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The Big Three

On my daily commute (OK, a rather pleasant walk across Adelaide’s parklands – I’m one of the lucky ones!) I’ve taken to listening to audiobooks. I find it’s a good way to broaden my reading repertoire when there are precious few hours in the day for non PhD-related reading.  Even though it’s notionally ‘downtime’, I still have a preference for listening to non-fiction and every so often there is a relationship between what I’m listening to and what I’m studying.

I recently finished the audiobook version of “Why we buy: the science of shopping” by Paco Underhill. Underhill and his company Envirosell have spent thousands of hours watching how people behave in retail environments, giving fascinating insights into how store layout, design and staffing can influence shopper behaviour and purchasing patterns. 

A lot of it is applicable to studying visitor behaviour in museums, but by way of example I’ll pick Underhill’s description of something he calls The Big Three:

  • Design (the store layout and design)
  • Merchandising (what’s put in the store)
  • Operations (what staff do)

Underhill describes how these three aspects are completely interlinked, and that a decision about one will inevitably affect the other two. He cites an example where a drugstore chain’s store designers decided to change the shelving to a wireframe style, which was much cheaper than the more traditional display shelves. Money saved, right? Well, no. It turns out that bottles kept on slipping in the gaps in the sheving, making the displays look untidy and causing staff to spend a considerable portion of the day straightening shelves – somthing they hadn’t previously needed to do. The savings on design were soon wiped out through increased staff costs.

Underhill goes on to describe client meetings where the heads of design, operations and merchandising might all be present. He says that it’s clear that these three are normally ensconced in their own respective silos; they barely know each other; and may regard each other with suspicion – if not outright hostility. Their areas all impact each other, but decisions are not being taken in a joined-up way – leading to missed opportunities and unintended consequences.

Throughout the book, Underhill is somewhat critical of both designers and store management for not spending enough time on the shop floor, seeing how their plans work in practice – and not just and 10am on a Tuesday, but during the 4.45pm rush on the day before an important holiday. It’s this culture that allows the silos to flourish as the knock-on effects of decisions are never seen by the people who make them.

It struck me listening to this that museums have their own (very similar) version of the Big Three:

  • Design (of exhibitions, circulation spaces, etc.)
  • Collections (both exhibits on display and objects in storage)
  • Operations (how many staff, what kind of staff, what kinds of facilities are offered, etc.)

As with the retail example, a decision about one will inevitably affect the other, for instance the following (semi) hypothetical scenarios:

  • An exhibition designed on the assumption that there will be a certain staff complement, only for the staff to be cut back later on in a cost-cutting exercise
  • A museum accepting a large collection from a benefactor, with an attached condition that the collection be displayed in its entirety
  • A museum developing a large new interactive exhibition gallery without taking on staff with the expertise to ensure the exhibits are well maintained and can be fixed when they break down

The lessons?

  1. Be mindful of organisational silos – the decisions you make will have wider ramifications than just your own department
  2. Take time to see the consequences of your decisions – it’s all too easy to be ‘too busy’ to spend time just watching how things are working out on the exhibition floor.
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Authority and Authorship

In my last post, I was musing about whether exhibitions can sometimes leave things too open to interpretation, in the process ending up just being confusing and coming across as elitist.

In the context of this, a recent article by Pete Brown in Museum Management and Curatorship* is very illuminating. His research:

“. .  . aimed to test whether [using exhibitions to provoke debate] is just an academic, post-modern indulgence that bewilders and alienates visitors, or whether it has real value for audiences.”

The article, “Us and them”, is a case study of Manchester Museum’s 2008 exhibition of the Lindow Man (a 2000 year old bog body discovered in the 1980s). The 2008 exhibition wasn’t the first time that Lindow Man had been displayed at Manchester Museum. However previous exhibitions had presented Lindow Man as an “archaeological treasure” (the ‘traditional’ interpretation) but did not explore the ethical issues surrounding the collection and display of human remains (issues which have come to the fore in more recent years). In constrast, the new exhibition sought to emphasise Lindow Man’s humanity, and speculate on his life and death rather than just treat him as purely an archaeological find:

“The key goal of the exhibition was to contextualise Lindow Man in a way that encouraged respectful reflection, inviting visitors to question the interpretation of archaeological evidence and the practice of displaying human remains in museums. The ‘post-modern’ concept sought to expose the process of development and construction, and to present various interpretations of what little evidence exists.”

Produced following extensive consultation with groups having a scientific, geographical or spiritual connection to Lindow Man, the exhibition was “poly vocal”, representing a range of viewpoints.

The exhibition design was intended to mirror the fact that that the story of the Lindow Man is incomplete and open to debate, by using finishes and materials which were deliberately left rough and unfinished.

