The Visitor Experience

Summary

2006-07-21T14:20:00.000Z

So that's the workshop over. In summary, the workshop looked at some emerging trends within new media and exhibition development, from social networking to interactive exhibit technologies. The audience was a group of people who are working on a project to develop a visitor centre for the Houses of Parliament. Hopefully, the event was useful and interesting to them.

This blog has acted as a record of the day, but can also be the starting point for any discussions, questions, remarks etc about the presentations given or the ideas discussed - you can leave a comment on any of the blog entries very easily - no registration required...

You may also want to explore some of the websites that were mentioned in the presentations, from myspace to 43things. I'm going to go through the notes and add the links where relevant.

You may also want to explore another social networking site based around events, by adding yourself to the event page for The Visitor Experience Workshop over on Upcoming.org, which lets you discuss the event and find similar events.

Future Exhibitions

2006-07-21T11:03:00.000Z

Peter Higgins starts his presentation.

He shows a venn diagram combining 'Destination', 'Physical' and 'Narrative'.

He says that as a consultants, people often think he does just the 'narrative' bit, but actually he's interested in the Physical and Destination issues too - how the building works, why people visit and come back, and so on. He says that exhibition designers need to know as much about the building as about the narrative content.

Clients always have different levels of expertise, he says.

He talks about a council which bought an artificial lake, and interesting environment, but didn't have a story to tell. So they looked for stories about the landscape that they could tell, and this was worked into the design of the physical building that was built to house the visitor centre. So this is an example of where the building was informed by the narrative.

Also within the building, they built an amphitheatre in order to cater for post-visit tours, as people initially would want to read a bit about the centre but to get out within the natural habitat as much as possible. So with the amphitheatre, the visitors were encouraged to come back after dark to watch shows in the amphitheatre.

In the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, they introduced a gallery where models could be hung, and re-hung fairly frequently, in order to encourage people to come back and as a dramatic introduction to the musuem.

They've also done some work on the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, which I couldn't quite write about quickly enough.

Understanding the visitors is very important, as is orientation and preparing visitors for the experience, eg within holding and queuing areas.

New Media - somehow we have to know how we are going to use future technology and so plan how it will interact with the building.

Lots of videos of interactive which are all very interesting but difficult to quickly describe.

Another dinosaur exhibit allows people to use a joystick to move a spotlight, uncovering hotspots which have curator-driven stories, however people feel that they are discovering the stories on their own terms, rather than being curator-driven.

New media has to be used in a way that is exceptional and different, he says, and has to actually mean something to people. You also have to keep the power of the real, and relate the new media to the objects in gallery, so that you're delivering an experience people can't get at home.

How do you evaluate interactive exhibits, when you can't evaluate it until it's aleady built, he asks. What you can do is to storyboard it and test those, he says, or test other prototypes.

He also mentions take-away content, which is something tangible and physical that they can take home.

What we're creating in visitor centres is experiences, he says, and we're all competiting with the likes of Alton Towers and Disney, and so it has to be engaging and real.

Someone asks about managing big visitor numbers and dwell time. He suggests that one technique is through passive engagement, whereby people can be satisfied by watching other people take part in the interactive. To do this, people watching have to be able to understand the process, and see it (no small screens!). You can provide the big experience on site, and then deliver any additional deep content for people to read at home, e.g via the web.

Emerging Technologies

2006-07-21T10:31:00.000Z

Kevin Walker begins his presentation...

He begins by introducing himself, and the London Knowledge Lab, where he works.

Generally he says, people have put computers into museums in order to fit in a load of content that curators couldn't otherwise fit into the exhibition. What he's been interested in, he says, is computers that relate to the physical world.

He gets out some toys from his bag. The first is a tilt sensor, which he put under a table in an exhibit, so that people tilted the table to affect a projection onto the table, making for an intuitive exhibit.

He goes on to tell the story of Shackleton, who took a ship full of people to try and reach the south pole. He shoes a video of a 3D-rendered footage of the boat crashing into the ice, suggesting that this is something you wouldn't otherwise be able to show. The exhibition was primarily an exhibition of photographs, he says, except for one object which was a little boat that the six guys travelled the ocean in. He wanted to show this amazing story, he says, and so they stuck the boat in the middle of the gallery and surrounded it with video projects of the ocean. This made people feel a bit sea sick, but was successful in immersing people in the exhibit. They recreated the oceon in 3D. They then hooked up a sextant with a computer, so that you could look through the sextant and take a sighting, and then a screen calculates your position, and tells you how far off course you were. It was intended to be quite difficult, to show how challenging the conditions and experience was.

