Experimental zones: Two cases of exploring frames of participation in a dialogic museumreprint

Preprint: Digital Creativity, June 2014. Special Issue: Designing for creative engagement in museums and cultural institutions. Volume 25 (Issue 2).

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Experimental zones: Two cases of exploring frames of

participation in a dialogic museum

Ole Smørdala, Dagny Stuedahlb and Idunn Sema aEngageLab, University of Oslo, bNorwegian University of Life Sciences

Abstract

A matter of concern for dialogic institutions such as museums is the struggle to find

appropriate ways of integrating social media and digital technologies into dialogues with

visitors. This paper addresses how co-creation and experimental methods may be applied

in a situated, natural environment, exploring how these technologies may be shaped to

support museum visitor relations. The concept ‘experimental zone’ is suggested as a

format for a collaborative design space where digital media-based dialogues are explored

in line with professional practices. This concept is discussed in relation to two design

experiments undertaken in collaboration with the Norwegian Museum of Science and

Technology.

Keywords

dialogic museum, social media, participatory design, exhibition design, cultural heritage,

experimental zones

Introduction

While museums increasingly are making use of social media and digital technologies in

exhibitions and outreach programs, there remains a lack of understanding how these may

be integrated into curatorial and educational thinking. Transferring practices and skills in

developing the meditational aspect of exhibition installations across to digital media is a

challenge for museum professionals. Digital resources in exhibitions are in many

museums still perceived as a kind of add-on or fun gadget (Holdgaard & Simonsen

2011), however there is an increasing understanding that successful use of digital


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resources entails how they are integrated into the social, timing, and spatial aspects of

exhibitions.

Inadequate Methods

Museum exhibitions are developed based on methods from the visitor studies field. This

includes the evaluation techniques front end, formative and summative evaluation

(Screven 1976, 1986, 1990). Such methodologies inform development by testing visitors’

experiences of exhibitions and their expectations towards exhibition themes, and have

also been criticized for being based too much on museum perspective in what comprises

successful communication (Hooper-Greenhill 2009).

There remains a differential between how a museum transforms and the potential to

exploit digital resources (Peacock 2008). Reflections have been made on the process of

organizational change in museums from a theoretical perspective (Weil 2002, Sandell &

Janes 2007, Peacock 2008, Parry 2007), and several studies show how social

technologies may be more challenging than any other technology introduced to the

museum setting. This brings to question how museums and heritage institutions see

themselves as dialogic institutions and introduces practices that conflict with

infrastructures (see i.e. Holdgaard & Klastrup, van Passel & Rigole this issue, Stuedahl

2007). Participatory design methods (Taxèn 2005, Smith 2013) have been proposed that

include an understanding of visitors’ experiences during exhibition development. While

we might expect these participatory or co-design methodologies to tune well towards a

participatory paradigm (Simon 2010), it seems these methods may also bring tensions

and conflicts to design collaborations not easily solved (Smith 2013). It can be argued

that traditional design techniques fall short in respect to these tensions, and are not

sufficiently focused on bridging visitors’ media practices with those of the museum.

Experiments with new technologies are important in order to create understanding

and practical experiences of design and use of these media that appeal to present, future

and potential museum visitors (Løssing 2009). How this might be achieved however, still

remains to be solved.


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Approach: Experimental Zones

Our approach, termed ‘experimental zones’, provides a situated explorative space in the

everyday setting of a museum. Here, researchers and museum professionals may explore

how new communication forms relate to their practices, in collaboration with visitors

bringing their expectations and media practices into the museum.

Contrary to explorative sessions inside design labs, which intend to create highly

innovative contexts for collaborative formats with methods focussing on ideas and

mapping of new terrain (Binder & Brandt 2008), experimental zones focus on

translations that are sparked upon introduction of new media and devices into well-

known situated everyday practices. Experimental zones also differ from Living labs’

approach to exhibition development (Culèn forthcoming) by involving natural selections

of visitor groups rather than focus groups.

Experimental zones direct the design process to assemble diverging matters of

concern (Weibel & Latour 2007) and to approach museum communication as a dialogic

activity between visitors and staff in concert with material objects making up the

exhibition space (Yaneva 2003). The actors of this assembly are both human and non-

human and include the material (e.g. exhibition objects, technologies, architecture and

spaces, mobile devices, wall texts) as well as the social (e.g. dialogue and interactions).

