Dramatizing the Museum Experience

Overwhelmingly in today’s society people are being pulled away from concrete relationships and instead replacing them with bits of data. Relationships and information are being represented as statistics, rather than important emotional bonds and knowledge. There is an alarming trend of not what your friends mean to you, but how many you have (on Facebook.) To reach people both on a personal level and engage them on an intellectual level, it is important to understand how to connect with them. Examining the arts, and more specifically museums, we can begin to understand how these cultural, philosophical, historical, and artistic languages are interacting with the general populace. Museums from 2002-2008 suffered significant declining attendance, but in 2009 and 2010, those figures have begun to turn around. I contend that to make a museum experience more engaging and interactive, a story must be created around the content, essentially dramatizing it.

I am not purporting that digital content take over as the interactive medium, far from it in fact. I believe there is an incredible value to tangible experiences that provide many different types of haptic and contextual feedback, but more and more, these physical experiences will have to bridge with digital content to engage viewers. Jesse Rosen, president and CEO of the League of American Orchestras, mentions, "There is a fundamental change happening in our lives. There's a sense that we have an old way of defining participating in the arts and that the public is redefining what participation means, the challenge for us is to see where the public is and engage with them and adapt."

Technology changes the way we do things; it changes our values and norms, and affects the information that we process. Marshall Mcluhan emphasizes that, “the medium is the message,” but with all of our content, how can we use different mediums to provide our message? To make an impact, to construct an experience, we have to provide a story. “In an experience, [there is] flow from something to something. As one part leads into another and as one part carries on what went before, each gains distinctness in itself. The enduring whole is diversified by successive phases that are emphases of its varied colors” (Dewey, 36). People have been engaged, entertained, and fascinated by stories and storytelling for thousands of years. There are essentially five elements that make up a story: the act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose (more commonly known as the who, what, where, why, and how.) Stories are not words, but experiences; by using these elements to dramatize information you can create an experience though various mediums that affect a change in people.

“The goal of the designer [is] to be persuasive or at least informative… [they] must anticipate the spectator’s reactions and meet his own aesthetic needs. He must therefore discover a means of communication between himself and the spectator – to discover a [story] universally comprehensible, one that translates abstract ideas into concrete forms” (Rand,7). Science/technology museums and centers are a unique exception to declining attendance in museums, reporting far and away the highest increase in attendance of any type of museum in any location according to the American Association of Museums. It is not a coincidence that this is happening, because more than any other, they have found a way to combine education with interaction. Rather than just staring at a poster on the wall, asking you to read about clouds, you can walk up to a machine that shows you how clouds are formed as it physically creates one in front of you. It is a powerful tool being able to see and understand conceptual information in a physical manifestation. “Man’s knowledge is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, demonstrating” (Pieper, 25); they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but an experience, it is priceless.

"We're seeing a backlash starting to emerge against the rapidly increasing level of consumerism and luxury in the economy," said James Chung, president of the firm Reach Advisors. "It's not about how much they spend. It's about how they're spending their time" (Zongker). Families no longer want the biggest and best, in a sense they do, but not in the form of consumerism as commonly believed, but rather in experiences. It is my belief that Technology and Science museums are connecting with their audiences better than other museums by creating a meaningful balance between the medium and the message, by essentially adding a narrative. Many of their exhibits are about letting the participants actively engage and interact with physical and digital content. For example, if they want to learn about simple machines you can present a pulley and create many different scenarios about the who, what, how, why, and where it is used and let people enact and experience that scenario by employing different methods. Now, there are two aspects to dramatism: story and method. Story is the ‘who, what, how, where, and why,’ but method is the medium, method for engagement, stories perspective, formula, visual elements, and the progression of narrative. There are many ways to imbue dramatism into the content, but the true goal is to combine it with the medium as well, in order to attract the audience.

