Visiting the National Museum of Scotland, reflections on digital displays

Two weekends ago, I went to have a look round the newly revamped National Museum of Scotland (NMS) with a visiting friend and my S.O. We didn’t have a lot of time, so hit a few highlights in the Scottish history part of the museum (relatively new, not recently remodelled) and then wandered through the graceful Victorian atrium down toward the new animal hall at the far end. A combination of weekend, festival, and probably school being out for the summer meant that this central space had the general ambience of an airport terminal, complete with a seemingly random selection of large artefacts displayed completely out of context. On a quieter day, it might seem more serene and even cathedral-like, illuminated from above. Artefacts aside, it made me genuinely happy to see the museum so busy. There were clearly plenty of foreign tourists, but I also heard a range of solidly Scottish accents all over the building. I hope that the museum can keep up this momentum, and will succeed in bringing local visitors back again and again as exhibits change and children grow, rather than simply attracting people in for a look-see now that the long remodel is finally finished.

Looking down at the Animal Hall from an upper floor

The skeleton of a giant, extinct deer greets visitors at the doorway from the atrium into the animal hall

The animal hall was obviously particularly popular, and inspired an air of wonder and fantasy due in no small part to the model Tyrannosaurus skeleton inside the entrance, and the sharks, dolphins, hippopotamus, and other animals swimming playfully through the air several stories up. Balconies wrapped around this central space with additional exhibits, both digital and carbon-based. I laud the curators for figuring out ways to display taxidermied and model animals (or the skeletons of their extinct relatives) in ways that illuminated relationships between them or illustrated ecosystems, adaptations, and other points. I will digress here to say that the exact OPPOSITE of this approach would be the African Hall in the newly re-built (and otherwise state-of-the art) California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco, which appears to have been kept as a creepy time capsule in its same room while the rest of the museum was re-built around it. Their website describes the 1934 dioramas as “majestic” but I think they mean night-mare inducing (seriously, as a child I found them very upsetting). Anyway!

Leaving the animal hall by an upper floor, we walked into the World Cultures section of the museum. Generations of Scots brought back a selection of curiosities that have been grouped by a combination of geography and themes, mostly sensitively. Unfortunately, in the sections I visited there was not enough material from any one culture to give a very comprehensive view. Perhaps I should say ‘fortunately’ as there are always so many questions about how explorers and colonisers acquired their cultural treasures in the first place!

Then, I saw it in the middle of the floor below: something to arouse my professional interest.

Display in the World Cultures section of the NMS

At first I thought what I was seeing was a touch screen interface being used by multiple people at the same time, apparently playing some kind of game about clothing and domestic artefacts that went with the surrounding “daily life” type exhibition. I was disappointed to watch further and find that it was 1. Not a touch screen, but apparently just a regular screen (or a projection, even) with buttons, and 2. That there were four stations, and multiple people standing at some of them. Some of the users seemed to be interacting because they knew each other (a family?), but this interaction was not mediated by the interface, and the person(s) at each station seemed to be using it fairly independently of one another.

I was very disappointed—what at first glance had seemed to be a very advanced interactive display was less advanced than I thought. However, even without going down to examine the content myself, I noticed one very positive thing: Most of the people who were using the interface when I began watching were still using the interface some minutes later when I walked on. At several stations, people were collaborating to use it (e.g. two children or parent/child). Every interactive museum display is in competition for the attention of the museum patrons—there is a lot of stuff in the room, some of it will be shinier, and an interface that is difficult to use is likely to be abandoned by the user immediately. I had never thought about this much before until listening to a talk at the Artificial Intelligence in Education conference this June, in Auckland. A researcher named H. Chad Lane was presenting work about tour guide and “coaching”virtual agents at the Boston Science Museum, and pointed out that this is very different than many other types of technology-enhanced learning because the museum visitor is free to walk away from the program at any time (besides being practically unknown in terms of age, prior knowledge, and other factors). Thus, it is very positive that the display at the NMS seemed to be holding its users’ attention over a period of time. They must be doing something right!

