What makes a museum interactive?
The most common approach museums take to make interactive experiences is to add activities to programs and exhibitions. Examples of activities might include:
- Making a project
- Answering a question
- Pulling a lever
- Watching a video
- Role playing in a program
- Listening to an audio tour
- Watching theater
- Filling out a scavenger hunt
- Taking a tour
- Touching an object
- Walking through a recreation
- Playing games on a cell phone
While each of these involves visitors doing, they do not automatically create interaction either between the visitor and the museum or between visitors. If the activities, as are often the case, have predetermined outcomes, the activity is not interactive; it is rhetorical. For example, a lift and drop panel that asks "Did you know?" on the top and provides a response underneath is asking a rhetorical question because the exhibit has no mechanism for gathering answers or providing responses. It is a closed loop activity. This is not to imply that the lift and drop panel is a bad thing. A good rhetorical question can frame an argument or be thought provoking, but it is not by itself interactive. Interactive experiences include branching options and the ability to accommodate multiple responses.
Museums often think of interactivity as a technique rather than an outcome
In order to be interactive, experiences must be open ended and involve multiple possible outcomes. Our lift and drop panel becomes a component of an interactive experience when it is part of an exhibition that asks visitors to form opinions and test hypotheses. Museums may find it challenging to facilitate interactivity in non-staffed experiences because they lack the ability to have face to face encounters with visitors. However, this does not preclude building interactivity into exhibitions; it begs for more creativity. Unfortunately, staffing does not guarantee interactivity. (I visited one historic site where the garden tour was described as a one-hour walking lecture. It hardly promised to be interactive.) Interaction springs from a mindset in which the expert (designer, curator, interpreter, docent) is open to being questioned and maybe even challenged. Their job is to persuade rather than to assert to a point of view.
An experience is interactive when the visitor feels empowered to form an opinion. He gathers information, tests it against existing knowledge or beliefs, and draws a conclusion. The experience may be designed to further an institutional point of view or argument, e.g. "Organisms undergo evolution." "Picasso was an influential painter.", or "The transcontinental railroad promoted western settlement." Acknowledging contrary arguments or opinions ("Many people do not believe in evolution." "Picasso was controversial."), offering evidence to bolster the museum's assertion, and asking visitors to form an opinion based on the evidence raises the level of interactivity. The mechanisms to present evidence are the illustrations, computer interactives, models, and even those nefarious lift and drop panels. The context breeds interactivity, not the components.
Interactivity achieved
Engagement occurs when the visitor constructs meaning from the experience and undergoes a change in knowledge, attitude, or experience. Engagement arises from a two-way interaction. All too often, museums identify interactivity as a vehicle rather than a destination because they are reluctant to yield control. Yet it is a mistake to approach it as a technique rather than an outcome. A panoply of “interactives” does not make for an engaging experience. Engagement starts with the museum's commitment to eliminating the didactic approach and taking on a conversational tone.