John Dewey lays claim that fine arts will never be as popular as music because, “fine arts consist of qualities; that of experience having intellectual conclusion are signs or symbols having no intrinsic quality of their own, but standing for things that may in another experience be qualitatively experienced (Dewey, 38). But, he stops to add that fine arts is an esthetic quality, one that cannot be left out from an intellectual experience, because they create a complete experience. I agree that as it is now the fine arts are one-sided, but this is mainly due to its presentation and the experience that is created around it. If museums were to dramatize elements and create a stimulating experience through practical, emotional, and intellectual engagement that focused on storytelling, it would be much more effective.

We can see the beginnings of this as artists and designers begin to create immersive museums that present content in new ways. By using technology and stories to augment the experiences they become more engaging. Offering audio headsets, or iPhone apps to inform or interact with people is just the first step at engaging; there is more to be done. It is an issue not just for the museums, but also for the designers and content providers, they need to figure out ways to engage their audience or they are going to lose them. How can they do this? I propose, by telling a good story.

References

Survey: Theater, museum attendance declining - Entertainment - The Arts –

TODAYshow.com. (2009, December 27). TODAYshow.com. Retrieved

December 17, 2010, from http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/34352348/ns/today-

entertainment/

 

Zongker, B., & AP. (2010, January 5). Smithsonian reports 20% jump in museum

visitors - USATODAY.com. USATODAY.com. Retrieved December 17, 2010,

from http://www.usatoday.com/travel/destinations/2010-01-05-smithsonian-

visitors_N.htm

 

Katz, P. (2010). Service Despite Stress: Museum Attendance and Funding in a Year of

Recession. American Association of Museums.

 

Dewey, J. (2005). Having an Experience. Art as Experience (pp. 35-57). Chicago:

Perigee Trade.

 

Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, (New York, 1952), 25.

 

Rand, P. (1985). The Symbol in Visual Communication. Paul Rand, a Designer's Art

(p. 7). New Haven: Yale University Press.

 

McGarry, K. J. (1981). To Know and To Be Informed. The changing context of

information: an introductory analysis (p. 32). London: Bingley.

 

Burke, K. (1969). Introduction: The Five Key Terms of Dramatism. A Grammar of

Motives (pp. XV-XXiii). Berkeley: University of California Press.

 

 

 

Human-to-Human, What a Hug Means.

Analyze the Usability of an Interaction

I would like to consider the human-to-human interaction of a hug. Representing a form of physical intimacy, it is commonly considered the embrace of two people or more wrapping their arms around one another. Hugging is one of the most common human signs of love and affection and is seen in practice across almost all countries, religions and cultures. The goal of a hug can vary depending on the context; it can be a sign of comfort, friendship, support, or also act as a romantic gesture. 

On a macro level, hugs are used to show many levels of affection and are commonly a demonstration of affection. Looking closer though, at the micro level, we can see the features and tasks that coalesce to form a hug. Each of these elements, the individual decisions, oftentimes are formed unconsciously yet are each based upon the context of the situation.

Clearly, to understand these elements and features, we must first understand the task that is being performed. A hug, as defined by the dictionary, is “to hold someone (or something) closely or tightly around or against part of one’s body.” To form a hug you use your whole body, each part is an interface for communicating. Your body is an information source and all of the movements (or lack thereof) from your arms and chest, hands, face, and your waist tell a story to the receiver you are hugging.

“Matter and manner interact to produce meaning”(Barnlund, 11). How hard or soft you hug, the duration, position, and distances between, can all heavily influence the meaning behind a hug. To understand a little better, let us closely examine a few of the common associations of these changing elements. Initiating a hug and squeezing the person closely and tightly will commonly indicate emphatic feelings, while a soft grip may convey a consideration of comfort. Typically hugs are quick and short, often just a few seconds; yet, a longer duration can alter the meaning drastically depending on the context. 

