Think Tank

The People will be heard: Interactive technology in public spaces

by Jennifer Kabat

Even the Shakers are going high tech. Ellen Spear, the head of Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts, recently talked to NPR about plans to add interactive technology to their exhibits. She reflected on the challenge of reconciling downloadable audio tours for Ipods with Shaker values of modesty and simplicity, but admitted that even Shakers are sometimes subject to the whims of the market. “Visitors demand it now,” she said. In fact, in their efforts to compete with other and more dynamic providers of information and entertainment, many museums are listening to their visitors more closely than ever before. In some cases museums—famously top-down institutions—are even incorporating the views, critical choices and contributed content of visitors into their programs. They are also re-examining the ways in which visitors interact with objects and spaces, as well as each other. For help with both of these approaches they are turning to a growing sector of the interactive design world; one that specializes in interactive museum displays.

ESI’s “Ring the Bells” exhibit for the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC.

Gideon D’Arcangelo, design manager at ESI, one of the first agencies creating interactive displays, explains the appeal of interactive technology, “No one wants to see themselves as just a consumer, where you’re just a convenient passive model, the blip at the end of a production line. Now there are tools for being a participant for being part of the conversation, and museums are becoming part of a two-way dialogue.”

Local Projects’ mobile recording studio for the “Miners Story Project.”

Thus, the best interactive exhibits are open-ended. They encourage visitors to be active participants in the experience rather than passive consumers of information. They take their visitors’ views seriously and break down the hierarchy of institutions. So now, 30 years after Derrida and Foucault challenged notions of who controls texts and history, these issues are trickling down to the museum through tools like iPods. Which are just what you’ll be using soon to take the various self-guided architecture tours at the Hancock Shaker Village.

New views on old art

Last Spring David Gilbert, a communications professor at Marymount College, got his students to “hack MoMA,” as he puts it. They produced Podcast museum tours in which professors and students discuss the sexually charged nature of Jackson Pollock’s work against the soundtrack of Strangler’s song “Peaches” (an explicit punk track from the 70s about checking out the foxy ladies at the beach…). Marc Chagall is also thoroughly dissed for his “ugly menorahs” and “reductive art.” The cheeky interactive tour was covered in the New York Times, on NPR—even by the BBC. It wasn’t long before others started producing their own versions. The online magazine Slate created tours of the Met and MoMA, explaining, “They can’t very well say things like ‘critics think this work is terrifically overrated, but we keep it on the wall because we sell a thousand posters of it a day’… but we can.”

Indeed, d’Arcangelo explains, “Online is encroaching on the physical world now that mobile devices are ubiquitous. And it’s great that a 14 year-old can have their take on art. Any perspective, the more the better. What you really need is a good tool to help you find the opinions that you care about with an eBay style ranking system. Art museums should be championing that sort of community involvement.”

But most aren’t. The idea of the audience taking control sends shivers down many a curator’s spine. Indeed after Gilbert’s class started hacking MoMA—and getting press for it, the museum briefly considered banning iPods before releasing select versions of their official tour online.

The whole issue of art’s aura, the individual object, the brush stroke, its “presence,” say, has been the traditional argument against art museums using interactive media. You can’t exactly replace paintings with a kiosk and, beyond audio tours, most institutions have a hard time figuring out how to make their collections interactive.

“It was previously thought that art spoke for itself, and what it didn’t say the curators would get across,” James Davis, Tate Britain’s curator for interactive resources explains. “But eventually we figured out this simply wasn’t true for visitors without experience or an art degree.” Still he cringes at the word “interactive.” “It defines an object in terms of its use rather than its purpose and this can preclude imaginative solutions to our interpretive goals.”

The audience takes over

Jake Barton, the principle of Local Projects, a design firm which has worked on interactive experiences like the StoryCorps project, tried to convince the Museum of the City of New York to do a show called “What Makes New York.” The idea was to have New Yorkers themselves curate objects from the museum’s collection that reveal the secret to New York’s New Yorkness. “Only,” Barton says, “I got a lot of push back. One curator said, ‘well then can anyone put anything in a museum?’ and I’m like ‘why not?’”

His exhibit would have injected energy in the staid presentation of the objects by overlaying the curators’ official take on them with the visitors’ own ideas. This is just what David Small’s interactive table at the Churchill Museum in London aims to do.

“Interactive Table” at the Churchhill Museum in London. Project by Small Design and Casson Mann.

Working with British exhibition designers Casson Mann, his firm, Small Design, created a device that lets visitors question all the patriotic pomp and circumstance you expect to accompany Churchill’s official life story. Using the table, visitors get to put together their own view of his life culling information from the more quotidian details—like his school reports and letters.