He gets out another gadget, which is a very simple button/knob. He plugs it in, and shows how turning the knob changes a display. Not particularly a future technology he says, but he used to have to solder together these gadgets whilst today you can buy them commercially.

He gets out a video camera, which plugs into his apple laptop. The first demonstration shows that it can track your movements. Whilst he used to have to program this software, it now comes built in to every 50 pound webcam.

He shows how the video tracking technology was used to build a 'virtual dig', to solve the problem of real digs being dirty and requiring supervision and so on.

He shows a product from Sony which you can stick on to anything to make it into a touch sensitive surface.

Next is an exhibit called thin air, where there is a projection into thin air, which people can control by pointing at and moving thier hands about.

Next up he shows a video project of the earth from space, and talks about how HD TV is being talked up in shops at the moment. There's an argument that it won't take off however, as people are also interested in web delivery of content and so on. Museums however are a place where high definition projects might work though, as it's giving people an experience they might not otherwise get at home.

He shows a video of two dinosaurs fighting, which was projected in an exhibition to help explain a fossil of two dinosaurs which had been found in a fighting position with each other.

He says he's big of projectors, and has spent time trying to get rid of screens within museums, because projection can transform a physical space, changing a wall that it's projected onto. He shows a video of a projection onto a white model, where the project knows the shape of the thing it's projecting on to. Another video he shows is where there's a series of white walls where a load of projectors turn the walls into different physical spaces.

He goes on to talk about electronic paper, which some newspapers are now trialling. Unlike screens, he says, electronic paper is reflective rather than projecting light, which tends to attract and distract people.

He shows another video of a wooden mirror, in which lots of small bits of wood are rotated to change their reflective properties in time with a video camera capturing the person looking at it, creating the illusion of a mirror.

He talks about a new Planetarium called the Rose Centre for Earth and Space. The big spherical surface was used to explain size information, such as models demonstrating the size of the planets relative to the Sun.

He skips through lots of other interesting examples of technology within visitor attractions. There's so much information here, I can't type fast enough to keep up!

A final video is of the National Cowgirl Museum in texas (!!). You ride a model horse for a few seconds, and then videos and motion sensors take your image and superimposes them onto an old-style rodeo video. You also get a username and password with which you can download the video from the web.

Question: Someone asks how you can plan these technology based exhibits to enable learning. He says that much of the work he's done has been trial and error. Whilst he's used evaluation and learning theory from the beginning, but often it's difficult to know how the interactives will work until they've actually been used by people.

Social Networking

2006-07-21T10:09:00.000Z

Katie Stretten starts her presentation.

She first shows the site 43things, which allows people to share and talk about their goals in life.

She then shows the site Soflow.com. It shows your personal network, and you can join specific groups. Conversations range from the serious to the frivilous.

The next site she shows is Frappr.com, which uses mapping technology so that you put yourself in geogrpahical contect.

She then turns to 'the daddy of them all', Myspace. She explains that you can have networks based on interests, has photos, music, blogs, etc. You can also add content and links from other social networking sites. So, she says that there's a network of networks, with all the sites working together.

How does this related to museums and visitor experiences, she asks. Katie has recently been working on a website called Every Object Tells a Story. This asks people to tell stories about their own objects as well as museum objects. Offline and online events were used to encourage people to tell stories, including in their branded taxi which has a video camera inside which you can tell your story too.

What's even more interesting, she says, is that museums upload their own stories about objects, but these are held on the same level as user-contributed stories, and so users feel like they are really contributing to the commuinity.

The site is more controlled than typical social networking sites, and doesn't focus on friends networks, in order to make it different and relevant.

She suggests that visitors could create account in the visiting centre, and then take photos via a mobile phone to upload to their space. Visitors could add tags to their objects, and comment on each others stories. They could also make pledges of things they are going to do. She comments that MPs should also be creating their own spaces, and so be engaging at the same level as the visitors, in order for people to feel that it's a valuable experience.

She also suggests working with other social networking sites, to engage with a wider variety audiences.

Someone asks whether people often meet up in real life through social networking sites, and whether there's any liability for this, if people have a bad experience. Katie suggests that people do sometimes meet up, depending on the site and type of network, but that she doesn't know about the legal issues [my note: see recent controversy over myspace].

Experiments in Engagement

2006-07-21T09:02:00.000Z

Dave Patten, head of new media at the Science Museum, delivers his presentation.