While I definitely sympathise with the decision to choose a simpler and perfectly sufficient technology over the most cutting-edge thing possible (probably a multi-touch table plus...bells and whistles? Not sure), I hope to see more museums pushing the boundaries of what can be done with an educational display. Particularly, displays where multiple people can interact at the same time without having defined “stations,” or where locating different content in different places meaningfully links to the content or layout of the exhibit. Better yet, there could be displays that encourage or even trick the users into interacting with each other :)

One station-less display that particularly impressed me was at The Settlement Museum 871 +/- 2, in Reykjavík (Iceland). This museum is fairly limited in size and for a very good reason: it is underground in the city centre, encompassing the actual foundations of an early settlement house and some outbuildings, and displaying the artefacts associated with the site. Additional materials, artistic renderings, and displays try to evoke the landscape and even sounds of the period. Some of the materials and animations from the museum are available online. Yes, there is an English option.

This is one of my rather dark photographs of the archeological site around which the museum is based (an oval house with central hearth...can you see it? Photo taken from one end of the house).

One of the displays was a large multi-touch table through which you could explore the “layers” of the house and other remains a few yards away. The house on the multi-touch table was oriented in the same way as the actual house, and you reached this table after having walked all around the walls. Thus, while standing at different parts of the table allowed you to access different content, there were not rigid stations and the content mapped directly to a space/physical experience. I spent a long time at the table--partly because I literally had the museum to myself on the day after Christmas and could stay there as long as I wanted—but the fact that I remember it so clearly almost two years later also speaks highly of its design, considering how many museums I visit! Unfortunately, I did not take a picture of the multi-touch table display, not imagining that it would be of later use to me.

In conclusion, do give the National Museum of Scotland a visit if you are in town—the Scottish history exhibits (about which I have not written here) are especially good. I myself plan to go back to the museum as soon as I have another free afternoon. Also, please try the digital exhibits! For anyone else interested in touch-screen interfaces and technology-enhanced learning, also have a think about how we can keep pushing the boundaries of these interfaces to make them more interesting for visitors—and to provide useful information about what works and what doesn’t.

UPDATE! (September 14th, 2011)

Interesting article about museums using cutting edge technologies to enhance visitor experiences and take content outside of the physical museum and into other contexts. Check it out here.

Questions for teaching, questions for engagement

As sort of a follow-on to the last post, I was alerted to the following short article via a science/pscyh/education poster on Twitter (@psychoBOBlogy has brought a lot of interesting articles to my attention!).  It presents itself as questions to help guide teaching and create class engagement, but I think with a little tweaking they would also be very useful for guiding public engagement, at least in a transmission or collaboration activity. Some of these certainly sound very much like what my group ended up discussing during the Vitae workshop! Check it out:

Five Questions That Will Improve Your Teaching

By Larry Ferlazzo

Take-home messages from the Vitae researcher engagement workshop

I have been meaning to write up a bit on what I thought were the most useful parts of this workshop since I attended it on July 26^th. You can see how prompt I have been! Better a bit delayed than never.

 Admittedly, I had expected that the content would be much more concretely about types of engagement activities you could do with different audiences. Instead, it was much more about cognitive tools for thinking about mutually beneficial public involvement. Before hitting what I thought were some of the key points, I would like to say that I thought that the workshop was very well-run, aimed at the right level of difficulty, and delivered at a comprehensible pace. The two sessions in Glasgow are pilot sessions for what is intended to be a nationwide programme, run by universities for their staff. The day went back and forth between one of the organisers talking through a chunk of material (such as the models of engagement, discussed below) and then a small-group activity to try applying it. I have definitely been to some events that force you into a small group with the aims of 1. Meaning that the whole thing is not just one person at the front of the room talking, and 2. Forcing “communication” and “net working” and “collaboration” onto a bunch of people who want to drink the free coffee and then get the hell out of there and back to dealing with their real to-do lists. Thus, I was surprised to find that the Vitae workshop used small-group working to good effect: the discussions with the others in my group really did help to illuminate the material, as we were from a variety of disciplines and a range of ages/career phases. So, good on you, organisers!

These are some of the things that I felt were the “take-home messages” of the day. They are not ordered by importance. Of course, another attendee with a different background would probably come up with a different list!

1. Public engagement is a two-way (or even more than two-way) process. It does not simply mean “how do I TELL the public about my research” but “how do I INVOLVE the public in my research.” The former is about handing down words of wisdom from the ivory tower (or ivory privately-funded research institution, whatever), and the latter is about mutual benefit. Yes, involvement could mean providing information to the public in the role of an expert , but also soliciting input from the members of the public to inform research-in-progress or future projects.