How bodies are in contact oftentimes distinguishes the type of relationship the persons have with each other. Hugs with someone you are romantically involved with may include a close, tight embrace, and often with waists touching and arms wrapped around one another. Additionally, these romantic hugs also typically last longer than a hug with friends or acquaintances. Where hands are placed during an embrace can help to differentiate the meaning behind a hug. For instance, if you don’t place your hands on the other at all it could represent apprehension or discomfort regarding the hug. Hands placed high on the others back is typically a position associated with friends, while lower is for a romantic partner. If you were to hug a member of the opposite sex and place your hands up high on their back, but then move your hands down their back slowly, it might change the meaning behind the interaction. Every action and element has meaning, but those meanings might be slightly different for different people, even if they are interacting with one another at the same time. 

In an encounter, such as a hug, it is initiated by someone making an opening move, “typically by means of a special expression of the eyes but sometimes by a statement or a special tone of voice at the beginning of a statement” (Goffman, 142). This behavior is symbolic of a mutual understanding or agreement between two people, and is common between many human encounters. Elements that support the smoothness of the interaction include these visual cues, as well as the speed at which the people may approach or their actual physical size. People need to have time to register what is happening and may balk at their aggressor if they are approached too fast or taken by surprise. In addition, there are also unspoken “dominant roles,” usually these are trumped by the physical size of the people but sometimes there are roles that people play. For example, who will be the one to hug above the others’ arms, or hug below, or will they cross arms? These positions are determined almost instantly without an exchange of dialogue, but rather only communicated through body language. Finally, a feature of these unspoken elements can include the ability to deny the interaction altogether. “An individual who wants to control others’ access to him… may avoid looking toward the person who is seeking him out” (Goffman, 143), or they may turn away, or put an arm up to block access. These are all understandable actions for one who wants to avoid, to them, an undesirable interaction. 

The principle behind a hug is, as I have mentioned previously, a person demonstrating support or comfort through an embrace.  But, we must consider more than just the people if we are to understand the strategies that will enable us to support existing user experiences. “Neither the source nor the subject, however, is as critical as the climate in which the interaction occurs” (Barnlund, 20). Context… Context is key to understanding the different meanings behind a hug, and there can be many. Hugging is widespread across human culture and in many countries it is practiced publicly and privately without stigma. There are principles though that must be understood before the participants will accept a hug.

Cultural context and personal context are two of the most important things to examine when trying to better understand a hugs meaning to an individual. By cultural context, I mean the background of the person and their location; what is the embedded symbolism of a hug in a persons’ culture? Some cultures do not consider a hug a sign of affection; it is not a universal representation. Others may feel extremely apprehensive about hugging in public and view it as a more private or personal interaction. As for personal context, by this I mean the personal space and association they have with other people and their surroundings and the relationship they have with other genders and ages. Personal space is the area around people that they regard psychologically as their own. Identified in a study by Anthropologist Edward Hall (The Hidden Dimension, 1966) there are four “zones” of personal space per individual. Defined by certain distances related to the person in question, they are the intimate, personal, social, and public spaces. Typically no one is “allowed” within the intimate space of a person besides family and close friends, and if someone else were to enter this space the person may feel violated. Understanding comes when a person takes the time to both consider personal context and cultural context, and from there you can begin to build strategies on how to better support existing user experiences. Because a human-to-human interaction like the hug is initiated so fast, often with the initial signal and acceptance happening almost simultaneously, there are strategies to help recognize when things are going well or amiss. One such strategy is eye contact, “when eyes are joined, the initiator’s first glance can be sufficiently tentative and ambiguous to allow him to act as if no initiation has been intended, if it appears that his overture is not desired” (Goffman, 142). 

In the end, hugging remains and will remain one of the most common ways for humans to show affection. Strategies can be developed for supporting existing user experiences if they consider the context, but they must be aware that much of it is subjective. Body language is not always clear and anything can be interpreted differently. But for now, go give someone you care about a hug; not just for affection, but because they have been proven to have health benefits as well (BBC News, 2005).

 

References

1. The Hidden Dimension. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966.

2. Goffman, E. (1966). Behavior in Public Places (Reissue ed.). New York City: 

  Free Press.

3. Rogers, C. (1995). On Becoming a Person: A Therapist's View of 

Psychotherapy. New York: Mariner Books.