This ‘polyvocal’ approach prompted considerable debate amongst the museum professionals involved: Was the museum abdicating its responsibility to educate the public or was it actually being more inclusive?

(This touches on similar issues to what happened when the Science Museum covered alternative medicine in one of its exhibitions – to the anger of those who expect the Museum to present only scientific authority).

The paper presents a good description of the issues museums face with respect to authority, the ownership of the ‘truth’, and the myth of ‘value-neutral’ displays. Exhibitions are products of their time and inevitably bear the fingerprints of the values and prejudices of the culture that produced them. But in this paper Brown goes a step further. Rather than just theorising about how visitors might respond to the museological shift in self awareness and self image, he presents some visitor research (something which is often sadly lacking in such debates).

Brown interviewed around 100 visitors, using a combination of Personal Meaning Mapping (PMM) and post-visit Questionnaire. Personal Meaning Mapping is an open-ended mind-mapping exercise conducted before and after an exhibition visit. It is a way of comparing visitors’ knowledge, attitudes and thoughts about an exhibition’s key idea and to see how these are affected by the exhibition experience. The questionnare collected demographic information as well as asking about visitors’ motivations for visiting the exhibition and general museum-going habits.

In the post-visit PMM exercise, nearly three quarters of visitors mentioned something to do with the exhibition’s ‘design, construction and atmosphere’. Apparently most of these comments were unfavourable – visitors missed the interpretive point of the deliberately ‘unfinished’ design and instead just saw it as tacky, incompetent and unprofessional. (Design like this presumably flies in the face of social conventions where ‘professional’ is used synonymously with ‘polished’).

But besides this observation, the PMM showed that nearly all visitors gained new knowledge, despite the non-didactic approach of the exhibition. In addition, more than half of visitors demonstrated attitudinal shifts, exploring and questioning their own assumptions about the issues raised. Going even further, many of these visitors had been inspired to delve further and find out more. However, others were clearly incensed by the approach taken and frustrated by the lack of an authoritative voice:

‘ . . . the exhibition, depending on an individual’s perspective, was seen as groundbreaking, experimental and challenging, or shoddy, lazy and unprofessional.’

Clearly, you can’t please all of the people all of the time.

Brown then goes on to say “With hindsight, I think the Museum could have made the thinking behind its approach more overt. . . ”

This is the point I was getting to (admittedly a bit awkwardly) in my last post. We shouldn’t be afraid of being experimental in our approach to exhibitions, and we do need to test boundaries from time to time. But we need to also ensure we aren’t leaving our audiences behind in the process.

Alienated visitors just switch off – at which point it doesn’t matter what we say.

*Source:  Brown, Pete (2011). Us and Them: who benefits from experimental exhibition making? Museum Management and Curatorship Volume 26, Issue 2, 2011, Pages 129 – 148

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Exhibition Review: ‘Not Just Ned’

I visited this temporary exhibition at the National Museum of Australia while visiting Canberra last week and with a free afternoon to kill:

I found the choice of title a little odd: for me at least, Ned Kelly isn’t high up on the list of things that sprint to mind when I think about the Irish in Australia. Perhaps it reflects the extent to which I paid attention (or not) in high school history, but to my mind the Kelly story is primarily an Australian one; the origins of the people involved is an incidental detail. (I wondered if it was a deliberate decision to link into (and then dissociate from) the Kelly story as a marketing ‘hook’, although from what I have since heard this wasn’t the case.)

Given my current research interests, my focus in visiting the exhibition was to think about the overall atmospherics and impressions that the space created rather than to concentrate too much on specifics or details. However, I got the distinct impression that the exhibition was designed with more of a Studier* type of visitor in mind. To be fair, these visitors were not in short supply – one older couple who entered about the same time I did stopped to carefully study every label and object; I tried to keep tabs on them during my visit but by the time I was done (some 20-25 minutes later) they were barely 1/4 of the way through the exhibition. Whether they continuted at this pace throughout the visit or run out of steam will have to remain a mystery. (In general, the exhibition did seem to be attracting an older demographic, although this could be just as much due to the fact it was a weekday afternoon.)

The exhibition’s layout was broadly thematic, with themes presented in a rough chronological order: arriving, settling in, etc., culminating in a display of more recent Irish migrants and the ongoing sense of shared identity with both the old country and the new. There were also displays dedicated to the Irish contributions to different facets of Australian life, such as politics, agriculture, sport, entertainment and so on. Another strong theme, obviously, was the role of Catholicism in shaping the outlooks of Irish migrants, the perception of Irish migrants by other Australians, and attitudes to political events unfolding back in the old country. Certain chapters in Australian history with strong Irish links, such as the Kelly Gang, Burke & Wills exhibition and the Eureka Stockade, had their own dedicated mini-exhibition areas.