He starts by looking at multi-user exhibits. An exhibit was developed around video conferencing, as this was something that only businesses were really using. It didn't work as expected though. EIther people used the exhibit on their own, or they discovered the videoconferencing, and used it to talk to other people in the museum, mostly teenagers chatting up other teenagers of the opposite sex. It was difficult to test this whole system. The exhibit used a telephone handset which people needed to tap a number in to connect the videoconferencing to a particlar feed. Unfortunately, the museum also used telephones to deliver audio commentaries, and so this ended up being confusing. This shows how important it is to do visitor tests and get into the mindset of the audience. The exhibit stayed in the museum for five years, but the museum learnt a lot from it.

The next multi-user exhibit, In Future, is a lot more successful. There are big circle tables, with a very simple wheel and and a button. THere are a number of different games, and the interesting thing is that people actually play with strangers, and often talk abot the game. A large screen at the back displays totals of the votes that are part of the games.

The musuem has also looked at putting the visitor into the exhibit. In the Challenge of Materials gallery, an exhibit called 'making a t-shirt' which takes a photo of the visitor, which then gets used within the exhibit as people design a t-shirt for themselves. At the end, they see themselves walking down a catwalk with the last three people who used the exhibit. People like this, and really engage with the exhibit.

Artists are also invited to make exhibits which put the visitor in the attraction. One exhibit that the museum is looking at for the new Launch Pad gallery is a video wall which displays videos captures of videos in sillhoutte. Visitors typically get engaged with this, and put on shadow puppet displays or even whole mini displays.

It doesn't have to be complicated though, he suggests. On Brighton Pier, there are boards displaying comic scenes which you can stand behind and have your face appear into. This is a fun and simple way of letting your visitors put themselves into the experience.

With another sytem at the Science Museum, visitors are able to leave comments on a variety of topics. The problem with thik is being too successfull, with thousands of comments being generated every week, requiring someone to sit through checking the comments. Typically only 15% are relevant comments, with others being gibberish or inappropriate.

The Energy Ring and 'dot dot comment', visitor comments are displayed in an artistic way. However, it's difficult to get a real time link between the comments being entered and being displayed, as people do make inappropriate comments.

Take away content - the Museum wanted to allow people to take content away. However, with printing systems, they typically were very expensive and created a litter problem.

A 'save' system allows people to generate a webpage from their content instead. This was developed in 1998, when not huge numbers of people had internet access. The museum knew it was going to go free, and wouldn't have tickets, and so needed some way of recognising people. Fingerprint technology was used, but initially it had a very low recognisabilty rating, especi ally with children, and so lots of work was done to improve it. Only 15% of people bothered to come back and view their webpage however, which seemed disappointing but is actually fairly high for this kind of thing. People either couldn't find their webpage, didn't want to, or didn't understand what they had done.

A second system allows people to e-mail themselves a link to some content, which means that there's an e-mail waiting for them when they get home. However, it's important to make sure that the e-mails collected aren't used for marketing purposes unless people specifically opt in.

For the Dana Centre, an electronic voting system was developed. Dave asks people to pick up a voting handset from under their chairs, and asks them to vote on a few questions to demonstrate the system.

Convergence - Dave suggests that convergence with technology has mostly already happened, with mobile phones becoming multi-function devices. The more interesting question is how you can converge real and virtual audiences. One example is an event held in the Dana Centre where people could watch live video of an operation taking place in a hospital, with the audience being able to ask the surgeons questions - this was an engaging experience, and is something you wouldn't be able to do in any other way.

The Dana Centre also webcasts its events, so that it can get a bigger and more diverse audience than the ones in the physical building. Some of the questions with this are how you let the online audiences take part in and effect the live event.

Conclusions.

"Evaluation is king. Plan carefully. Think like a visitor. Push the technology hard, but not too hard. You can always learn. Take some risks"

Question: Do you consider dwell-time when designing interactives. Dave suggests that this is considered, and that dwell time is quite low, around 2 minutes. For longer dwell time, seating is provided...

Question: Someone asks what kind of immediete feedback people expect when leaving comments. Dave says that this was difficult to make clear to people, and the exhibit software had to be re-written to make it clearer. With the energy ring, people see an effect on the ring - eg a lightening strobe - when they post a comment, but don't see their comment immedietly appear. People are fairly content with this, but ultimately want to see their comment appear live.

You, Me and Science.

2006-07-21T08:30:00.000Z

Tim Molloy, Head of Strategic Design at the Science Museum, is talking about 'You, Me & Science'.

