"We're trying to really experiment with a new way of thinking about experiences in museum settings where visitors are true participants and co-designers of the experience..."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An ASTC bestseller, McLean's book provides a broad understanding of the many disciplines needed to produce effective exhibitions.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

"That's the big axe I have to grind about informal learning research - the research questions need to be grounded and come from the practitioners and the researchers working together."

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An interview with Kathy McLean about experiments with visitor co-design of the exhibit experience and why business as usual is no longer tenable for museums.

Interview by Marti Louw :: Spring 2007

Louw: The first question is an easy one. Tell us about your current work and the ideas that are getting you excited. What are you passionate about?

McLean: I'm working on a lot of different projects that are experimenting with new ways of thinking about informal learning experiences in museum settings - where visitors are true participants and co-designers of the experience, and co-contributors of content.

Since I left the Exploratorium, I've been working with a number of arts organizations and art museums to think about new ways of accessing and experiencing art. I'm currently working with the Dallas Museum of Art on their Center for Creative Connections, which just received significant funding to start an experimental lab. We are focusing on how to get visitors more engaged in looking at art, using some of the tools I have developed in science museums. So that's very exciting. I'm also working with the Oakland Museum of California on an Innovation in Arts project funded by the Irvine Foundation, focused on attracting more diverse audiences. We are deep in a process of research, testing, and prototyping with the community and the Art Gallery staff.

Louw:You mentioned that you are trying to involve the users or visitors in a co-design process - I've also heard this called participatory design. Can you talk a little bit more about how you see this happening and how you actually bring the public into your process?

McLean: One of my favorite projects right now is "Yuungnaqpiallerput: The Way We Genuinely Live" which focuses on Yup'ik Eskimo technologies and the scientific processes underlying them. I'm working with the Anchorage Museum, Curator Ann Riordan, OMSI, Beverly Serrell, and the Yup'ik community in developing hands-on science exhibits embedded into an object-rich exhibition of material culture. The Yup'ik community is one target audience of the exhibition, and they have been essentially visioning the project with Ann, as well as testing out the interactive prototypes with OMSI. It's quite remarkable.

Another project, at the Oakland Museum of California, is the conceptual design and development of the museum's permanent History Gallery. Here, we will be engaging community groups - including teenagers - in conceptual development, and asking them to create exhibit elements for the galleries. One of the best sources for information on visitor co-design right now is a forthcoming book I co-edited with Wendy Pollock, and published by ASTC, called "Visitor Voices in Museum Exhibitions." Dozens of museum professionals from science, art, and history museums describe projects that incorporate visitors as partners and co-creators. The book will be out in July.

Louw: As you were talking I began to wonder how you think technology may be changing the museum visit? What technologies do you feel have creative potential for mediating experiences in interesting ways?

McLean: I'm looking at new ways to experiment with technology in museums - beyond the polarized on-site/off-site kind of thing. At the Exploratorium, for example, all of the online web material is designed for an external audience that supposedly has very different needs than on-site audiences. I'm interested in merging these two audiences. We're going to be experimenting with that in the Oakland Museum's History Gallery. We envision the exhibits like stage sets where visitors bring the current knowledge to the table, so that the burden is not on the staff to keep generating current content. And this is really shifting away from the typical content-delivery model of exhibition. Traditionally, we have seen ourselves as creators, custodians, and deliverers of content and that has to morph into something more generative and collaborative, I think. YouTube, MySpace, Wikipedia - all of the kinds of user-generated, Web 2.0, social software stuff - is interesting. Also, the notion of radical trust that's coming out of the library community right now is influencing how I think about our visitors.

A white paper was recently published by the Irvine Foundation called Critical Issues Facing the Arts in California. It's essentially talking about how profoundly technology is changing our society to the point where business as usual in museums and galleries is not tenable. They're talking about the arts, but I think it's true across the board for science museums as well. If we don't embrace these new technologies in profound, fundamentally new ways we will be left behind. The paper identified three major issues these technologies bring up for museums: 1) Our visitors will increasingly expect us to be technologically literate; 2) They'll increasingly expect that their experiences will be personalized and customized to meet their own particular interests and needs. They will not want to come to a place where an exhibit has been designed in a uniform, mass-market way where everybody gets the same experience; and 3) We need to be excruciatingly current. That is, whatever you engage with in a museum setting will be - as on the Internet - the most current information out there. These three expectations have huge implications for museums.

