, our weekend visitation to the Hatfield Visitor Center is generally pretty low. This means I have to time my data collection carefully if I don’t want to spend an entire day waiting for subjects and maybe only collect data on two people. That’s what happened on a Sunday last month; the weather on the coast was lovely, and visitation was minimal. I have been recently collecting data in our Rhythms of the Coastal Waters exhibit, which has additional data collection challenges in that it is basically the last thing people might see before they leave the center, it’s dim because it houses the projector-based Magic Planet, and there are no animals, unlike just about every other corner of the Visitor Center. So, I knocked off early and went to the beach. Then I definitely rescheduled another day I was going to collect data because it was a sunny weekend day at the coast.

On the other hand, on a recent Saturday we hosted our annual Fossil Fest. While visitation was down from previous years, only about 650 compared to 900, this was plenty for me, and I was able to collect data on 13 people between 11:30 and 3:30, despite an octopus feeding and a lecture by our special guest fossil expert. Considering data collection, including recruitment, consent, the experiment, and debrief probably runs 15 minutes, I thought that this was a big win. In addition, I only got one refusal from a group that said they were on their way out and didn’t have time. It’s amazing how much better things go if you a) lead with “I’m a student doing research,” b) mention “it will only take about 5-10 minutes”, and c) don’t record any video of them. I suspect it also helps that it’s not summer, as this crowd is more local and thus perhaps more invested in improving the center, whereas summer tourists might be visiting more for the experience, to say they’ve been there, as John Falk’s museum visitor “identity” or motivation research would suggest. This would seem to me like a motivation that would not make you all that eager to participate. Hm, sounds like a good research project to me!

Another reason I suspect things went well was that I am generally approaching only all-adult groups, and I only need one participant from each group, so someone can watch the kids if they get bored. I did have one grandma get interrupted a couple times, though, by her grandkids, but she was a trooper and shooed them away while she finished. When I was recording video and doing interviews about the Magic Planet, the younger kids in the group often got bored, which made recruiting families and getting good data somewhat difficult, though I didn’t have anyone quit early once they agreed to participate. Also, as opposed to prototyping our salmon forecasting exhibit, I wasn’t asking people to sit down at a computer and take a survey, which seemed to feel more like a test to some people. Or it could have been the exciting new technology I was using, the eye-tracker, that was appealing to some.

Interestingly, I also had a lot of folks observe their partners as the experiment happened, rather than wander off and meet up later, which happened more with the salmon exhibit prototyping, perhaps because there was not much to see if one person was using the exhibit. With the eye-tracking and the Magic Planet, it was still possible to view the images on the globe because it is such a large exhibit. Will we ever solve the mystery of what makes the perfect day for data collection? Probably not, but it does present a good opportunity for reflection on what did and didn’t seem to work to get the best sample of your visitorship. The cameras we’re installing are of course intended to shed some light on how representative these samples are.

What other influences have you seen that affect whether you have a successful or slow day collecting exhibit use data?

This past week at HMSC, we have been getting back to my old favorite – exhibit design and prototyping. Katie and I have been planning the prototype of the video booth that will go in to the new wave tank area, which is intended to capture visitor reflections when they test out their wave-resilient lego structures in the large tsunami tank.

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The idea behind the booth is visitors will build and test their lego structures in the tank, and then have the chance to review footage of their “crash” via an overhead camera above the tsunami tank. The video booth will encourage visitors to reflect on their footage and video record their response. Eventually, the reflections we capture will be used to research how visitors reflect on design and test activities in an ocean engineering context.

Depending on the application interface that is being designed for us to run the video review and record capabilities, the prototype will start simple with a touchscreen device behind a curtained booth. We are hoping that “curtaining” the booth will give it an element of mystery for visitors, and hence a hook to use the exhibit – inspired by our lab group’s visit to the Science Factory last summer, where we played for a long time in a darkened booth that allowed us to explore photosensitive materials.

With the help of Becca and Susan’s interpretive expertise, myself and Allison are also in the process of working on some signage to help visitors explore how different construction materials will affect their lego structure wave-resilience. Mark had the idea to weaken different color legos to represent different materials resistant to wave impact, an idea which Harrison began experimenting with last spring. In this way, the weakened legos are models of different construction materials and, in essence, are weakened using a drilling tool so they have less “cling” to the base plate their fixed to during tank testing. Some are heavily weakened to represent wood, some only moderately to represent concrete, and some not at all to represent steel. The idea is to encourage visitors to experiment with differing “materials” and to generate hypotheses about material effect on design as they build and test their structures.

I love exhibit prototyping, so these tasks have been very enjoyable for me so far! I’ll post some pictures once these get out on the floor.

Our climate change “exhibit” is rapidly losing its primacy as an exhibit on which we do research to instead becoming a research platform that we set up as an exhibit. The original plan was to design an exhibit on a multitouch table around climate change and research, among other things, how users interact and what stories they choose to tell as related to their “6 Americas” identity about climate change.

