Rising to the “Future Challenge”

Last week was Interpretation Australia’s National Conference, titled Future Challenge. As IA President Sue Hodges said in the opening ceremony, Interpretation faces challenges in the present, as well as the future. Economic downturns lead to budget cuts, which often disproportionately affect funding for interpretive projects and staff. In light of this, how can interpreters adapt to changing circumstances and make a better case for the value they add to natural and cultural heritage?

Our opening and closing keynotes gave two very different perspectives on this issue.

Genevieve Adkins, Director of the Centre for Interpretive Studies at the University of the Highlands and Islands, Scotland, highlighted the importance of interpreters having a solid grasp of the theory that underpins their work. Theory confers rigour, and rigour is necessary for funders and other stakeholders to take interpretation seriously. Judicious application of theory can also lead to better returns on investment in heritage interpretation projects.

For the closing keynote, Dee Madigan, Director of Madigan Communications and probably best known as a regular panellist on ABC’s spin-deconstruction program Gruen Planet, gave an ‘outsider’ perspective on the issues facing interpretation. She highlighted some of the parallels between advertising and interpretation, and how there is common ground in needing to understand the motivations and wants of your target audience.

I’ve prepared a storify of the tweets from Day 1 and Day 3. Day 2 was mostly taken up by field trips to destinations around Regional Victoria – I went to Point Nepean National Park and learned some of the history of the site as a Quarantine Station and later as an Officer Cadet School.

Ships and their passengers en route to Melbourne were held in quarantine at Point Nepean. The station was in use from the mid 1800s until the 1970s.
Quarantine was strict – passengers belongings were fumigated and all passengers had to go through special bathing procedures. Even the mail was fumigated! This case shows equipment used for fumigating mail.

I also gave a presentation based on Chip and Dan Heath’s 2007 book Made to Stick: why some ideas take hold and others come unstuck. In keeping with the Future Challenge theme of the conference, this paper was intended to show how the Heath brothers’ ingredients for ‘sticky’ ideas are a useful checklist for interpreters. Conversely, it shows how the business world is hungry for sticky ideas: are there potential untapped markets for people with interpretive skills?

 

Social Media and the PhD Student

Yesterday I presented a seminar to my fellow UQ PhD students about how social media can be used as a research and collaboration tool, based on my own experiences.

It was a fairly low-key, off-the-cuff presentation, but I duly uploaded it to Slideshare and posted a link to it on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn (the main platforms my presentation was talking about). Overnight it has picked up nearly 180 views and was featured on Slideshare’s “Hot on Facebook” and “Hot on LinkedIn” pages. I confess I don’t really know what that means but it sounds good and it’s nice to see there was some interest in it!

The main thrust of the presentation is comparing and contrasting the networking merits of Facebook (which I called “closed networking”), Twitter (“open networking”) and LinkedIn (“strategic networking”), as well as the value of blogging to a PhD student. It also includes a brief case study of how I used social media to recruit a participant sample for the first phase of my PhD research.

 

New Interpretive Trail at West Terrace Cemetery

Last Sunday was the launch of the Beliefs Attitudes and Customs self-guided interpretive trail at West Terrace Cemetery. This trail complements the Heritage Highlights tour (featured in this 4-minute video) that was launched last year and won a 2011 tourism award.

The trail was launched as part of a Victorian funeral re-enactment staged during the About Time history festival. Over 400 people attended the re-enactment, which was an impressive turnout.

Crowds photographing the funeral procession as it enters the cemetery

I was responsible for writing the signage and self-guided leaflet for the trail, with the assistance of historian Geoff Speirs who helped me with some of the background research and sourcing of images.

In contrast to the Heritage Highlights tour, the Beliefs Attitudes and Customs trail focuses less on individual personalities and more on how the cemetery reflects both the religious diversity of South Australia and the change in social attitudes since the colonial era.

So this trail encompasses the different religious sections of the cemetery, the funeral rituals of these different faiths, and how these religious sections came about in the first place. It is also an opportunity to compare the practices of colonial times, which to modern eyes can seem very rigid and superstitious, with the more ‘scientific’ view of death and the grieving process prevalent today. However in the absence of the prescribed social norms of yesteryear, we now may find ourselves at a loss regarding how we are ‘supposed’ to deal with death and grief.