Louw: Is there anyone whose work you're following closely?

McLean: Yeah, Dan Spock at the Minnesota Historical Society. He's very innovative and the work that comes out of his team is quite inspirational. I was an advisor on a project they did that just blew me away called "Open House: If These Walls Could Talk," about one house in St. Paul and its inhabitants. The way they've interpreted this house over time and through the kind of design methods they've used are really fabulous. Also Michael Pearce at the Exploratorium. He has always done wonderful interdisciplinary work, and I'm looking forward to seeing the new Mind and Learning project when it is complete.

Louw: If you were to mentor someone new coming into this practice of making learning experiences for people, what would you tell them? What do you think are common mistakes for newcomers?

McLean: Not knowing what's gone on before, for sure. Not understanding the history of the practice. You have to search for it, but the reason I wrote my book Planning for People in Museum Exhibitions was that I got so frustrated when people would just go out and dream up something that was concocted in the 60s and think it was the latest, greatest thing. There was nothing laid down that said, "This is what people have been thinking about up to now." But people are still reinventing the wheel. I think ExhibitFiles, the new online community I helped create with Wendy Pollock at ASTC and Jim Spadaccini at Ideum will help bridge the gap and provide ongoing information about exhibits. My recommendation to newcomers: learn from what others have done - stand on the shoulders of colleagues. Look to other fields of endeavor for inspiration, particularly the arts. Don't try to emulate formal learning in the schools. And, as much as possible, try to create models that are alternatives to schools, rather than focusing on work that's in support of the schools.

Louw: Do you think experience design as a kind of a tag-word is an interesting place to look for inspiration?

McLean: No, I have a phobic reaction to the notion of experience design. I think the realm of environmental psychology is much more interesting and more applicable for our work. Experience design seems like a superficial sound bite in the genre of tradeshows, Disney, and commercial branding efforts.

Louw: Where is innovation coming from right now? Where do you think it will come from in the future?

McLean: I think right now innovation is coming from interdisciplinary collisions - from the arts, from artists dealing with science, and from social explorations in the history of science and philosophy. And I think innovations are showing up in places like YouTube and Second Life and some of the quirky things that are going on online.

Louw: So, pragmatically, how can research and evaluation help support the design process?

McLean: I'd like to see a lot more research focused on environmental psychology and designed environments. And much more research on the power of images and imaging and perhaps less on conversation. The family intergenerational conversation research that's going on - that's a 60s museum thing. I would like to see people put their research energy where there are really new things to be discovered rather than just confirming the old folkology. I would much rather see research that actually goes out and discovers new things.

Louw: What would interesting design research look like in a museum?

McLean: I did a paper for the National Academy of Sciences that focused on research questions of museum practitioners - and I'd love to see some of those questions really explored in depth. What are the influences and effects of design on learning? Of metaphor? How can we support and encourage the imagination? What are the limits of interactivity? What are the long-term effects of wondrous experiences?

On a more practical level, Sue Allen did a study on 'walls' at the Exploratorium. It came out of a fiercely held notion by some staff - originated by Frank Oppenheimer when he started the Exploratorium - that walls separating and dividing exhibits only serve to reinforce our own conceptual categories and that they are too coercive on visitors. Therefore, the Exploratorium would have no walls that organized exhibits into categories. But, what was frustrating to me was that staff didn't recognize that, in terms of environmental design, walls serve to help focus, to create comfortable, quiet spaces, nesting opportunities - all those things about human psychology that are required in order for people to drill down deeper into an experience. For this study, Sue put up walls and then videotaped and interviewed people. Then she took the walls down, left the exhibits exactly where they were and did the same thing. The study showed that walls actually did help some people spend more time and focus on the exhibits.