The exhibition was very object-rich and while some of the objects were organised to illustrate specific stories or reflect the life of a certain key personality, there was no obvious logic to the juxtaposition of other displays. I gather this was a deliberate choice, but sometimes this approach a little unnerving as I’m not sure if there is meant to be some broader message that I’m somehow failing to ‘get’.

There was a seating area roughly in the middle of the exhibtion area with four comfy swivel chairs, each with an iPad (built into a rigid frame) allowing you to select different music, audio recordings, letters home and so forth (a good use of off-the-shelf technology). Speakers embedded into the chairs worked well, providing good sound but not interfering with other seated users. I liked that the swivel chairs meant you could choose which part of the gallery you wished to overlook while you listened. One downside was that the chairs were definitely a single-user experience – fine as a solo visitor like me, but I noticed couples having to either take turns or with one person standing leaning over the chair to be in aural range of the speakers. Maybe it would have been a good idea to make one of the chairs  double-width to allow shared listening.

As I mentioned before, I was primarily looking at the exhibition from an atmospheric perspective, and the thing that struck me was how dark the space was**. The ceiling and walls of the NMA’s temporary exhibition space are painted black, enveloping the space in a sense of gloom which is only penetrated by strategically placed track lighting (in a ceiling which is probably about 4-5 metres in height).

I find such spaces inherently fatiguing and a bit claustrophobic, making it difficult for me to focus on the displays and ensuring I’m ready to call it a day after about 20-30 minutes. (Other people I’ve spoken to are less bothered by low light levels- I’d be interested to find out whether I’m in the majority or minority on this one.) On a more practical level, the fact that the graphics are lit from a single source sometimes meant that you have to be careful not to cast a shadow on the bit you’re trying to read. This was a particular problem for graphics on any horizontal or near-horizontal surface.

Also, looking from an atmospheric perspective, there was (with some exceptions) little clear visual signposting of different thematic areas which you could determine at a glance if you were looking to dip in and out of content rather than go through the exhibition systematically. In some areas it wasn’t immediately apparent where one theme stopped and another started.  I would have preferred a bit more of a content hierarchy with a few more intermediate level take-home messages, and suspect that such an approach might even have encouraged me to look closer at the objects. In other words, a bit of  a top-down approach (i.e. higher level, big-picture messages to hook you in), to balance the object-led approach which is more bottom-up.

At the end of the exhibition was a large reading area and facility for tracing your Irish roots. Plus of course the obligatory gift shop. But by this stage, having no Irish ancestry that I know of, my visit was done and I made a welcome return to the Canberra afternoon sunshine.

*Studier in the sense of the ‘Streaker, Stroller and Studier’ characterisation of different kinds of visitors.

**Someone will probably point out that the low light levels are for conservation purposes. However, I wonder how many of the objects in this particular exhibition are really so light sensitive as to warrant this approach, particularly given it is a temporary exhibition. Conservators may be horrified at the thought, but I do think it is time to revisit the evidence concerning light levels and object care, to see if we’re getting the balance right in this regard.

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Beautifully Empty

A few years ago, a significant part of my job was preparing design proposals for prospective clients. As well as addressing the specific selection criteria, part of the art of preparing a good submission was preparing a version of the company portfolio which cast the firm in the best light, given the client’s specific requirements.

Imagery was essential to a good proposal – it could demonstrate, at a glance, how the firm had addressed similar design challenges in the past. Good photographs of past projects also gave proposals a sense of the tangible – a demonstration of ideas that had taken shape in the real world (and something that no amount of words, CAD renderings or concept sketches can really substitute for).

A common source of frustration for me was that many of our stock portfolio images depicted beautifully finished, perfectly lit, crisp, clean . . . empty spaces. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing for projects where the aesthetic was a big part of the whole point (fine art exhibitions for instance). But I felt they really sold interactive spaces short – even the most interactive and engaging exhibition in the world looks sterile and passive without visitors there to breathe life into it.

There were good reasons why the images were the way they were: most of them were taken opportunistically, at the end of an install – while the ink was still drying, so to speak. Real visitors (not the people in suits and tell-tale name tags from opening night) could be days or sometimes weeks away. And it wasn’t always logistically or economically feasible to come back later to get the perfectly populated photographs in a museum that was several timezones away.