Tim starts by suggesting that it's quite difficult to talk to people about science. He shows a slide showing an early picture of the Science Museum - with collections from the Great Exhibition. The collection somehow ended up in the V&A, where it was pretty dense an impenitrable. The sign over the door, he says, was 'the non-art collection' - a problem which to some extent continues today. The Science Museum is quite a humble building, he suggests, unlike some other big museums.

Tim shows a photo of the new Making the Modern World gallery. The director wanted to showcase some of the collection as beautiful, interesting objects. So the collection went from being a non-art collection to one which was displayed as though it was art.

Branding. People depend on science but don't understand it, they want a trusted guide. The Science Museum must fulfil this role, whilst being approachable and world class.

The Antenna gallery talks to people about contemporary science. It used to take 6 weeks minimum to get a story onto the gallery floor. With Antenna, stories can go on to gallery overnight if need be, but more usually within a week.

Launch Pad. Shows how things work - the best way of showing something is to allow them to directly take part in doing it. Interactivity isn't done just for the sake of it, as it's expensive and difficult, but because it helps us engage with visitors.

Ingenious is a series of galleries which simply tell stories. Current gallery is about Spitfire.

Outreach is another way of

The museum isn't just about the content though, people come to museums because they are public spaces, and want to explore, eat, watch other people, etc. So it's important to design spaces for these activities.

The Science Museum store is important, not just to raise important revenue, but because people expect it, wanting to take a souvenir home. The shop is also producing its own products, which are sold elsewhere too. The brand is informal, but authoritative.

Catering - when he joined the Science Museum, the shop sold a few postcards and research papers, and there was a small 'tea bar'. Now we have three main catering outlets - important because people expect these as part of a visit.

Questions: someone asked about how much research they did before developing brands and exhibits. Heather Mayfield answers, saying that the Science Museum does a huge amount of research in developing exhibits, however it's important not to just do what people ask for, as they only ask for things based on experience from elsewhere, and you don't want to just to what other people have already done.

Someone else asks about exhibit lifespan. Tim tells a story of Digitopolis, which opened in 2000 and closed in 2006. That gallery was about technology and had a lifespan of five year. At the V&A, some galleries that are twenty years old that still look good, but it's difficult to do this when talking about the future. Rapid churn of content is important to the Science Museum.

Someone asks how the brand was developed. Tim suggests that it is a work in progress, and probably always will be. The Science Museum has a reputation, which has a value, and intends to use its recognised (brand) characteristics to promote the idea of Science learning.

Final question, someone asks about a new children's gallery - is having a seperate children's gallery distinct to science museums? Tim suggests it not unique, as the Tate Modern and the Horniman all do this. He also sees the style of 'children galleries' like Launch Pad as also being relevant to other audiences - interactivity is important to many audiences, it's just that kids are generally better at working and playing at that level. The museum doesn't want to ghettoise the children's galleries, as most children and family groups will explore other galleries apart from the ones aimed directly at children.

Someone asked to what extend the museum has been able to move away from white middle class audiences. Heather says free entry meant a larger audience, but of the same proportions. Whilst school groups reflect the London community, the main audience hasn't really shifted. Outreach can help with this, but there is still work to do. The Tate Modern is a shining example of what can be done however.

About the Event

2006-07-21T08:14:00.000Z

So, I should explain more about this event, which is being held at the Science Museum's Dana Centre today. Titled 'The Visitor Experience ', the event is being run by the Science Museum to demonstrate some emerging trends and developments within exhibitions and new media. The audience is a group of MPs, Lords and officials from the House of Commons, who are working on a project to build a visitor centre for the Palace of Westminster.

The program is as follows:

9:15 - Welcome by Heather Mayfield, from the Science Museum. Update on progress towards a Parliamentary Visitor Centre from Robert Wilson.

9:30 - 'You, Me & Science...' - presentation from Tim Molloy, Science Museum.

9:55 - 'Experiments in Engagement' - Dave Patten, Science Museum.

10:20 - Coffee

10:45 - 'Social Networking' - Katie Stretten, Channel 4

11:15 - 'Emerging Technologies', Kevin Walker, London Knowledge Lab

11:45 - Future Exhibitions - Peter Higgins, Land Design

12:15 - Questions

Getting started

2006-07-21T08:06:00.000Z

The delegates are currently eating their breakfast at the Dana Centre here as we wait for the conference to begin...

Intro

2006-07-20T16:50:00.000Z

This blog has been set up to record the events from an event called 'The Visitor Experience' taking place at the Dana Centre on Friday 21st July 2006 (tomorrow).