I have to confess that while fascinating, some of these more abstract ideas proved difficult to write about in a way that was clear, engaging and succinct. Time will tell how successful we were in this goal.

PhD FAQs

A few weeks ago I completed the “Confirmation of Candidature” milestone of my PhD.

At my university at least, confirmation happens roughly one year into your candidature and is the first major litmus test of your PhD. Basically, when you pass your confirmation milestone you’ve managed to demonstrate to your Department that your proposed research is of sufficient scope, originality and feasibility to be “PhD-worthy”. After clearing this hurdle you can go forth into the world and start collecting your data (subject to ethics clearance of course – which I received earlier this week). So this seems to be as good a time as any to describe a bit about what I will be doing during my PhD and why.

What’s your PhD on?

My draft thesis title is “Design Factors in the Museum Visitor Experience”.  I’m interested in how visitors perceive different kinds of exhibition environments, and how this may influence what they notice, what they do, and how they describe their experiences. In a nutshell, does the exhibition environment make a difference, and if so, how?

How are you going to study this?

I’m taking what’s called a “sequential mixed-methods” approach. This means I’m using both qualitative and quantitative approaches to data collection, with each stage informing the next round of research. There are three main stages to my research:

  1. To start off, I’ll be accompanying a small number of people (about 20 I reckon) as they visit a range of different exhibition spaces. I’ll be asking them to “think aloud” their visit, telling me what they see, what they notice, what they think and feel about it and what attracts or repels them. This will all be audio recorded, as will a subsequent ‘debrief’ interview where we talk about and compare and contrast the different exhibition environments we visited. I’ll use the audio transcripts to identify key themes, patterns and commonalities in the way people describe exhibition environments.
  2. Based on these key themes, patterns and commonalities, I’ll design and refine a questionnaire to try to quantify these perceptual qualities. As part of the analysis I’ll apply a statistical technique called factor analysis to see what the important underlying factors are in the way people perceive exhibition environments.
  3. The final stage will be relating how visitors perceive the environment to how visitors respond to it, by measuring their behavioural, affective and cognitive responses. I’ll do this by combining the questionnaire I developed in the second stage with existing survey instruments for measuring visitor experience. I’ll also observe visitors and ‘code’ their behaviour to help me analyse the patterns. I’ll then use a statistical technique called path analysis to quantify the relationships between environment, affect, cognition and behaviour.

That’s the plan anyway. I’m sure things will evolve as my research progresses.

What made you decide to approach it that way?

The theory and methods I’ll be using have their roots in environmental psychology, which is the study of the interplay between people and their environment (in this context “environment” means any physical setting, built or natural). Environmental psychology has informed a lot of museum visitor studies, including the work of venerable researchers such as Stephen Bitgood, John Falk, and David Uzzell. So I feel I’m working within a strong academic tradition.

I’m also interested in applying some of the theories and techniques that have been developed in the study of retail environments, a field of study that can be considered to fall under the heading of “atmospherics”. Developed by Philip Kotler back in 1974, atmospherics contends that the (retail) environment influences consumer behaviour, and that this happens in fairly predictable ways. Kotler’s paper spawned a whole tranche of research in the marketing and retail spheres, which is now starting to find its way back to the museums sphere, at least from a marketing perspective (1, 2). My choice of methods is inspired by particular approaches that have been used in the study of retail environments (3, 4) that I think will also be applicable to museums.

Why are you studying this?

I spent several years planning museum and exhibition environments in collaboration with many talented and creative people. But because of the nature of the work at hand, we often never really had the chance to see our creations in action; test the assumptions upon which our designs were based. I want to see how much of our intuition was correct, and also see where we might have done things based on false assumptions. I’m hoping my findings will eventually improve the way we design exhibition environments.

Who are you studying with?

I’m studying through the School of Tourism at the University of Queensland, being supervised by Jan Packer and Roy Ballantyne. I was keen to work with Jan and Roy as they have a great reputation and strong publication record in visitor studies. And as luck would have it, they seemed happy enough to take me on (I have yet to ask them if they regret this decision . . . )

As I have firm roots in Adelaide, moving to Brisbane (a two-hour flight away) to be on campus was not an option. But I’ve been lucky to secure some desk space closer to home, at the South Australian Museum. This will be my principal study site.

