Designing With Multiple Interactives: Five Common Pitfalls

Abstract

Interactive museum exhibits are ubiquitous in science centers, and are becoming increasingly popular in art, history and cultural museums. At an interactive exhibit, visitors can act on the exhibit and the exhibit reacts. While there is much theoretical and empirical support for the idea that interactive features promote science learning, we believe that serious design problems can arise if an uncritical “more is better” approach is taken to interactivity. This article describes five common pitfalls of designing exhibits with high levels of interactivity or multiple interactive features: 1) multiple options with equal salience, 2) features allowing multiple users to interfere with one another, 3) options that encourage users to disrupt the phenomenon being displayed, 4) features that make the critical phenomenon difficult to find, and 5) secondary features that obscure the primary feature. Examples of each of the five problems are presented, and possible design solutions are offered.

Educational value of different types of exhibits in an interactive science and technology center

“…Exposing a visitor to an analogy-based exhibit does not necessarily lead to a successful use of analogical reasoning and to a scientifically explanation of a target-the designer's intention. In particular, this study supports the idea that unnecessary elements may distract the visitors' attention away from the main interactive features of a source domain (Allen & Gutwill, 2004), and that exhibits "only showing similarities between relationships" obstruct the awareness of the analogy per se among nonexpert visitors (Stocklmayer & Gilbert, 2002a). Findings also suggest that visitors' learning style (e.g., using the exhibit after having read the complementary text) as well as visitors' familiarity with a target constrains the activation of analogical reasoning.…”

Tegn på læring ved bruk av interaktive matematikkutstillinger ved vitensenter

“…Dette er ikke mulig på samme måte i en utstilling. Utformingen av utstillingen med tilhørende tekster blir derfor saerdeles viktig (Allan, 2004).…”

Summative Evaluation of Children’s Creative Engagement through Interactive Exhibits: A Case Study on the Participatory Exhibition of Masterpieces in South Korea

“…Such trend implies the need and effectiveness for participatory learning through There is considerable interest in the nature of learning that happens when visitors use interactive media. Research on visitor learning in museums suggests that interactivity promotes engagement, understanding and recall of exhibits and their content (B. Schneider & N. Cheslock, 2003) [6]. According to G. E. Hein and M. Alexander(1998), "visitors greatly prefer interactive elements" in exhibitions (p.16) W.H.…”

“…Such interactivity is an essential element in the majority of exhibits in science and children's museums. The idea that interactivity can enhance visitor learning in museum exhibitions has come from the philosophies of experiential education (J. Dewey, 1938) and constructivism(J. Piaget, 1957) [8]. Much of the learning that takes place in the exhibitions is non-structured and difficult to test, since visitors generally select objects that are of interest to them.…”

“…According to G. E. Hein and M. Alexander(1998), "visitors greatly prefer interactive elements" in exhibitions (p.16) W.H. Richard and M. Menninger(2000) evaluated specially-designed interactive galleries at the J. Paul Getty Museum and figure out that holding time was greater in those galleries [7]. At the core of interactivity is reciprocity of action, where a visitor acts on the exhibit and the exhibit reacts in various ways.…”