Museums and social transactions

I've been reading Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely, the behavioral economist who is frequently featured on NPR. Ariely studies purchasing decisions. He repeatedly demonstrates that markets are not impartial and that individuals and businesses do not tend to automatically act in their own self-interest. In fact, he shows that people often make decisions that are not only not in their best economic interests they appear downright illogical. For example, he asks: Why do people buy one to get one free when they did not need the first one?  Why do people drive across town to save $5 on a small dollar purchase but not on a large one? Why do people who own a thing value it more than potential buyers? Ariely asserts that seemingly illogical decisions are actually very logical, or predictably irrational, when you examine the basis of human decision making.


Social vs economic transactions
In his book, Ariely describes and defines transactions as either social or economic. Simply, an economic transaction is one in which there is an exchange of money. People recognize these as business transactions and expect that they will be governed by rules, such as when and in what form payment will occur. They are not offended by demand for payment. A social transaction is one in which one party does a favor for another with no expectation of payment, and, in fact, would take offense if payment were proffered. In Ariely's example, you would not offer to pay your mother-in-law for cooking Thanksgiving dinner unless you wanted her never to speak to you again. You can ask your neighbor, the lawyer, to bring in your mail while you are on vacation but you would not ask him to spend the same amount of time drawing up your will. Did a wise elder ever warn you not to lend money to a relative with an expectation of getting it back? If so, he was cautioning you not to mix a social and economic transaction. The context of the request and the relationship sets the tone of the interaction.


Ariely points out that people have very different expectations from these two kinds of transactions. Upon conducting social science experiments, he found that people will work harder when they are performing a social transaction rather than an economic one. They expect that the social transaction will be personally meaningful to the recipient, whether the activity is holding open a door or donating a kidney, and they derive pleasure from helping. Moreover, they expect that they will be repaid in the future by an equivalent social transaction, whether directly or through karma. If I help you move your sofa today, I do not expect that you will move mine tomorrow but rather that I may ask you for an equivalent favor in the future. Social transactions break down when people are called upon too often for too much and they begin to feel taken advantage of. Newspaper advice columnists frequently arbitrate just these scenarios. Ask Amy responds to one writer who describes a difference of opinion as to the type of transaction she had entered into when she agreed to tend bar for mom's anniversary party. Social transactions have at their heart an expectation of thanks while economic transactions are expected to provide value. 


Under the aegis of an economic transaction, parties can demand more accountability from others without being offensive. Ariely cites the example of a bank charging an overdraft fee. People are not offended by a business enforcing a contractual obligation, though they may feel free to dispute it. But they do become offended if they have been led to believe that their banking relationship has a personal as well as professional basis such as when the bank trades on its status as a community supporter. This can be a danger to companies when they use social mediums to build economic relationships. People react much more vehemently to betrayals of social contracts, even those that are merely perceived social contracts, than economic contracts. If you hire your neighbor's brother-in-law to remodel your kitchen, you may interpret his inability to show up when scheduled as a personal affront because your economic transaction is masquerading as a social contract. People are much more likely to excoriate companies through negative word of mouth that they perceive as having failed them socially rather than economically. Poor customer service is more often the result of a failed social interaction rather than economic transaction.


So what can museums learn from Ariely's book? 
Museums are wonderfully interesting institutions that since the beginning have walked a line between social and economic relationships. We ask our visitors to pay admission (at least most of us do) to listen to our curatorial point of view and be persuaded to support our missions. Yet we also present ourselves as community members or "friends" and seek to create personal relationships with individuals such as volunteers, teachers, web site visitors, and members. Museums are constantly switching between economic and social transactions. Viewing the many types of interactions as either social or economic and understanding what each side expects from the transaction provides very interesting insights into common problems and misunderstandings faced by museums. In subsequent postings, I will talk about three issues and how we can better understand them as predictably irrational.

1. If it's important, why was it assigned to a volunteer?
2. Which is more valuable, the admission-based or the free museum?
3. Are we friend friends or Facebook friends?

Museums and interactivity

When I was coming up in the museum profession, the emphasis was on including hands-on activities in museum experiences. A colleague, weary of the demand, would flash a beatific smile and respond that her programs featured minds on activities. Today the new catch phrases are "interactive" and "immersive". Regardless of the terminology, the motivation is the same. Museums want visitors to feel involved, but they are uncertain of how to craft genuine interaction.


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. 

Museums and interactive gaming

QR tags facilitate location-based gaming

Smart phone applications such as FourSquare and Gowalla—popular among the hip, wired, highly-socially networked crowd—encourage users to check in via their mobile devices by posting their locations and activities to a web site. The more users post, the more points or badges they win. While these web sites are games in the most basic sense, new software is allowing game designers to build on location-based game concepts to create more in-depth and complicated experiences. Location-based gaming is emerging as the latest interactive trend to be powered by mobile technology. Rather than only encouraging users to check in from anywhere, interactive location-based experiences link information, instructions, or an activity to a specific site to create a game. The user receives information instead of or in addition to sending it. QR tags are the current technology that allows users to access the critical information.