So how is it all going? Have you finished your thesis yet?

This question is probably the most infuriating one for a PhD student to hear. By way of analogy, it’s a bit like asking the Colorado River “how’s that canyon thing you’re making going?” And from the outside, PhD research can seem positively geological in the timeframes involved. A lot may be happening, but it’s at a slow and deliberate pace – this means that months can go by without any tangibly new progress to report.

So over the next couple of years at least it will be a long chipping away at my research problem – collecting data, analysing it, refining my hypotheses, collecting more data, doing more analysis, rinse & repeat. Of course, during this period I hope to have preliminary findings that I can publish as papers or present at conferences. But a whole thesis is quite a while away yet.

In short, please don’t ask me this until AT LEAST early 2014.

There is obviously a lot more to my proposed research than I can cover in a mere blog post. But if you have any questions or comments, please get in touch – challenges and critiques are all part of it . . .

UPDATE: This research proposal was recently featured in April edition of the Museum Education Monitor. Online version available here.

Big stories in small places

Last week I gave a presentation to the Flinders University Archaeology Department, titled “Big Stories in Small Places:reflecting community identity through the interpretation of heritage sites”.

Big stories in small places

View more presentations from ReganForrest.
I drew upon two case studies of past projects: Fort Stanwix National Monument in upstate New York; and West Terrace Cemetery in Adelaide. Several years ago I worked on the development of a new exhibition and site interpretation at Fort Stanwix, while my work at West Terrace Cemetery is more recent (and in fact, ongoing).
I chose these two because I thought there would be some interesting parallels – both are in downtown locations, and both can be used as a starting point for wider and more complex narratives. Through Fort Stanwix we can tell the interweaving stories of colonialism and the formation of the American nation; while West Terrace Cemetery acts as a springboard for many stories of South Australia’s colonial period.
As I was going through the case studies, it also reinforced to me that the way we choose to interpret sites such as these inevitably says something about how we see ourselves, and how we want others to see us. How we see ourselves as a community will shape what stories we see fit to tell. But our heritage can also bring us face to face with uncomfortable truths that demand to be told.

Surveillance inside the museum

NB: This article was commissioned by Artlink magazine and was first published in the Art and Surveillance issue (Vol 31 No. 3) in September 2011.

Think back to the last time you visited a museum or gallery. Think carefully – consider each step you took and every decision you made.  Which way did you turn? What did you see and what did you miss? Did you look at any labels? Did you move through some spaces quicker than others?

Answering these questions – what visitors do, why they do it, and how museum design can influence such behaviour – is fundamental to visitor research, and what better way to find out than by watching them?

Early research: drift in; drift right; drift out

The first systematic studies of museum visitor behaviour were conducted in the 1920s and 1930s. These publications[i] continue to be influential and are generally credited as the foundational works in museum visitor observation.

Armed with a stopwatch and notebook, early researchers discreetly followed lone visitors to (mostly) art museums, taking care to observe without themselves being noticed (and thus disrupting the behaviour they were trying to document).

These early studies built up some general patterns of visitor behaviour, and coined terms such as ‘attracting power’ – a measure of how many visitors stop at an exhibit – and ‘holding power’ – a measure of how long they stay – which are still studied today.

A commonly-observed pattern of movement was visitors entering a gallery, turning right, and closely following the wall until they reached the nearest exit. Thus art on the left or centre of the gallery went relatively unobserved. This ‘right turn’ bias is still studied, and while it is by no means universal it has been observed elsewhere (Paco Underhill, in his book Why we buy: the science of shopping, describes a similar rightwards drift in retail settings).

Observation also revealed that as a visit wore on, the pace picked up: visitors took their time to look at art early in their visit, but successively sped up until they were moving through galleries quite quickly, barely pausing to look at any works. This was one of the earliest observations of the ‘museum fatigue’ phenomenon, where visitors gradually run out of physical and / or cognitive ‘steam’, or simply had seen enough for one day.

Late 20th century: diligent or dilettante?

After the second world war, museological priorities shifted and one apparent casualty was visitor observation. The field was virtually neglected until the 1970s and 1980s, when visitor studies came to be recognised as a distinct discipline.