4. "How hugs can aid women's hearts". BBC News. August 8, 2005. Retrieved 2010-10-28.

 

A Contextual Look at Tangible Interactions

What would digital information feel like if we could touch it? How would the physical properties of analog objects modify the experience of understanding digital information? These questions inevitably raise more questions, but maybe the most obvious is: why do we care? There is a gap between how information in the digital world and that of the physical is consumed, processed, and understood. “Human experience is founded on knowledge of the physical world,”1 so how can we create meaningful experiences in the digital world? By bridging the space between the two it is possible to create a synergistic relationship, where by the mediating influence of a product/service/space can foster understanding.

More and more, designers need to marry the idea of designing content and designing a product/service/space in tangent; they should not be considered mutually exclusive. When designed in this fashion it can help foster the most immersive and comprehensive experience. Paul Rand states, “the goal of the designer [is] to be persuasive or at least informative… [they] must anticipate the spectator’s reactions and meet his own aesthetic needs. He must therefore discover a means of communication between himself and the spectator – to discover an [interaction] universally comprehensible, one that translates abstract ideas into concrete forms”2. Important words to note here are “anticipate” and “discover” as they lead us back to a simple foundation in communication. Successful interactions are based on an exchange of information where “influence or effectiveness are concerned with the success with which the meaning conveyed to the receiver leads to the desired conduct on his part”3. Now, if all of human experience is founded on the physical world, then it becomes apparent that finding inspiration for designing effective interactions should come from, and relate to, the tangible. Instead of “anticipating” or “discovering” it might be more useful to create something “intuitive” and “contextual.”

Examining human-computer interface design provides a clear history and timeline that shows the shift towards a more natural user experience, based on tangible interactions. Originally starting with command line interface (CLI,) it was “a series of request-response transactions, with requests expressed as textual commands in a specialized vocabulary”4. Trying to appeal more to users through symbols, graphical user interface (GUI) saw its start when it presented “information in the form of pixels on bit-mapped displays. These graphical representations are manipulated with generic remote controllers”5. GUI stayed around for a while, waiting until the technology could essentially catch up to provide more “realistic” representations. Tangible user interface (TUI), which is able to “give physical form to digital information… [making] digital information directly manipulatable with our hands and perceptible through our peripheral senses through its physical embodiment”6 is an attempt at this realism. Another being natural user interface (NUI), which “exploits skills that we have acquired through a lifetime of living in this world.” All of this is not to say that a natural or tangible interface best meets the needs of a user, but rather it illustrates the need for tangible interactions that offer “a set of clear and easy to understand actions and reactions between agent(s) and agency, all for the purpose of doing or expressing something”8. This accepted progression of interface elements underpins the thought that humans respond best towards tangible, intuitive, and direct, communication.

Over the last few decades’ digital perforation into the physical world has been more and more apparent. Can we still trust that this “accepted progression” is leading us to the correct path? Human’s quest for technology and exciting new things is insatiable, it’s the “always approaching, but never quite there,” and it is navigated by interactions. Cool things don’t just become “cool” based on looks alone any more. If a product, service, or space is unpleasant to use, if the experience is not gratifying, people will move on. Interactions, and more specifically usefulness, ease of use, and comprehension, play a large role in shaping success. 

Interaction design is contextual, it can be applied across all subjects, but to be effective it must remain focused on the problem at hand. “In the process of application, the designer must discover or invent a particular subject out of the problems and issues of specific circumstances”9. Hoping to solve one of these problems a relevant and clear message needs to be constructed and sent, this is paramount to creating an effective interaction. If the message is correctly received it should produce the proper response. “Man’s knowledge is realized in the act of comparing, examining, relating, distinguishing, abstracting, deducing, and demonstrating”10. These are all contextual as well, and based on personal histories and experiences. What one man does is different than another, even though the input is the same; so, you can conclude that what is significant, is the medium. As Marshall McLuhan famously wrote, “… the medium is the message”11.