Building on actor-network theory, an emerging framework for re-thinking

collaborative and participatory design (Nickelsen & Binder 2008, Yaneva 2009, Stuedahl

& Smørdal 2010, Binder et al. 2011, Storni 2012), we address multiple ‘matters of

concern’ as social factors. Experimental zones connects matters of concern brought by

visitors as part of their cultural practices, to the institutional need of museums to engage

in social media based dialogues, and to the concerns of the museum curators and

educators. Collaboration in design is understood as socio-material enactments. The

entanglement of the social and the material are refined slowly in experimental zones

throughout enactments by museum staff, visitors, and the public by co-creation on a long-

term basis in the actual context (Hillgren et al. 2011). In this way slow prototyping

accommodates a gradual scaling up process – ensuring that the final design concepts can

relate in meaningful ways the expectations, skills, and practices of the museum, museum

professionals, specific visitors groups or communities of interest.


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Experimental Zones: Two Cases

In this paper we reflect upon two specific cases with a focus on the concepts of

enactments and assemblage, and how this has assisted design as exploration of new

dialogical forms involving both museum professionals and visitors.

As a combination of science centre and cultural heritage institution, the Norwegian

Museum of Science & Technology has a track record for developing interactive and

audience-focused programs. In case one, the museum wanted to explore possibilities of

adding social and dialogical aspects by use of a mobile outdoor audio guide about

industrial heritage of the city. In case two, we organized and participated in a

collaboration between designers and museum staff in a two-week workshop exploring

ideas for adding social awareness of energy consumption to an existing energy

exhibition.

Case One: Akerselva Digitalt

The Akerselva Digitalt project aimed at mediating industrial history at authentic and

interesting locations along Oslo’s Akerselva river. The museum’s concern was to develop

an outdoor audio guide available as a smartphone app using GPS to select among geo-

located audio narratives. The authors were exploring opportunities to include a social

dimension in the guide, with particular aim to encourage participation by young visitors.

During the course of one year we organized a number of workshops and design activities

with museum curators and also local youth clubs, involving youths of different ages

(Stuedahl & Lowe 2014). The outcome indicated a need to explore how the museum

content could be related to peoples’ practices relating to mobile and social

communication in outdoor contexts.

We set up an outdoor experimental zone at the annual winter solstice walk, aiming to

explore visitor digital engagement and enactments of museum content related to the

situated context of the river. For this purpose we set up an online presence at the social

media platform Instagram by establishing a profile for the museum project. This service

is widely used with a potential to extend visitors’ engagement in museums (Weilenmann

et al. 2013). In this instance Instagram was used as a digital social space in which to


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explore peoples’ enactments and engagement with local historical imagery closely related

to their contemporary practices of photography.

Configuring the assemblage

Historical images of workers from nearby factories were published to Instagram, hence

taking on the same coloration and feel as other images there. We added geo-location, key

word ‘tags’ and brief archival information. Images were published in relevant existing

thematic streams on Instagram in order to prompt reflections and tensions between the

present and the past (#labour #childlabour, #womanlabour, #activism etc.) pertaining to

the location. These historical images blended together with commonplace Instagram

streams in ways that would contradict the usual display of abundance and leisure at the

site, and also differentiate from the way archived photos are normally shared or

exhibited.

To explore the relation between digital and physical enactments, we created three

physical installations along the winter solstice walk, an evening when thousands of

people become involved with installations of art and culture along the Akerselva. Each

installation consisted of a montage of laminated cards with historical images and a QR-

coded invitation that would open the image in the viewer’s own Instagram app, ready for

sharing and commenting. Hanging amongst the cards were iPads displaying a mosaic

blending the historic images with newly contributed commonplace images in real time

inside the photo stream tagged #akerselva. Each installation had a specific thematic focus

relevant for the location and its transformation through time; rock music clubs, activism

or work-leisure relations between the past and present (see Figure 1). Visitors were

prompted to reflect on the contrast of life along the river across time periods and

contribute via Instagram with a thematic #tag.


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Figure 1: Relating to historical images on Instagram

Figure 2: The card inviting to become a follower on Instagram

We used the perspective of assemblage to define the experimental zone as a hybrid space

– consisting of digital and physical settings and practices, of diverging information

sources from the past and present. Framing the assemblage as an object of tension led our

design to focus on how contrasts, contradictions and surprising factors such as iPads

hanging in the trees might support visitors’ engagement.


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Socio-material enactments

Using Instagram in the experimental zone lowered the threshold for people to engage

with museum content, both as part of their media practice and as a partner in a dialogue

with the museum. Furthermore, Instagram engaged young people and groups that would

otherwise be difficult to involve. During prototyping we also discovered the potential of

enactments other than distribution of images and sharing by means of users’ social graph.

An unexpected find was the popularity of the ‘follow’ function, as opposed to sharing of

#tags or commenting on images (see Figure 2). Electing to follow will populate a user’s

list with posts shared by other selected interesting Instagram streams. This finding

indicated a need to expand our picture of participation expressions, and how mobile and

distributed museum contexts can influence socio-material enactments.