This renewed interest arose with a shift in the perceived role of public museums. Collections, in and of themselves, were no longer seen to be enough. Museums increasingly had to justify their presence (and their funding) as sites of public education and enrichment. The emergence of hands-on museums, with an explicit educational role and a funding-driven need to evaluate their exhibits and programs, also catalysed a shift to a more visitor-focused outlook across the museums sector as a whole.

Again, most of these later studies were done using a stopwatch, pencil and paper, marking where people went, where they stopped, what they looked at and how long they stayed. But the question remained – what can be generalised from these observations? Are they anecdotes or data?

In the late 1990s, through a meta-analysis of over 100 of these observations, some patterns did emerge, and the results might have been disappointing for the curators who had carefully selected objects, designed interactive exhibits and crafted interpretive labels. Most visitors breezed through their lovingly-produced creations in just a few minutes, passing most displays with barely a second glance. One metric of the study was the proportion of ‘diligent’ visitors, defined as those who stopped at over half of all exhibit elements. On average, only a quarter of visitors fell into this category, meaning the vast majority took in less than half what was on offer.

But was this necessarily a bad thing? Recent commentators have pointed out that low ‘diligence’ is an inevitable consequence of visitors following their own agendas. Visitors come to satisfy their own curiosity, which may be gratified long before the exhibition has finished ‘talking’ about a particular topic. From the point of view of the visitor, skimming an exhibition can be just as successful as carefully studying it.

Caught on tape: audio and video recording of visitors

Obviously, researchers cannot faithfully record everything visitors do, say and notice by pen-and-paper recording methods. Real life has no replay button to catch those things you missed the first time around. Thus in-depth study of specific exhibits calls for audio and video recording.

Video recording works best either for individual exhibits, or in small spaces which can be captured in a single camera’s field of view. Using this method, researchers have produced detailed and sometimes profound vignettes of visitor-exhibit exchanges. Audio recordings have caught visitors repeating snippets of label text in their conversations, proving that they are reading more text than first thought.

While audiovisual recording is a source of rich and detailed data, it does not scale well to studies of whole galleries. Trying to follow individual visitors through footage of multiple cameras presents a monumental data management task (and that’s assuming the camera angles catch what you’re looking for in the first place). Audio recordings can be hard to follow after the event, particularly if you don’t know where visitors were standing at any given point in time, and you can’t always distinguish who is speaking keeping the cheap, practical and flexible pencil-and-stopwatch method the standard, at least for the time being.

Where next?

Trackers, smartphones and the ‘O’

To borrow from Niels Bohr: prediction is difficult – especially about the future.

As electronic technology becomes a more ubiquitous presence in our lives, a reliable and cost-effective tracking tool may eventually supersede paper-based methods.

Like it or not, we already share a lot of information about our day-to-day lives through GPS-enabled smart phones, social media and internet use. For market researchers, this is raising the bar of expectation – if we can follow website visits click-by-click, what’s stopping us getting similarly rich data about real-life visits to malls and museums?

Radio Frequency Identifiers (RFIDs) are already widely used in the retail sector for supply chain management. In theory, RFID-tagged tickets or lanyards could be used to track people too – although such an approach can be expensive (not to mention feeling a tad intrusive).

Smartphones offer more promise[ii] as we are already used to carrying them. Data is based on the signals the phone is emitting anyway, and can be collected while maintaining visitor anonymity. Using visitors’ own phones also makes it feel like less of an imposition. This means that the tracking process is less likely to influence visitor behaviour.

Onsite receivers can be installed to make use of the TMSI – the electronic handshake that every mobile phone periodically makes with its nearest base station. Piggybacking on the TMSI signal can allow time-stamped locations to be taken with an accuracy of about 1-2 metres. Weaving together these snapshots can then give an overall visitor path. Drawing on phones’ inbuilt Bluetooth and Wi Fi capacity are also possibilities, but no solution on its own is a silver bullet.

So far, it appears that phone tracking has yet to cross over from retail to museums, although in Australia the Powerhouse Museum is currently trialling a phone-based system in their Lace exhibition, supported by the NSW Trade and Investment’s Collaborative Solutions Program.

Another possibility is to make tracking an intrinsic part of the visitor experience. This is what Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) has done with its “O”, an interpretive device that doubles as a visitor tracker.