This kind of real environmental design research that studies the effects on learning environments of things like walls, lighting, color, acoustics, air quality and so forth is really important. Studying things like what the sound environment does to people's ability to focus and pay attention and attend to something. As well as lighting - you know, the weird strobe flickers in the fluorescent versus more incandescent campfire kind of lighting - and the effects of containment vs. openness on visitor experience.

The reason I'm really pushing here is because I think most educational researchers think these are trivial. But I think these design choices have profound effects that we have not studied. I think people would be surprised at how much those tiny, nuanced differences have a huge effect in terms of how people learn and interact.

Louw: Just going back to the previous question - because I think it's something people care about - how can evaluation help support the design process in meaningful way?

McLean: Formative evaluation is critical to the design process. I'm a firm believer that formative is the most valuable, summative/remedial is the second most valuable, and front-end is the least valuable. You almost can't do public design without formative evaluation. You shouldn't do public design without it.

Louw: What is a good formative evaluation and how does it map onto the design process? What are the features of it? How do you set it up?

McLean: Good formative evaluation is an essential part of the design process. It's about asking questions to sort out what the design choices are and trying different design options to get some sense of how things are affecting people. And then iterative testing. I would say that formative evaluation coupled with mini-research projects around the bigger questions could be something really helpful to the field. It's not a linear process where you address this or that big research question floating over here. And that's the big axe I have to grind about informal learning research - the research questions need to be grounded and come from the practitioners and the researchers working together.

Louw: You say formative evaluation is part of the design process, so who leads this effort. Is it the makers themselves or is it a collaborative, negotiated effort with a research/evaluation team coming in and asking those questions around the design choices?

McLean: I think the designers and the evaluators and the writers and whomever else - based on the culture of the particular organization - need to be partners and need to really think about project goals together. I would say that the evaluators need to be less evaluators than facilitators of public co-design.

Louw: Is there a body of practical or theoretical knowledge that exhibit designers and more broadly - makers of informal science experiences - should build up and share? Or is every project unique?

McLean: Every project is unique, but the thread that holds them all together are the kind of nuanced sensitivity to visitors that is actually rare across the board - in researchers and designers and developers and educators. It's what I used to call the "expert generalist." I think people need to have a highly tuned intuition, instinct, and sensitivity to visitors, and the human condition. The goal is to create a stage on which visitors can follow their own questions. When you look at interesting arts installations, science exhibits, theater, writing and even stuff that's online now, it all has that in common.

Louw: How might a website(s) help build a stronger bridge between research and practice?

McLean: A website can't solve the research-practice question on it's own. I think that the way to move forward is to build synergies across related sites. For example meaningful linkages between InformalScience.org, Exhibit Files.org and WDIL.org (Web Designs for Interactive Learning) is one direction. ExhibitFiles is going to attract the people who take pictures of their work and like to talk about pulleys and screws or scripts and images; and that might have real points of intersection with Web Designs for Interactive Learning. I could see those three online communities coming together where WDIL looks at the specificity of what's going on online; Exhibit Files the specificity of what's going on in an onsite kind of environment; and InformalScience.org the specificity of how of the people who are looking at what's going on in these two environments in terms of impact.

Louw: How will informal science projects look different to audiences in the next five years? Or, will they look different?

McLean: Mmm. There is going to be a lot more citizen science and a lot more visitor co-design, customization, personalization - not mass-marketed things. And I'm not sure exhibitions as we know them are going to survive. I think they might be an outdated medium. If we do have exhibitions, they are going to be much more like lounges and little modules of things rather than these meta - Pirates of the Caribbean - blockbuster kinds of thing. We can't afford it. They're too expensive. They're too mono-cultural; that experience can't be customized.

Louw: What things annoy you the most when you visit a science museum?

McLean: They all look the same, like an airport. They are not in the service of beauty, and they often have no soul. That's more than annoying.

Louw: So then what makes an exhibit successful in your mind?

McLean: If the blood pressure of the people using it goes up. If people are engaged and lose track of time or they are inspired or excited. If you took a poll from a wide range of people about which are the most powerful experiences, there would be a lot of agreement...a lot of agreement.