The 50-foot long table (or “Lifeline” as it’s called by the Museum) has 90 digital file folders, one for every year of Churchill’s life. Each folder has an additional 12 folders for each month filled with documents. People pick what they want to read so they can go as deep into his life as they want (or their time and patience will allow). The information is projected on the table from below by 13 video projectors so it looks seamless. Walk up to 1932, for instance, and touch the side of the table, (it works with a finger not a mouse or a pointer) select a date and see what happened. The files even include other historical events which give broader context to the personal material, so there’s a film from the day the first washing machine was sold in the UK at Selfridges, and when you open the file for the Titanic’s sinking, the whole table seems to go down. Among the thousands of documents are even such banal ones as Churchll’s first report card from 1882. The fact that he came bottom of the class is somehow deeply humanizing. But despite the fact that visitors get to curate their own narratives about Britain’s most famous prime minister, their choices are largely pre-determined. The information is in a context and is only one element of the show.

AllOfUs’s project for the John Constable exhibition at the Tate Britain Museum reveals the different layers of the painting.

Tate Britain is taking the idea of letting the audience provide the content for the exhibition one step farther. Seen as the stodgy cousin of the new, hip and architecturally fabulous Tate Modern, Tate Britain has shaken its role as the unloved relative to become more inventive and radical. Its outreach already includes projects like themed guides to the collections for hangovers, first dates—getting dumped even. And now they’re they’ve hired the firm AllofUs to take on interactive displays. After projects for London’s Science Museum and interactive shop windows for Selfridges (the same store that sold the first washing machine) even an interactive forest for the ICA where the trees grew leaves if you sang to the mushrooms, AllofUs came up with a display that lets people draw. Part of a small show pairing artist William Blake and his friend John Flaxman’s illustrations, the interactive drawing tool hardly looked like a kiosk.

AllOfUs’s kiosk for the William Blake and John Flaxman exhibition at the Tate Britain Museum.

Instead it was built from English oak and steel and stands like an elegant piece of furniture in the middle of the room. Because both Flaxman and Blake believed in the primacy of drawing, purity of line was the display’s focus. It used Flash, Director and a Wacom drawing tablet (framed in the oak so that it matched the frames in the rest of the gallery) to allow visitors to trace a highly magnified image of a Flaxman drawing. The idea was to let visitors feel for themselves what it might have been like for Flaxman to draw. Because the person drawing only saw a small detail, the illustration was reduced to simply a curve or an angle, to the line itself. Using 21st century technology, people got to experience an 18th century mindset where, as James Davis explains, “tracing was an essential skill worth perfecting and not associated with copying or cheating as might be thought of today.”

AllOfUs’s kiosk for the William Blake and John Flaxman exhibition at the Tate Britain Museum.

The Blake Flaxman display was the museum’s first experiment in interactive media, and it was so successful Davis has commissioned two more from AllofUs for their big-ticket Constable show this summer. Both new projects allow visitors to get closer to the work and Constable’s process. In one viewers physically move back and forth to reveal the various stages in the production of a painting. Based on conservation x-rays, the display works on that basic art gallery behavior of moving close to a painting to see its details and further away to take in the whole. People’s movement creates the actual interface, so there is no tricky technology to master and no need to handle even a keyboard and a mouse, making it particularly “grandma friendly,” AllofUs’s Nick Cristea explains.

Make it yourself

While audience participation is used to reinforce ideas, it’s also used to create exhibits themselves. Sometimes actually in real-time. That’s what happens at the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington DC, which implemented what one of its designers, d’Arcangelo, calls “an out-there concept.”

ESI’s “Gallery of Community” exhibit for the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC.

When the Catholic Church first approached ESI to make a visitor center in Washington DC, “they basically wanted a presidential library dedicated to the Pope with his glasses on the desk and his books, that sort of thing,” D’ Arcangelo says. But there was another faction in the Church who wanted it to be relevant and wanted to create the ultimate interactive exhibition to serve as an open door to visitors. The Pope would be a central figure, but the exhibit wouldn’t necessarily be about him.

ESI decided to put faith, and peoples’ various interpretations of faith at the very core of their solution. “We wanted to make a place that felt under construction. When we opened the doors to the public, we wanted it to feel like we were just getting started, and that the visitors would need to help finish it, and participate, like they do online.” The galleries include private spaces, or booths, where visitors are asked to create testimonials of their own experience of faith. People can draw, make a video, type a story, or record audio. If they choose to share it, their testimonial is filtered then and there by a curator who adds it to the gallery, so the exhibit continually tells the stories of that day’s visitors, and the center feels like a continuing tapestry of individual faith rather than some didactic explanation of the pope’s life.

ESI’s “Gallery of Community” exhibit for the Pope John Paul II Cultural Center in Washington, DC.