Practical issues aside though, it has since struck me that most images you see in the design or architectural press show spaces where people are conspicuously absent. At points, it borders on the spooky: deserted nightclubs, abandoned restaurants, lobbies where your only company would be the echo of your footsteps. To see what I mean, pick up an architectural magazine at random (or do a google image search under architecture magazine). I did this the other day as an experiment. Out of all the images in the feature articles (I ignored ads ,etc):50 were completely depopulated, 7 had people in them, and another 6 had what I called an ‘arty’ human presence (those long-exposure photographs where the person’s movement blurs them into a sort of semi-existence; ephemeral in relation to the permanence of the building).

Based on these examples, one could be forgiven for thinking that architects see people as a messy inconvenience, ruining their masterpieces. So when architects and designers speak amongst themselves, they airbrush out the public. This has interesting implications for the social and aesthetic role of architecture and design.

Jon Lang, writing 20 years ago*, really put his finger on something when he wrote:

Design professionals have long been rent by two opposing self-images – that of themselves as artists and that of themselves as environmental designers. . . Architects tend to think of buildings as objects and are thus concerned with object perception rather than environment perception. . . They are concerned with buildings as art rather than environments. . . Few architects would place themselves at the extreme ends of an artist-environmental designer scale, but these are two contrasting self-images, with the former being the one promoted by schools of architecture and the press. . . The problem is that few architects or schools of architectural education explicitly recognise this tension. . .

As far as I can tell, this tension has not been resolved in the intervening two decades.

Museums are an interesting case study in considering buildings as art vs. buildings as environments. New museums are often housed in ‘statement’ buildings by celebrity architects, which may or may not be all that easy to live with on a day-to-day operations front.

I should be clear – this is not intended as an anti design rant! Well-planned and executed design adds to our lives. Social research and environmental psychology have shown us that aesthetics are far more than an ‘optional extra’ in our homes, workplaces and public places. But nor is the aesthetic an end in itself: beauty in design helps serve the psychological and social needs of people. And I do wonder where people sit in the order of priorities in ‘statement’ architecture.

*Jon Lang (1991) Design Theory from an Environment and Behavior  Perspective. In Zube, EH & Moore GT (eds) Advances in Environment, Behavior and Design Volume 3. (extracts from p55; emphasis added)

 

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It’s the way they make us feel

Things have been quiet here for a few weeks as all my writing energies have gone into producing a chunk of my literature review for my PhD. The good news is that my supervisors think it’s a good start!

So out of all the research and musings I’ve read so far, what’s coming out as the main themes worth exploring in my own research?  What’s struck me so far is the importance of understanding the museum experience from a psychological perspective, in particular the emotional or affective dimension. In other words, it’s not just what museums have to show or to tell, it’s how they make us feel.

People visit museums for all sorts of reasons. Other people don’t visit for all sorts of other reasons. Peel back some of these reasons and you find it’s more about how the museum communicates with us on an emotional level: do we find it relaxing or exhausting? Exhilirating or baffling? Friendly or exclusive? Exploratory or didactic?

Following from this, my interest is how the design of museums (architecturally as well as within different exhibitions) sets up some of these emotional responses, and thus creating an internal mindset well before we’ve had a chance to figure out what the museum is all about on a cognitive, content-centred level.

This perspective creates interesting new territory for visitor research, and an area where we can challenge accusations of ‘dumbing down’ in response to focus groups and front end evaluation, for instance the recent “nastygram” the NY Times gave the Brooklyn Museum.

That post (from the Asking Audiences blog) neatly summarises how focusing on the purely fact-based aspects of an exhibition can have us miss the point:

. . . we’re starting with a narrowly cognitive, educative purpose in mind. We’re interested in what visitors know about [a subject] rather than (for example) what they feel, what they wish, what they fear, what they find beautiful, what they find sad. We’re looking at a single, isolated aspect of human connection to the material. It’s not necessarily the most interesting aspect, but it’s the one that museums, as Enlightenment institutions, have traditionally cared about most.

Based on what I’ve seen in the most recent museum research, the shift from testing facts to exploring feelings already underway. And it’s an area I hope to contribute to.

 

 

 

 

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Review: Beaconsfield Mine and Heritage Centre

Like many people, I doubt I would ever have heard of Beaconsfield had it not been for the mine collapse of Anzac Day 2006, which claimed the life of one miner and trapped another two underground. It took 14 days for rescuers to free the miners from nearly one kilometre below ground, while their families and the world’s media watched.

Brant Webb and Todd Russell emerge triumphunt after their rescue
Just another day at the 'office': the same shaft access on the day of my visit

Given the significance of this site in recent history, a trip to Beaconsfield was the field trip I chose to go on as part of the Interpretation Australia National Symposium. (I should say here that while I was aware of the Beaconsfield disaster at the time, I was living in the UK and it didn’t get the same blanket media coverage as it did locally. So I felt a sense of familiarity, but also a sense of distance compared to my fellow visitors who could recall a more immediate connection to the dramatic events as they unfolded.)