After Mark attended the ASTC conference, in talking with Ideum folks and others, we’ve decided what we really need to build is a research platform on the table, with exhibit content just as the vehicle for doing that research. That means instead of designing content and asking research questions about it, we’re taking the approach of proposing the research questions, then finding content to put on that allows us to investigate those questions. The good news is that a lot of content already exists.

So, with that in mind, we’re taking the tack now of identifying the research questions we’re interested in in order to build the appropriate tools for answering those questions. For example,

-How do people respond to the table, and what kinds of tools do we need to build so that they will respond, especially by creating their own narratives about the content?

-How can we extend the museum’s reach beyond the building itself, for example, by integrating the multitouch exhibit and handheld tools? What is the shelf life of interactions in the museum?

-What are the differences between the ways groups and individuals use the table, or the differences between the horizontal interactions of the table-based exhibit vs. the more traditional “vertical” interactions provided by other exhibits (did you play Ms. Pac Man differently when it was in the table version vs. the stand-up kiosk?)

-How can we help facilitate visualization understanding through simulations on the table where visitors can build comparisons and manipulate factors in the data to create their own images and animations?

What other questions with the multitouch table should we build research tools to answer?

We’ve recently been prototyping a new exhibit with standard on-the-ground methods, and now we’re going to use the cameras to do a sort of reverse ground-truthing. Over our busy Whale Watch Week between Christmas and New Year’s, Laura set up a camera on the exhibit to collect data on people using the exhibit at times when we didn’t have an observer in place. So in this case, instead of ground-truthing the cameras, we’re sort of doing the opposite, and checking what we found with the in-person observer.

However, the camera will be on at the same time that the researcher is there, too. It almost sounds like we’ll be spying on our researcher and “checking up,” but it will be an interesting check of both our earlier observations without the camera in place, as well as a chance to observe a) people using the new exhibit without a researcher in place, b) people using it *with* a researcher observing them (and maybe noticing the observer, or possibly not), and c) whether people behave differently as well as how much we can capture with a different camera angle than the on-the-ground observer will have.

Some expectations:

The camera should have the advantage of replay which the in-person observer won’t, so we can get an idea of how much might be missed, especially detail-wise.

The camera audio might be better than a researcher standing a ways away, but as our earlier blog posts have mentioned, the audio testing is very much a work in progress.

The camera angle, especially since it’s a single, fixed camera at this point, will be worse than the flexible researcher-in-place, as it will be at a higher angle, and the visitors may block what they’re doing a good portion of the time.

As we go forward and check the automated collection of our system with in-place observers, rather than the other way around, these are the sorts of things we’ll be checking for, advantages and disadvantages.

What else do you all expect the camera might provide better or worse than a in-person researcher?

It was our last day in Glacier National Park, Montana. My dad, sister, husband & I entered the park at the Saint Mary entrance for the third time and this time we committed to stopping at the visitor center. The four of us walked inside to see ceiling-high windows with mountain views, a movie playing in a dark room, a large timeline with the history of the area, a small room with exhibits, and, of course, a bookstore. Our party dissipated and I headed straight for the exhibits.

The room wasn’t that large, maybe 30’x20’. There was a teepee set up in the corner that you could go in to. Arranged along the walls of the room were six-foot-high signs covering topics of land use, creating a park, creation and animals. Along the back wall were taxidermied animals of species common within the park: a bear, wolf, and moose. I started at the animals. Each animal had a sign in front of it that was fairly ordinary. There was the animal’s common name, a picture, cast of its track, and a button and phone to hear a sound of the animal. But what caught my eye was the animal’s common name printed in three native languages with translations.

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I moved on to look at the signage that took up the majority of this small area and I started recognizing a pattern. I read about creation beliefs, oral histories, place names and place meanings from the point of view of the Salish and Pend d’Oreille, Kootenai, and Blackfeet, the same three native languages I saw on the animal signs. It seemed that these signs, because of how they read, were co-created with tribe members.

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I spent a good portion of my time at the sign about oral histories because of both personal and professional interests. How do we tell stories? What do they mean to us? To others? I think the Blackfeet said it well,

“Oral history is our culture. Our oral history holds the key to who we are. Our language is spiritual because it is taken from nature, and nature is spiritual. Our language doesn’t need a verb to move the noun; it is in constant motion like the earth.”

I met the rest of my group by the windows, looking out at the mountains. We left Montana the next day with a lot of new stories to tell.

The Free-Choice Learning Laboratory at HMSC

Informal science education research

Category Archives: Exhibits

“Make it work” in the FCL Lab

Good days and bad days for visitor data collection

More prototyping at the wave tanks…it’s lego-tastic!

Exhibit or research platform?

“Reverse” ground-truthing

That’s my story (and I’m sticking to it)

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