What are QR tags?

A QR tag, short for Quick Response, is a matrix or two dimensional bar code. Rather than the traditional collection of vertical, black lines, QRs are composed of small black squares on a white background. The design allows for a much higher amount of data storage than a traditional barcode, and it can be placed in any orientation. A Microsoft tag uses colored triangles to accomplish the same objective. In order to read a QR tag, the user downloads a reader program to his or her web-enabled, mobile phone. When s/he snaps a picture of the tag, the reader automatically links to the web to reveal text, see an image, play an MP3, or open a web page. Designers compare the experience to opening a physical world hyperlink.

QR code was invented by Denso-Wave, a Japanese company, which still sets the standards. Several companies offer QR generators and readers on their web sites. Designers can easily generate tags, and many free readers are available to the public for download. I-Phone, Android, and Nokia's Symbian operating systems offer the best platforms for QR tag readers. QR readers are available for a limited number of Windows enabled phones and Blackberry, and developers are frank in saying that developing for Blackberry is a low priority. 

(Microsoft tag for www.Re-LivingHistory.com)

QR tags and location-based gaming in the real (museum) world today

While Microsoft’s code is gaining in corporate popularity for magazine and on-product placement, SCVNGR is the largest software developer to make QR code-based games work in a real world environment. The company, venture-capital funded by Google, develops games for cities, conferences, universities, museums, and others. SCVNGR developed GoSmithsonian Trek for the Smithsonian Institution. (Active until July 24, 2010.) Googling “SCVNGR museum” will bring up a list of museums currently offering SCVNGR experiences including the MFA Boston, Franklin Institute, and Science Museum of Virginia. SCVNGR markets itself to museum clients with a promise of delivering information about how visitors use the mobile web, how long they spend in one location, and the paths that they travel through an exhibition. These geo-analytics are available to purchasers of  the full software development tool kit. SCVNGR has announced that it will offer its software tools for free, without the analytics components, to small businesses and individuals to develop more real world games. The readers are already free to users, but the drawback to SCVNGR is that it is not available on Blackberry, only I-Phone and Android. Other companies will surely enter the market soon, and museum clients may find themselves with more vendor choices. In the meantime, museums can make their own location-based games by generating QR tags using free software from Zxing, i-nigma, or BeeTagg, and linking them to special sections of their web sites. (FYI: this requires a working knowledge of IT.)

Today’s challenges in QR tag mobile gaming: a case study

On the weekend of July 24-25, 2010, the Boy Scouts of America hosted activities related to the 100th anniversary of Boy Scouting in the United States on the National Mall in Washington, DC. All, even non-scouts, were invited to participate in Adventure Base 100 ScoutQuest. Participants picked up a map from a central location and received web addresses for three QR readers to download to their phones. Twelve primary QR tag posters were hidden in locations on and off the mall. Each tag revealed a secret word. Those who collected all of the words could upload them onto a web site  to enter a contest. The potential audience for the activity numbered in the tens of thousands. Ironically, the most limiting factor of the Scout Quest QR code scavenger hunt was that one did not actually need a QR reader enabled device to participate. The Scouts planned to provide phones at each location, though several stations did not have functioning phones. In those situations the volunteers simply gave participants the secret word. The BSA’s caution was validated by Smithsonian technology experts who spoke at a mobile learning summit only a few weeks before. SI technology experts explained that it is their practice, when a program absolutely requires a piece of technology, to provide the equipment. This ensures that the technology will work consistently for all participants. To emphasize their point, the mobile technology summit participants used Smithsonian-provided mobile phones. The Boy Scouts of America arguably represents the most mainstream audience in the United States, and the event designers seemed acutely aware that many would not have access to the necessary technology. Their solution was to design a technological experience that eliminated the need for technology.

Concluding thoughts
In designing location-specific experiences for museums that link to web content, designers have many factors for which to account. The simplest museum application is to add a real world hot link to a location where additional information may be desirable but is not required. For example, QR codes could be added to a label to give visitors an opportunity to click to learn more. However, the museum must assess the value of the learning experience against the costs of implementation. The IT infrastructure must allow for wifi access. The museum’s web site must be optimized for the content. The program must be communicated to visitors upon arrival, and guest services staff should be knowledgeable in how to download and use the technology. Museums must be prepared for visitors who do not have the equipment to participate. Finally, the experience itself must be worthy of the visitor’s time, attention, and data plan. Like all new technologies, interactive gaming has its challenges; however, it has an awesome potential as an interactive learning tool, and museums should seize the opportunity to lead the way.