Beaconsfield Mine and Heritage Centre is distinctive in that there is both a historic and an operational gold mine right next to each other, separated only by high wire fences. While the Heritage Centre was operational before the infamous incident (as the Grubb Shaft Gold & Heritage Museum), in the wake of the tragedy a Federal grant was allocated to expand upon the site and rebrand the museum. Not surprisingly, visitor numbers have increased dramatically since the collapse due to the site’s notoriety (which probably counts as an example of Dark Tourism).

The old and the new: the head of the historic Grubb Shaft with the modern equivalent in the background

The Mine Rescue Exhibition

Not surprisingly, this is the drawcard of the site and the most powerful part of the visitor experience. There is a rich seam of content (pardon the pun): a dramatic storyline, emotionally compelling anecdotes and a narrative thread of human resilience and comraderie in the face of huge adversity.

The space is fairly dark and minimalist in design; greys punctuated by accents of yellow reminiscent of the colours of an industrial site. This bare-bones functional design works well with the content, letting the relatively few objects and sparse text come to the fore.

Overview of the Rescue exhibition area

For me the most memorable exhibit was the Interactive Tunnel. This is a crawlthrough which, part-way along, includes a section where you can stand up into a space reminiscent of the claustrophobic environment where the miners were trapped (the actual space they were trapped in was only about 1.5-2 cubic metres and too small to stand up in). The area is in semidarkness, surrounded by a cage holding back a mass of rocks. There is a soundscape of the creaking of rocks as the underground realm ‘breathes’. The thing that really completes it in my opinion is the fact that the hole you stand up through is just a little bit too small – feeling the sides of the hole pushing against your shoulders really enhances the sense of claustrophobia.

View of the interactive tunnel entrance from the mezzanine above

Interpretive text and images present the circumstances of the incident and a day-by-day account of the dramatic rescue, explaining the difficult circumstances of the rescue and how the men were finally reached. These people’s stories are presented minimally but powerfully:

This quote from Rex Johnson, the rescue co-ordinator, brought a tear to my eye

The other star objects are the overalls of the miners which show the tears from when they had to cut themselves free from rubble using stanley knives. (I hope those were the real overalls because I’d feel so cheated if they were mocked up!)

The thing that lets the exhibition down is that it seems a bit muddled in the way that it’s organised – several of us found ourselves reading panels titled “Day 6” without having seen anything about Days 1-5. Looking around the space again, I suspect that nearly all of us entered the exhibition backwards compared to what the designers presumably intended.

When you approach the exhibition entry, there are two possible points of entry to the space beyond. The one that looks the most direct and is the most visually attractive (it displays a colourful scarf over 2km long which was made by members of the public during the rescue vigil) is the one we went through, but looking back I think this was meant to be the conclusion to the experience. I’d contend that this is an example of a visitor flow which had a logic ‘in plan’ which didn’t quite translate to the physical reality and the other visual and spatial cues that visitors follow.*

The Entrance to the exhibition - the path on the left is the one we all took but I suspect this is the 'end' of the exhibition. (I don't think the agricultural machinery is usually there - another exhibit is having a refit - but this might have been another factor in our navigation)

I think the interpretive challenge with this exhibition is that it is actually telling two stories: that of the collapse and the subsequent ordeal of the trapped miners; and that of the rescue attempts and associated media frenzy above ground. I wonder if this exhibition might have worked better if these two stories were made more clearly separate, with visitors being told which ‘side’ of the story they were experiencing, perhaps with the two ‘meeting’ in the middle for the climactic story of the miners reaching the surface.

Another minor gripe – there was a wall of newspaper headlines showing press coverage of the rescue events. But I was disappointed that this seemed to include only Tasmanian papers, which to me felt a bit parochial. I would have liked to seen more about media coverage from further afield, given it was an event that attracted national and even international attention. However I appreciate that copyright constraints, project timescales, etc. might have made this a non-starter.

The Heritage Site

The rest of the site is dedicated to interpreting the ruins surrounding the old Grubb Shaft, and an area which is effectively a local history museum which doesn’t have a lot to do with the mine itself. It was interesting comparing notes on the level of detail of interpretation with some fellow field-trippers, many who were from national parks and so with little prior knowledge of industrial heritage.

A nice outdoor interactive where visitors can play 'workhorse'

Ideally, I think the non-mining content would be better presented at another site, to allow a more coherent storyline to come through and to preserve the sense of place of the actual mine.  But I can see on a practical level why the situation has arisen as it has (and there were some classics on display – such as a table of women’s magazines from the 1950s and 60s, as well as a typically 1960s documentary on the construction of the nearby Batman Bridge). I don’t think it helped that the first area you encounter after crossing the ‘paywall’ includes a lot of industrial equipment and collections which are not connected to mining (which confused a few of us at first).