ESI decided to put faith, and peoples’ various interpretations of faith at the very core of their solution. “We wanted to make a place that felt under construction. When we opened the doors to the public, we wanted it to feel like we were just getting started, and that the visitors would need to help finish it, and participate, like they do online.” The galleries include private spaces, or booths, where visitors are asked to create testimonials of their own experience of faith. People can draw, make a video, type a story, or record audio. If they choose to share it, their testimonial is filtered then and there by a curator who adds it to the gallery, so the exhibit continually tells the stories of that day’s visitors, and the center feels like a continually forming tapestry of individual faith rather than some didactic chronicle of the Pope’s life.

“It’s important for designers to make you feel that what you are contributing is relevant,” d’Arcangelo explains, “and not like you deposit your story down a hole, and it’s never heard from again. It has to be meaningful both for you to leave and for someone else to look at it.”

Jake Barton agrees. He’s worked on similar projects with visitor-created content and says, “It can’t just be about participating for participation’s sake, like ‘Leave a comment,’ but no one will read it and respond to it.”

The StoryCorps Booth, Interaction Design by Local Projects. Photo by Chris Weil, NYC.

Visitor participation could almost be called Jake Barton’s stock-in-trade. He worked on StoryCorps, David Isay’s visionary project where visitors interview their friends and family members, creating in aggregate an oral history of average Americans’ amazing stories. The best get played on NPR, and all are collected by the Library of Congress. Each visitor leaves with a CD recording of their story. Though it’s a hugely interactive experience, there are virtually no computers to interact with in the booth itself, no telling your story to a screen. In fact, with its wood paneling, the booth looks almost like a den, and the only devices that feel like an exhibit display are outside the box, on the sides where you can hear some of the stories and see pictures of participants.

As Barton says, “The most expensive interactive device is a person.” He thought automating the process too much would intimidate people and produce stiff responses, so a person always mans the booth, talking visitors through the recording process. “We were designing the experience of how you prepare for the interview and what you do in the booth. It wasn’t just about interviewing and participating, it was about creating quality content.” Also, he adds, “We wanted it to be subversive. We wanted it to be about communication between two people who may not otherwise be able to talk to each other. We wanted to build this booth where you could ask your grandfather all these questions you usually couldn’t, but because you were in the booth, it mediated the relationship.”

The jetBlue Storybooth. project by Local Projects and MESH Architectures with MASDesigned.

Real, live, in-the-flesh people are an essential part of his other oral history projects for Jet Blue (passengers’ tales are told in a fuselage booth and the best turned into ads) and the Miners Story Project (their oral histories are being collected in a vintage Airstream traveling the Southwest for the Flandrau Science Center in Tucson, Arizona). Barton and d’Arcangelo have also both been taking these strategies beyond museum walls to try to integrate visitor participation into shopping.

Local Projects' provided technology design for Lo/Tek and Inbar Barak on the 'DIM' project.

ESI has been working with big box retailer Best Buy while Barton provided technology design for the edgy architects Lo/Tek and media designer Inbar Barak for the concept shop for Sara Lee. Called the Dimobile, it sold H&M-style clothes to kids in their teens and early twenties. As Barton explains, “The company didn’t know how to do that but wanted to use guerilla marketing and all these social software strategies to create viral media to draw attention to the brand itself.” Basically Sara Lee wanted to take fashion on the road, with the mobile store rolling up in different towns for a week or two. Inside, it didn’t have any traditional signage. Instead it used over 200 flat-screen monitors, so the images could be updated bi-weekly when new stock came in. Another way in which everything was made to feel real and personalized was the fact that the customers themselves were the models. When they opened drawers to look at the clothes inside, shoppers were asked if their picture could be taken. It would be stamped with the date and location and added to the store’s walls, creating a Dim community—almost like MySpace in literal space.

Local Projects' provided technology design for Lo/Tek and Inbar Barak on the 'DIM' project.

“Shopping is already purely, beautifully interactive,” says Peter Higgins, creative director of Land Design a British interactive design agency. “You go to a store, you pick something up, you smell it, you look at it, you touch it.” Designing a shopping experience is all about aura, about giving an object a space in which it can exert its pure, lustful power, thus inspiring people to buy it. While there is something confusing about a shop that takes your picture before it lets you fondle the merchandise, the project creates a social sphere for its intended audience, which is all part of building aura.

Objects in museums and visitor centers get their aura from history and the implied value of being in a museum collection. Technology mediates that aura in a number of ways. There’s the didactic approach where technology makes learning more compelling as happens in the Churchill Museum. Certainly all the documents of Churchill’s life could live online but then would the same cross-section of people see them? And would they be as fun? At the exhibit everyone gets to see the Titanic sink. At Tate Britain visitors get to experience art on new levels, and even to enter the artist’s mindset. What is perhaps most interesting than interactive technology in the tightly controlled narrative of the exhibition are the displays that depend on unpredictable visitor input. It’s impossible to imagine such exhibitions without interactive technology, but they also need the social sphere of a museum or visitor center to give aura and meaning to the diverse opinions visitors create. Given the right sort of content, faith or shopping, every person is able to give by contributing new depth to the experience, as well as taking something away with them.