Case Two: My Commitment

The museum opened a new section in their energy exhibition one year prior to our

involvement. The ‘Energy Tivoli’ exhibition has an amusement park theme, is highly

interactive and playful, but still pertains towards unidirectional communication. The

exhibition has installations for existing and future energy sources such as hydroelectric,

solar, nuclear, wind, etc. but the concern of curators was a lack of visitors’ engagement

with the underlying and more serious theme of the exhibit, that is what choices regarding

energy do we have as a society, and what are the consequences our energy consumption?

Exploration of participatory exhibits arose from this concrete need to further develop the

Energy Tivoli exhibit, an initiative solidly supported by the museum staff at all levels.

Here an experimental zone explored possibilities of using social media for visitors’

mission statements, a concept used since the 1980’s (Macdonald 2002).

The zone was initiated through a series of workshops. There were two main

iterations with twenty contributors present at the initial brainstorm generation, selection

and final evaluation. A core group of eight people developed prototypes based on

selected ideas. This group had skills in carpentry, software development, interaction

design, museum research and curatorship for both cultural historical exhibitions and

hands-on exhibitions for science centres. The core group worked in a space adjacent to


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the main exhibition area, able at any time to move prototypes to the main exhibition

space for evaluation with regular visitors (see Figure 3 and 4).

Figure 3: The wall with projected energy commitments in the back

Figure 4: Creating a commitment: taking a self-portrait and writing a commitment


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Configuring the assemblage

The prototype reported here was labeled My Commitment. It was an addition to the

energy exhibition consisting a spatial arrangement in the entrance area with a projected

wall and iPads hanging from the ceiling (yes, we do enjoy hanging up iPads on wires).

The iPads provided the means for visitors to create a statement about their future energy

consumption, a commitment. Both the complexity and the need for a clear, personalized

and well-communicated motivation for interaction was first revealed through a video and

paper mock-up enacting the interaction. The final version of this prototype guided

visitors to take a self-portrait using the iPad’s camera, then to write a short statement with

their finger on top of the picture. Hence, the energy commitment was a combination of

facial expression and short hand written statement. These articulations were displayed as

a dynamic mosaic on the wall in the entrance area of the exhibition space. We explored

this wall as a type of social media, though not online, rather in terms of a physical and

social presence in the museum space, reminding or suggesting energy commitments for

other visitors to see. It reflects the value of a post-it note on a museum wall, focusing

important points, as visitors’ accountability and identity are enacted and explored.

Socio-material enactments

Both invited and regular visitors explored the installation. The prototype was

contextualised by the exhibition, as it was situated alongside with a similar look and feel.

An experimental installation can be received with wonder, so its use was encouraged by

the museum. Indeed the prototype attracted welcome attention from test visitors and

regular visitors alike, with plans made to turn the prototype into a permanent part of the

exhibition.

The outcome demonstrates that the museum must strive to connect people’s

everyday experiences with the topic at hand in order to raise dialogue or expect

contributions. As we discovered in this case, the global energy situation needs to be

related to people’s own energy consumption experience.


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Conclusion and Outlook

We set out to explore experimental zones as frames of participation in two exploratory

cases connected with the same museum. These cases explored complex issues relating to

the socio-material enactments of visitors, ‘the public’, and museum staff. In surprising

and unfamiliar ways the practices and materiality of museum and visitors were enmeshed

as we studied situated experiences relating to ownership, authority, relevance, contexts,

and media practices.

Our approach is based on ideas from design research that involve ‘the public’. A

combination of rapid development and slow prototyping (Björgvinsson et al. 2010)

enabled the multi-disciplinary team to assess the value of prototypes, employing a socio-

material approach involving enactments of exploratory configurations. This gave us

theoretical tools to focus the design process on how these prototypes would relate

between visitors’ expectations and media practices, and those of the museum. We have

used these cases to co-create alternatives for museums that establish exploratory spaces

and approaches to further their knowledge and practices (Stuedahl & Smørdal 2012),

accommodated in a low risk and playful way.

Not all content can or should be communicated nor should it all involve dialogue or

participation. We found that industrial history needs to be related to people’s current

context in order to excite contributions, likewise energy consumption should to be related

to people’s own energy use. Rather than absorbing expert knowledge on industrial history

or advise on various energy resources, a low threshold #tag or ‘follow’ through regular

social media or capturing a quick photo with a drawing or handwritten statement, might

be a more suitable level of involvement to expect for public dialogic spaces and

participatory museum exhibits.

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