The site is currently undergoing some further redevelopments, including a 3D immersive experience to interpret the gold mining process itself, which will fill an important gap in the current storyline of the site. I hope there is also the opportunity to address some of the ‘disconnects’ in the way the non-mining related spaces are presented as part of this process.

* The visual and spatial cues of an exhibition space, and how these affect the way people interact with exhibitions and their content, will be a major focus of my PhD research in Visitor Experience which I am starting in February next year. So expect more posts on topics such as this!

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TEDxAdelaide

On Saturday, I was lucky enough to be in the live audience of the inaugural TEDxAdelaide event, which was organised by Bridge 8 and held at the RiAus.

For the uninitiated, TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design; and goes by the strapline “Ideas Worth Spreading”. TED conferences have been happening for over 20 years now, with hundred of talks being recorded and posted online.

The ‘x’ bit refers to the fact that this was an independently organised TED event – local convenors take the basic TED format, branding and guidelines to run their own show. These TEDx events have spread like wildfire across the world – on Saturday alone Adelaide was one of some eight cities staging TEDx events.

So what sorts of things are talked about at a TEDx event? The Adelaide event had the theme “Ideas on the Edge” and there was an emphasis on Adelaide-based speakers, showcasing local talent and creativity. We had the technological (Christian Sandor’s augmented reality combining real and virtual worlds); emotional (Wend Lear teaching Palestinean teenagers how to create powerful photoessays – not a dry eye in the house!); “fancy-that!” facts (Frank Grutzner presenting complicated dance of 10 – count them! – platypus sex chromosomes); societal (Jodie Benveniste on how we could be better parents if we stopped trying to be perfect ones); as well as perspectives from surprising places (for instance Nick Palousis started out by confessing he was a ‘non-greenie’, only to go on to present an elegant manifesto for how Industry could take a leaf or two from Nature’s book).

There were also Burundian musicians, a documentary on the making of an Urban Art festival, and the whole day was punctuated by a fast-paced twitter stream from the audience (nearly 2000 #TEDxADL tweets over the course of the day).

I won’t go into details of speakers or presentations as this is all on the TEDxAdelaide website, plus podcasts of all the talks are being uploaded as I write. There is also a flickr stream, forum and much more online which will doubtless grow over the coming days – so check it out for yourself. . .

At drinks after the event, participants were keen to continue the conversation and it was great to meet so many interesting and passionate people. Many people agreed that Adelaide is the right size of city to bring together different skills, expertises and perspectives in creative ways: much smaller and the diversity wouldn’t be there in the first place; much bigger and the “two-degrees-of-separation rule” that can bridge cultural and disciplinary divides would no longer work.

In other words, Adelaide dreamers, creators and thinkers are less constrained by categorical boundaries because they have to be – the only way to get a critical mass together is to look over a few fences and see what other people are doing.

This brings me to one of the main underlying themes that jumped out at me during the day – sometimes things just defy categorisation and we need to be comfortable with that. This is not to say that categorisation is a bad thing – we can’t be experts at everything and categorisation has allowed specialisation and thus the great expansion of the sum of human knowledge. But at this stage of human history, there are probably numerous instances where categorisation is more of a hindrance than a help. There were so many examples of this over the course of the day – people challenging assumptions and testing boundaries and thus breaking into new ground. I can think of no better summary for this than to quote one of the most re-tweeted tweets from the day:

I think when people started to regard art & engineering as separate disciplines is pretty well when the world jumped the shark. (MoMcKinnon, we thank you for that pearl of wisdom!)

Another unifying theme was that of working with human nature, not against it. Humans are creatures of habit and inertia, and the decisions we make are just as much “paths of least resistance” as they are active choices. So it’s not just the nature of the choice that’s important, but the context in which that choice is made and presented. Environmental scientist Tim Jarvis introduced the concept of Choice architecture. By making certain decisions ‘opt-out’ rather than ‘opt-in’ (for instance selecting green energy sources or allowing organ donation), take-up rates can be dramatically increased. In a similar vein, marketing scientist (no I didn’t know they existed either) Byron Sharp blew apart some marketing myths about brand loyalty, describing our loyalties as “polygamous” and as much about what’s available as what we feel a personal affinity to.

There’s so much I could say, but I’d like to round this post up by relating the lessons from TEDxAdelaide to my main interests: culture and the visitor experience. Firstly, the idea of categories and boundaries is something we will increasingly have to grapple with – the definition of culture: who defines it, creates it, and ‘owns’ it is rapidly changing. What will this mean for traditional cultural ‘authority figures’ such as museums? Secondly, if you’re trying to connect with people, you really can’t get away with not understanding how they tick. If changing the design of tick-boxes on a form can dramatically affect the choices people make, what seemingly minor changes could heritage sites make to dramatically change the level of audience engagement?