MONA has taken the bold step of having no printed labels at all, just the O (an iPod Touch loaded with specialised software) which visitors are given on arrival as their tool for navigating the exhibition spaces. At the same time as providing interpretive material, the O is recording a visitor’s every move: where they stop; what they look at; how long they spend looking at it. “A dedicated sensor network in gallery ceilings and walls monitors the position of an RFID tracking tag attached to the mobile device. It is similar to how GPS works, but for indoors,” says Tony Holzner of Art Processors, a Mona venture created to commercialise the O. The O is thus quite different from website analytics tools, which are based on IP addresses.

Visitors to MONA can get the O to save a copy of their track through the museum and information about what they looked at to their own email addresses. Meanwhile the data accumulates, giving MONA a good sense of what visitors are doing on the gallery floor.

While MONA already has an enormous wealth of information to draw upon, this is still not the whole picture. Where are visitors coming from? What’s being said on the gallery floor? What else are visitors doing? MONA hopes to find out, but so far at least, they are beyond the capabilities of the O. As curator Nicole Durling acknowledges, ‘there are some things you still need to stand there with a clipboard for’.

[i] A more detailed review and bibliography can be found in Timing and Tracking: Unlocking Visitor Behavior by Steven Yalowitz and Kerry Bronnenkant (2009) Visitor Studies, Vol 12 no 1 pp47-64 http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10645570902769134.

[ii] For a more detailed overview of mobile phones as visitor tracking devices, see http://conference.archimuse.com/mw2011/papers/mobile_phones_and_visitor_tracking

 

“Heritage Highlights” wins Tourism Award

The 2011 South Australian Tourism Awards were announced on Friday night during a black tie dinner held at the Adelaide Convention Centre. The awards span some 28 categories, covering everything from major attractions and international events to small boutique tourism operators.

The self-guided “Heritage Highlights” interpretive trail of West Terrace Cemetery (which opened in March this year, and for which I wrote the text – see here for details) was entered in the New Tourism Development category (Category 25)

In each category, awards are given out based on the judges’ score each entry receives: a Bronze award for a score above 75%; Silver for 80% or higher; and Gold for 90% or higher. There is also an overall winner for the best entry in each category.

I was at the awards dinner as a guest of the Adelaide Cemeteries Authority, who had entered the trail into the Awards. While we were hoping to pick up a prize, we had no idea what to expect because the category had a strong and very diverse field of entries (including boutique restaurants and shark tours). So we were all a little bit shocked (and delighted) when it was announced that we’d won the category!

It was great for all of us involved to receive peer recognition for the project. It’s been a few years in the planning: I first got involved in 2008, when the Cemetery first commissioned its interpretation plan. But it’s not over yet! The next phase of interpretive signage now in its early stage of development and is due to be installed in mid-2012.

The company we keep: audience engagement

Earlier this week I spoke at the National Craft and Design Directors and Curators Conference, held in Melbourne as part of the State of Design Festival. I met lots of interesting and passionate people and I was delighted to be able to be part of their conversations and workshop sessions.

I had been invited to address the group on this year’s theme: The company we keep: audience engagement. My talk: Who, How and How Many?, was intended to give an overview of issues surrounding audience development: the difference between audiences, visitors and participants (at least how I see it), audience profiles, visitor identities, models of participation, barriers to engagement, and how social media can fit into an audience development strategy.

For those that are interested, a PDF version of my presentation has been uploaded to Slideshare:

The presentation was intended to be a bit of a toolkit, identifying resources that might be useful. It was also a way of introducing some common vocabulary that we could all use during the Workshop sessions during the conference.

As always, I am indebted to Nina Simon and her excellent Museum 2.0 blog. It has so many great ideas I was able to include in my presentation and I just hope my own particular take and spin on things was able to add some value.  (I always put a plug in for Nina’s book, the Participatory Museum, so maybe I repay the favour by promoting a sale or two . . .).

Another resource I drew upon in this presentation was Morris Hargreaves McIntyre’s Culture Segments audience model. But more on that in a future post.

The Garden of Health

It’s always nice to see a project you’ve worked on come to fruition.

Yesterday I went to the opening of the Garden of Health at the Botanic Gardens of Adelaide. This new garden is designed to show how plants have been used for healing and wellbeing since ancient times. It features medicinal plants from around the world, including plants which have only recently caught the attention of modern pharmacology.