The medium chosen is representative of much more than its form though, mainly due to the influence of symbolic interactionism12. This theory works off of three premises, the first being the idea that “human beings act toward things on the basis of the meanings they have for them.” The second premise states that the meanings are based off of interactions with other people, and the third proposes that, “these meanings are handled in, and modified through, an interpretative process used by the person in dealing with the things he encounters.” So although all of our knowledge may be found in the physical world, it arises from and is inspired by people as they interact. Symbolic interactionism helps define appropriate actions and reactions of the agents as they are created through a process of designation and interpretation. This in reality assists forming tangible interactions, as they should be designed in such a way that it is unconsciously expected, it should feel natural, but with its intent not obvious. 

Recently, I worked on a project using body language to inspire tangible interactions within a design framework. Essentially the projects called for taking already formed and valid tangible interactions and examine, abstract, translate and apply them to a new medium; in a word, it was to ‘inspire.’ When trying to understand body language, we found many commonalities but in addition many different interpretations of what body language meant to different people. Largely though, we found many of these divergent interpretations went away when context was applied. To create a successful tangible interaction will be a bit of a balancing act; it will need to engage distinct ‘agents’ with different background knowledge in a way that they will lead to the messages receiver performing the desired response. Maintaining “a set of clear and easy to understand actions and reactions between agent(s) and agency [within a context,] all for the purpose of doing or expressing something”8, that is a tangible interaction, and a powerful communication tool.

With an influx of technology and information based in the digital world, rather than the physical, we may have found ourselves at a crossroads when it comes to different generations. While the elderly still lay claim to their experiences and knowledge being firmly rooted in the physical world, young “digital babies” have found much of their own knowledge and experiences brought about by the digital world. In the future the world is going to merge the physical and digital together to a point soon where they will be indistinguishable from one another. They will work synergistically to create an augmented world that efficiently delivers information to people. But these new systems may change the very way we interact with the objects, environment, and people around us. There is a tendency to believe that physical objects hold more value, but that is because they are familiar and understood by us, to “digital babies” there is no weighted value placed on one or the other because to them they are the same. At the moment tangible interactions seem an effective mediating influence between people and products, but what will we do when we just need to think to make something happen, how will we make that meaningful?

 

 

References

1. Boulanger, Adam, and Elena Jessp. "Audio Oxide: Transforming Digital Information 

As it Bridges to the Physical World." CHI 2010 1 (2010): 1-9. Print.

 

2. Rand, P. (1985). The Symbol in Visual Communication. Paul Rand, a Designer's Art 

(p. 7). New Haven: Yale University Press.

 

3. Mortensen, C. D., & Weaver, W. (1979). The Mathematics of Communication. Basic 

readings in communication theory (2nd ed, pp. 28). New York: Harper & Row.

 

4. Steven Raymond. The Art of Unix Usability. 2004.

 

5. Ishi, H. and Ullmer, B. Tangible bits: Towards seamless interfaces between people, 

bits, and atoms. In Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in 

Computing Systems (Atlanta, Mar.). ACM Press, New York, 1997, 234-241

 

6. Hiroshi Ishii. “The tangible user interface and its evolution.” 2008.

 

7. Buxton, B. CES 2010: BUI with Bill Buxton.  HYPERLINK "http://channelg.msdn.com/posts  

/LarryLarsen/CES-2010-NUI-with-Bill-Buxton/" http://channelg.msdn.com/posts  

/LarryLarsen/CES-2010-NUI-with-Bill-Buxton/.2010.

 

8. Michael Lai, “Tangible Interactions,” 2011

 

9. Richard Buchanan, “Wicked Problems in Design Thinking,” 1995.

 

10. Joseph Pieper, Leisure: The Basis of Culture, (New York, 1952), 25.

 

11. Macluhan, Herbert Marshall. Understanding Media. The Extensions of Man. 

London: New American Library, 1964. Print.

 

12. Mortensen, C. D., & Blumer, H. (1979). Communication: The Context of Change. 

Basic Readings in Communication Theory (2nd ed, pp. 6-26). New York: Harper

& Row.