One final note – someone asked me at the end of my day what my favourite session was. I said I think it’s too soon to know – my head was so full of ideas – and it probably still is. It will be those ideas and concepts that stick which are the most important, and only time will tell which they are.

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Exhibition Critique: “Screenworlds”

One of my favourite sessions from last week’s MA National Conference (see also here) was the ‘Exhibition Critique’ session. This was a thought-provoking peer review of an exhibition, bringing together designers, curators and a panel of expert reviewers to discuss the exhibition from the perspective of both the design challenges and the resulting visitor experience.

The subject of this year’s critique was Screenworlds, the permanent exhibition at ACMI which opened in September 2009.

"Emergence" section of Screenworlds (from ACMI's website)

I’d visited this exhibition not long after it opened, albeit a quick streak through at the tail end of a lightning trip to Melbourne. So I was familiar with the exhibition, but nearly 12 months down the track, was relying on the lasting impressions I had rather than any immediate recollections (probably not a bad starting point really).

The session kicked off with the ACMI team, led by Michael Parry, giving a brief overview of the exhibition’s history, processes and challenges, along with some visitor feedback they’d collected. (This bit was done while the exhibit reviewers were out of the room, so that it could not affect their critiques later in the session). Michael elaborated on some of this at a later conference session, and I’ll summarise the salient points from both sessions here:

  • ACMI had a difficult first few years, tied in with some of the early teething problems of Federation Square. ACMI hosted numerous temporary exhibitions, but there was no consistent offer. So Screenworlds was unusual in that it was an exhibition conceived to solve a problem.
  • The Design and Content Development processes were conducted in parallel. The initial intention of this was to save time, however this turned out not to be the case: it often entailed considerable design re-iterations, and sometimes design decisions made early in the process created unforeseen constraints in the way the emerging content could be presented. On the other hand, the parallel process created oppourtunities and exhibits that would not have emerged if all the content decisions had been made before the designers were called in. (This resonates with my experience of contractual tensions in exhibition development process – from a Project Manager’s point of view, the more certainty there is in the project at the outset, the better. You want to limit re-designs and the time, cost and hassle they entail. But on the other hand, steering too hard down that route can stifle creative opportunities.) As Michael said, the only way around this is for all team members (in-house and consultants) to enter the process with their eyes open and ready to navigate the bumps along the road (presumably with contractual and fee structures that allow this).
  • By definition, the content was overwhelmingly screen-based (there are apparently some 250 screens across the exhibition!). But they couldn’t use all the content they wanted, often due to format and copyright constraints.
  • The content and the slightly awkwardly-shaped angular cloverleaf exhibition space both lent themselves to the exhibition being divided into three parts:
    Emergence (history of the development of different screen based media);
    Voices (how the moving image shaped Australia, and how Australians shaped the moving image – from a cultural rather than a production-process perspective);
    Sensation (the most interactive and immersive area, looking at commonalities between media. I think this is also the bit that includes the games lab).
  • The low ceiling and hard surfaces were softened using curved surfaces; these were made of bamboo and other renewable materials.
  • In the year since opening, some 340,000 people have visited the exhibition, roughly half from outside Melbourne. 24% of these visitors spend longer than 1.5 hours in the exhibition and there is a fair bit of repeat visitation. From visitor surveys, the main complaints they have are density and audio tracks interfering with one another (9% of visitors). The team were aware that this was going to be an issue, but one which was somewhat inherent given the content. The design solution was a self-aware compromise on this front.

At this stage, our reviewers entered the room. They were: Bryon Cunningham (Cunningham Martyn Design), Bliss Jensen (Museum Victoria) and Tim Fisher (Curator at Victorian Arts Centre). They each presented their thoughts upon visiting the exhibition.

Bryon liked the simple graphic map which was handed at the entrance – it clearly set out the space and he thought he would have found navigation difficult without it. He found the opening section (Emergence) overwhelming – a cacophony of activity and noise. But he liked to escape from it into the microcinemas (the white domes in the pictures above). He also thought there was a lot of text. Design-wise, he liked the lighting and curved shapes which he said brought welcome relief from the ubiquitous angles of Federation Square. He made an analogy to a department store – with piles of content to choose from, and mirrors to create an illusion of space.

