Exhibiting Performance: Co‐participation in science centres and museums

Abstract

NutzungsbedingungenThere is a growing commitment within science centres and museums to deploy computerbased exhibits to enhance participation and engage visitors with socio-scientific issues. As yet however, we have little understanding of the interaction and communication that arises with and around these forms of exhibits, and the extent to which they do indeed facilitate engagement. In this paper, we examine the use of novel computer-based exhibits to explore how people, both alone and with others, interact with and around the installations. The data are drawn from video-based field studies of the conduct and communication of visitors to the Energy Gallery at London's Science Museum. The paper explores how visitors transform their activity with and around computer-based exhibits into performances, and how such performances create shared experiences. It reveals how these performances can attract other people to become an audience to an individual's use of the system and subsequently sustain their engagement with both the performance and the exhibit. The observations and findings of the study are used to reflect upon the extent to which the design of exhibits enables particular forms of co-participation or shared experiences, and to develop design sensitivities that exhibition managers and designers may consider when wishing to engender novel ways of engagement and participation with and around computer-based exhibits. Hermanson, 1995;Hennes, 2002; Perry, 1989Perry, , 1993 Semper, 1990). As a result such institutions grapple with ways to support visitor engagement with science, and are thus concerned with visitor attitudes towards both science and representations of science. The authors of this paper, being a mix of academic researchers and practitioners at a science museum, respect that museum educators and exhibit developers take seriously the challenge of making subjects commonly perceived as boring or difficult engaging and have worked to develop ways to draw visitors into exhibits that aim to teach complex concepts from which most visitors would normally shy away. As such, a common task for those within the museum community, and perhaps more broadly within science education, is -how do you make the seemingly tedious engaging?Computer-based exhibits, particularly simulations and games, are often seen by museum educators and designers as a way forward -a means of engaging visitors with complex concepts in innovative ways (Farmelo & Carding, 1997 This paper seeks to contribute to the knowledgebase by looking at participation, and in particular how shared experiences arise both in and through visitors' performative activity with and around computer-based exhibits in the Energy Gallery at London's ScienceMuseum -exhibits that have been designed with, among other aims, the intention of engendering a range of activities that might be of interest to both the user(s) and the observers. Drawing upon field observations and video recordings of visitors' verbal and bodily conduct, this paper explores the social organi...

Using F-formations to analyse spatial patterns of interaction in physical environments

“…We used this data to analyse what influence the physical constraints of the space had on social interactions between the visitors. While the spatial patterns of social interactions might normally be studied using video-analytic methods (e.g., [15,19]) in CSCW, our focus was on the visible outcomes rather than the details of production of social order. Although it can be difficult to analyse the more subtle interactions of an F-formation system without using video we found it was unnecessary to describe more than gross interactions, to gain significant insight into where and why social interactions worked or did not work in the centre.…”

“…From studies in contexts such as museums, a rich descriptive picture is emerging of how people find out how to use technologies by watching those nearby and create engagement and participation through performative interaction [19], but also how the current generation of museum interactives has tended to prioritise constrained interactions and individual use [8].…”

Interacting with … what? Exploring children's social and sensory practices in a science discovery centre

“…Goodwin (2000Goodwin ( , 1492, for example, shows how games of hopscotch provide 'participation frameworks' in which children reflexively orient their speech, gestures and movements towards each other to secure the attention of other players and achieve ongoing play. In science centres and museums, visitors' gestures, bodily movements and talk around objects have been shown to anchor exhibit meanings (Heath and vom Lehn 2004) in which physical coparticipation with others is a crucial dimension (Meisner et al 2007). Whilst not explicitly ethnomethodological in methodological commitment, the present research takes the social situation of unfolding action and talk around exhibits as its focus.…”

“…Spectating and performing Meisner et al (2007) argue that spectatorÁperformer interactions Á watching each other and being watched Á are key elements of co-participatory activities in science centres. However, we found that spectatorÁperformer relations shift continually from co-participation to conflict.…”

Analysis of the Educational Potential of a Science Museum Learning Environment: Visitors’ experience with and understanding of an immersion exhibit

“…Schauble & Bartlett, 1997;Falcão et al, 2004;Guichard, 1995), current research pertaining to the design of informal educational interventions such as science museum exhibits contributes mainly to an accumulation of general recommendations and design guidelines. Examples of such guidelines from the last three decades are the findings that computer-based exhibits engage visitors (Meisner et al, 2007), that partially completed exhibit puzzles are more motivating for children than fully completed or uncompleted puzzles (Henderlong & Paris, 1996), and that visitors are attracted by exhibits that impart a short clear message displayed in a vivid manner (Alt & Shaw, 1984). While these findings are no doubt both reliable and valid, the design principles derived from them are articulated at a level of generality which makes them difficult to refute, and can accordingly inform museum exhibit engineering only superficially (Moscardo, 1996).…”