A view of one of the Garden of Health beds

I was appointed to write interpretive text for the signage. The Garden staff were very pleased with the result (as was I!), so bear with me if I show off some of my handiwork (and apologies that the contrasts of daylight have played havoc with the camera a bit):

Ancient plants, cutting edge medicine
Interpretive sign on plants and modern pharmacology

 

The potential hazards of herbal medicines
Healing plants of Africa

The intent with the interpretive text was to have a casual, conversational style that didn’t get too bogged down in detail but still offered enough interesting facts to make the signs informative and engaging. Signs cover historic periods, healing traditions and geogrpahic areas. (And thanks to Katrina Nitschke from the Garden for giving these signs a nudge in the right direction from time to time!)

The Garden of Health is located near a new Western Entrance to the Garden, made a landmark by this impressive Gingko Gate by artists Hossein and Angela Valamanesh:

The Gingko Gate

If you’re in Adelaide, I hope you have a chance to check it out.

Cemetery stories

Visiting a cemetery, just for the sheer curiosity of it, probably isn’t top of your ‘must do’ list.  It certainly wasn’t on mine.

But that was before I realised how much cemeteries can tell us about a place and its history. Death is the ultimate unifier and, almost by definition, a cemetery will include a true cross-section of society. In addition, the design of the cemetery and the symbolism of the monuments can tell us a lot about the culture and the values of the society that created them.

About three years ago, I was part of a team that was commissioned to do an Interpretation Plan for West Terrace Cemetery here in Adelaide (I wrote about it at the time in Issue 39 of Interpreting Australia magazine – free download available to IA members). It was an intriguing prospect – while there are a few cemeteries around the world that pull in the crowds (Pere Lachaise in Paris springs to mind), I don’t think many have systematically explored their cultural tourism potential.

West Terrace Cemetery is distinctive in that it dates back to the beginning of South Australia’s colonial history, and was the State’s principal cemetery for the best part of a century. South Australia’s early politicians, explorers, entrepreneurs, priests and paupers all share their final resting place in its grounds. You can consider the cemetery as a window into South Australia’s colonial history in particular (I’ll define ‘colonial’ South Australia as the period from first European settlement to Federation, i.e. 1836-1901).

So, back to the Interpretation Plan.  One of its recommendations was to produce a set of self-guided tours of the cemetery, each exploring a different theme. The first challenge was to choose, out of a longlist of several hundred, which grave sites would be chosen to create the first tour of ‘heritage highlights’. Eventually, a tour comprising 29 stops was developed and I was appointed to write the text for the signage (through Exhibition Studios).

One of the sites on the Heritage Highlights tour. The draped urn at the top of the monument was a common funerary symbol in the late 1800s.

It was quite an undertaking – to interpret the cemetery features and burial sites necessitated getting across a lot of SA’s early history in order to give the stories context and relevance. We needed to provide enough background for visitors who knew little of South Australian history, while still keeping the text succinct. The tone of the text needed to be lively, while still sufficiently respectful of the place it was sited. The content also needed to be approved by the descendents, who remain ownership and control of the burial plots.

The Heritage Highlights trail was officially opened on March 4, and I was delighted to be invited to the celebrations and meet some of the descendents of the people I’d written about. I was careful not to look too closely at the text (I was sure there’d be things I’d wished I’d done differently!), but was pleased to see a project that had been in the pipeline for so long finally come into fruition.

So if you’re in Adelaide, are curious and have a free couple of hours, I recommend you see it for yourself – among the people you will discover are:

  • Colonial powerbrokers such as the Kingstons, Henry Ayers and John Langdon Bonython
  • The entrepreneurs behind household names such as Faulding and Menz
  • The women who campaigned to see SA become the first place in the world to give women full democratic rights
  • Eccentric genius Percy Grainger (yes he’s buried at West Terrace!)
  • Plus the stories of ordinary people caught up in extraordinary circumstances, such as the young Foot Constable killed in the line of duty, and a victim of South Australia’s worst civilian maritime disaster.

I hope that’s been enough to whet your appetite – and do let me know what you think!

The Cemetery is open every day and you can pick up the tour guide brochure at the front gate.