Bliss was less confronted by the noise – in fact it drew her in and kept her moving from post to post. She liked the Australian perspective in an international context (care had been taken by the curatorial to make this Australian content neither parochial nor jingoistic). She observed that there was so much to take in on a first visit, and it took a while to focus on one thing. She started off looking methodically at each section, but soon lost stamina. Bliss also commented on some of the exhibition’s ergonomics – some of the tabletop viewfinders were positioned very low, and she wondered if the target age of the content and the ergonomic range of the exhibit were compatible in all instances (e.g. more adult-targeted content in low-positioned viewfinders). Compared to Bryon, Bliss was less taken with the physical form of the design, not feeling it was all that consistent with the curatorial messages. (Bryon apparently took the forms at face value, whereas Bliss seemingly wanted them to represent something meaningful).

Tim started out by acknowledging that as a permanent exhibition, this was ‘crying out’ to be done. But again, his critique was in the sheer density of content – was there too much stuff in this exhibition? There was much well-researched and written content, but it was cluttered and he didn’t feel there was any clear direction about where to go first. For Tim, museum fatigue set in from the outset – the sheer overwhelming density causing his attention span to wane “against my will”.

All three reviewers also spent time observing other visitors to the exhibition (indeed, Bryon prefaced his review by asking whether as exhibition ‘experts’, we are in the right place to review an exhibition compared to the general public). They all noticed generational differences in the way visitors used the exhibition – younger visitors seemed more confident in negotiating the visual and aural density (children of the information age?), and in any case, bee-lined for the games area more or less straight away.

The session then broadened out into a more open discussion between the ACMI team, the reviewers and the rest of the audience. Apparently an earlier iteration of the ‘Emergence’ exhibition had even more content. There was colour-coding of different themes in the ‘Emergence’ area, although this detail seemed to be lost on some of the reviewers (I’m starting to have my suspicions about the effectiveness of colour-coding as a visual signpost for the majority of visitors).

Over the weekend, I had another quick trip through the exhibition (cut short as it was near closing time; plus I was already a bit exhibitioned-out, fresh from the Tim Burton exhibition). Again the visual density of ‘Emergence’ struck me, but it seemed less intimidating the second time round. I don’t think I went into the microcinemas the first time (maybe they were all busy) but found them to be useful respite and a good way of delving into more detailed content.

In one of the lower-hanging microcinemas, I observed a kid who was probably no older than three confidently navigating the touchscreen interface. I wonder if our understanding of visitors in exhibitions can keep pace with the ever-increasing savvy of said visitors?

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A different kind of ‘park’ visit

Today was Adelaide PARK(ing) day, where groups take over a city centre parking space and turn it into something else for a few hours.

According to the website, it started in San Francisco in 2005 and has since gone global with around 100 cities participating.

It is based on the idea that a parking space is just rented space – so if it can be occupied by a car, then why not something else? So for a few hours either side of today’s lunch hour, around a dozen city centre parking spaces were turned into art installations, outdoor design studios and miniature market gardens (including live chickens in one instance!).

Hosking Design's 'Happy Days' cutout figures

I managed to see all but one of them, which either wasn’t there or I blinked and missed it among the usual hustle-bustle of Gouger St.

Quoting the website, PARK(ing) Day is all about:

* Calling attention to the importance of urban public spaces
* Rethinking the way we use our streets
* Creating diverse conversations about design and how we make sustainable cities

JPE Design's comment wall

So how well did the parks achieve these objectives? Well based on my experiences, the most successful ones had at least two of three following ingredients:

  • Good Location: some sites were just better positioned than others. I had a map and systematically looked out for all of the parks, but I would have been in the minority. Most people would have stumbled across them on their lunch break. So those which were on reasonably busy thoroughfares (but not so busy that they were lost in amongst all the other goings on) seem to have the best conversations and interactions with passers by.
  • Something to do: those who had a way for the public to get involved somehow, for instance Hosking Design’s large cut-out figures which doubled as comment walls for people’s ideas about sustainability. (Although I think this might have worked better if it the topics for comments were bit more specific and focused – I probably wasn’t the only one who was at a loss for words when a pen was shoved in my hand). JPE’s artwork where people could map the paths they’d taken that day in lengths of string was another creative idea and primed thinking about the journeys we make.
  • Passionate people: parks who were staffed by energetic teams who seemed to genuinely enjoy engaging with the public, explaining what it was about, and getting passersby involved.

To get a flavour of the different parks, there is a Flickr stream on the PARKing day homepage.

(PS. I give the “sense of humour” prize to design company Enoki. Their park, entitled ‘All my friends are dead’, comprised a sole dinosaur skeleton made from large orange profile-cut pieces. There may have been a more profound story behind this installation, but unfortunately I didn’t get a chance to look too closely as there was a huge crowd of school kids lining up to get into the cinema right next to them. Wonder what they made of it?)