                In discussing types of public engagement, the group looked at the triangle model of engagement. This model was developed by the BIS (Department for business innovation and skills) science follow-up group, and a PDF of the triangle (and how to try using it) is available here.

The three points are TRANSMIT (information to others), RECEIVE (information from others), and COLLABORATE (information with others). This model was something of an “ah ha!” for me, as I could mentally re-cast many of the ECHOES project participatory design activities into this framework. I think it would be useful to re-visit the language of participatory design and the language of public engagement to see the ways in which the actual work may overlap a great deal, even if it is being described differently. By this standard, ECHOES has done a lot of public engagement so far, even if relatively little of it has been transmission (though we should be ramping that up in the next few months). 

2. “Everyone is someone’s public.” This is a place where the small-group working provided an immediate and clear illustration of a concept: Researchers in one discipline do not automatically understand researchers in another discipline because they are both doing research. Yes, there may be some shared jargon and a firm belief in hypothesis testing and/or the need for p< 0.05, but a PhD is not a Babel fish.  Researchers are perhaps not even a good example of being a possible public, because they are more likely to already be convinced that what you are doing has value and relevance (even if it is not immediately apparent to them).  When speaking to a non-specialist public, being able to convey why your work is relevant (and, perhaps, worth public funding!) is a huge deal. Figuring out how to convey that relevance can also be a good way in to more practically planning what type of engagement activity you will do with a particular audience. 

3. Jargon can be a huge barrier to comprehension—and until you involve or consult others outside your immediate area, it may not be clear to you the extent of your language which is perceived as jargon, complex, and off-puttingly scary.  We were challenged to describe our current research area/project to the others at our table as simply as possible (50 words or less). This was HARD. Surprisingly, those who seemed to have most trouble explaining their work were not the people working on extremely complex and specialised biochemistry stuff where almost every term is easily identifiable as jargon, but the people for whom crucial descriptors of their work are, or come close to, words with common everyday usages which are not the sense in which the researcher is using that word. It can be hard to get people to really listen to you when they are afraid that they will not understand what you are saying... and equally hard to get them to listen when they think they already know what your work is about (and may be far off the mark).

I was reminded forcefully of a. In it, she discussed the results of the Adventure Author project (will not describe in detail here), and students’ attitudes toward “computing” before and after the project. She identified that one possible issue with the lack of improved attitudes was that the researchers-- including those on the project and those who wrote the attitudes survey—likely had a very different definition of “computing” than the young people in the study. There had also not been a specific effort to acquaint the participants with the researchers’ definition of computing before taking the survey. Thus, the survey was unlikely to have measured what the researchers wanted to measure, and indeed initially thought they were measuring. As Dr. Robertson writes in a more recent, related blog post, “The results may not be very reliable if some of the kids think programming is merely typing.”

Back to public engagement....Partly as a result of the derailed computing survey and partly after the “explain your project in 50 words” workshop exercise, I have set several short-term research goals that are all about cutting the jargon and coming up with a comprehensible description of what I do (see subsequent post).

4.  “The argument for science has to be made at all levels, not just in grant applications.” (Dr. Martin Coath, University of Plymouth). I spotted this quote in some of the hand-out materials, and without having a rant on the state of science education/ science in mainstream media/ public distrust of science and scientists, all I have to say is AMEN. Whether you are transmitting or receiving information, this is the ideal end goal. Next time I have an incredibly frustrating talk with my grandfather (who is very disappointed that I am not a politician, or an economist), I will try to grit my teeth and remind myself that I am making the argument for science...

Good news! Job contract extended

I am pleased to announce that I have received confirmation that my job contact at Heriot Watt will be extended. I had previously only been set to work through the end of September. Now I will be continuing through the end of the ECHOES project, in mid-November. Of course, I am sure that dealing with final reporting and working on publications will eat into the first few months of my PhD...

I am really pleased that I will have a chance to see the project through to the end. By "really pleased" I actually mean that I would have been devastated to leave without some sense of closure on the whole thing, and without helping to tie up some of the most important loose ends. I have never been involved in a single project for this much of my time over such a long period of time (a year and a half already!), and it really has a strong emotional grip on me. Having little choice but to leave before the end would probably have been like an unfortunate breakup, except that the awkward talk over coffee would go along the lines of "it's not you, it's me and my nearly empty budget." Fortunately, we never have to have that talk, ECHOES and I-- instead, the project in its current iteration will die soon, and I can be left with 'fond' memories. And hopefully publications!