A ‘traditional’ museum display cabinet in the Kremlin museum, Moscow. I liked the owl.
Two very interesting posts from last week looked at the use of control in museum design - Frankie Roberto discusses trying to get children (in particular) to learn interactively, and Josh Clark has some thoughts on the way that museum and gallery visitors can be encouraged to think more about the work on display.
Slipping information into play
Frankie - who works for London’s Science Museum - notes the approach of using interactive games or exhibits with forcing functions to (force?-)feed the user information whilst playing: users are “surreptitiously slipped educational information whilst they’re having fun”:
Museums often try to force visitor behaviour in order to achieve learning outcomes, sometimes more successfully than others. A common example of this is a game - designed to appeal to children - which has factual text embedded within it. The ‘Mobile Mayhem’ game included within our recent Dead Ringers exhibition is a typical example. The gameplay, essentially about pressing the right buttons at the right time, is bookended by some factual paragraphs about mobile phone recycling. By revealing the content word by word, and making the screens unskippable until the whole paragraph has been displayed, the player is meant to be forced to read the text, and hence to take in the new and educational information.
The Mobile Mayhem game, from the Science Museum’s Dead Ringers exhibition website. In the screen shown in the first image, educational text appears word by word, forcing the reader to read it (or at least wait for it to be revealed) before proceeding to the actual game.
The word by word revealing of text is familiar from so many indistinguishable Powerpoint presentations (usually accompanied by that awful typewriter noise, of course), and seeing it used in a ‘control’ context makes me wonder how many speakers/lecturers/managers intentionally (even if subconsciously) reveal their dull text or bullet points word by word so that the audience is forced to stick with the information in the order it’s presented and not read (or think) ahead? I’ve had a few teachers and lecturers in my time who used a bit of paper to cover up parts of OHP transparencies they didn’t want us to read yet, in the hope that we’d pay more attention to what they were saying, and I remember how much that used to irritate me (I like reading ahead!), but I understand why they did it.
Relating back to my recent look at forcing functions in textbooks, Frankie makes the point that:
The problem is, of course, that it’s not that difficult to ignore the education and just focus on the game… it’s pretty impossible for software to actually evaluate educational ‘understanding’, and so attempting to force can be somewhat disingenuous.
[As an aside - and this is something I really should develop in a separate post - there does, equally, come a point where our understanding of how other people understand ideas and concepts makes a one size-fits-all evaluation very difficult. I expect someone has done a study like this (I do hope so - I'd love to read it), but wouldn't it be fascinating to find out whether certain ways of understanding (or visualising) certain concepts help certain people think laterally and draw conclusions that others have missed? For example, this is Richard Feynman, in 'It's as Simple as One, Two, Three':
When I see equations, I see the letters in colors - I don't know why. As I'm talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions... with light-tan js, slightly violet-bluish ns and dark brown xs flying around. And I wonder what the hell it must look like to the students.
I first noted that quote down a few years ago when reading a collection of Feynman's essays, as I'd always had the same kind of very mild grapheme-colour synæsthesia that the quote implies, but I wonder whether the phenomenon actually helped Feynman structure mentally and remember mathematical concepts? And can we learn from it in designing educational systems? Anyway, I'll come back to that idea in a future, more relevant, post!]
Encouraging visitors to think
Left: When issued with a booklet explaining artwork on display, many visitors walk around reading this before forming their own impressions of the work. This is an exhibition at Uxbridge’s Beldam Gallery in 2002. Right: Displaying work with no explanatory text, captions or booklets compels visitors to make their own judgments and form their own interpretations of the work (or ignore it, but that’s something of a judgment in itself). This is Dave Cranmer’s Pixelly Paintings at the Foundry, London, in 2002.
Josh’s post argues that many museums and galleries would better fulfil their educational and inspirational potential if they encouraged visitors to think more about what they are looking at, rather than spoon-feeding them information and an ‘established’ opinion - especially pertinent to art:
My wife Ellen is an art historian and a professional museumgoer. She tells me that museum visitors commonly spend more time reading wall texts than looking at the art… It’s a law of interface behavior that users will always follow the path of least resistance. Looking at art is hard. Many find it intimidating, unfamiliar, uncomfortable. It’s easier to read wall text, go shopping or listen to audio commentary than it is to actually face down the work itself.
The interface is broken.
The support materials should be less prominent. What a work “means” or why it’s “important” is second-order information. The important experience is simply to look at the work, to absorb its sensual impact. Respond to it, rather than study it like a schoolbook. For lots of visitors, though, the support materials seem to distract, reducing the time that visitors take to reflect on the works.
The design question: How do you get people to consider the art instead of plunging into its documentation?
As Josh notes, there are designers who think entirely the opposite, and long for more structured lead-ins in galleries, with the artwork’s title and rationale defined clearly up-front. (The always-interesting David Friedman subverts the concept further.)
I can see both points of view. When I was very young I used to get frustrated visiting ‘traditional’ museums that really interested me (mostly motor museums and those with technology) because there was rarely a pre-defined route around them, and I wanted to see everything. When you’re a little kid, zig-zagging across a room from one side to the other to make sure you don’t miss anything out can be difficult, especially when every other visitor is much taller than you and the room seems intimidatingly large. I remember thinking how a museum with displays only along one wall, so that you had to look at them in a certain order, would be good. Now, of course, I would tend to see that as excessive control, and want to be able to miss out things that don’t interest me, and indeed, form my own interpretations of what’s on display.
Josh goes on to give the example of a fairly simple compromise which both allows the visitor to form his or her own interpretations of the work, and to read interpretations if desired:
I think that it would be better to make wall text less prominent, encouraging visitors to spend their time with the art instead.
The modern art museum in Paris, the Centre Pompidou, uses an architecture of control that does just that. Each gallery has a stand with a set of cards offering commentary on the works in the gallery. The wall text is limited only to title, artist and materials. The behavior of museumgoers changes: People walk into the gallery, and spend time with the works. Afterward, those who are curious to learn more go retrieve a card and return to look at the works some more after reading about them.
The educational and background materials are still there, but presented in a way that still encourages people to confront the works first.
It’s interesting that this really does apparently change people’s behavior. (An alternative might be to have more information under a hinged flap on the wall or a pedestal so that only those who want/feel the need to have an established opinion on the piece end up reading it. Or perhaps even the title, artist and materials could be listed under the flap, so that visitors who want to form entirely independent opinions aren’t even swayed by the pieces’ titles or the artists’ names.)
Would you feel cheated if you visited an art gallery and there were no interpretation or explanation of the pieces available at all? Before it became so well-known, how many people picked up The Catcher In the Rye (with its famously sparse blurb-less covers) from a library shelf and put it back, unable to make a commitment to reading it without having an idea what it was about?
Of course, the argument can shift considerably when the subject is a museum dedicated to educating visitors about the exhibits and why they are important, rather than an art gallery, but the principle that Josh outlines of the visitor interfacing (as it were) directly with the exhibit, whether that’s a painting (and the interfacing is figuring out one’s own response to it) or a hands-on science experiment, or anything in between, has a good degree of commonality. The ‘middle man’, the filter of best-fit interpretation drawn up to fit on the standard-size card and fit standard-size opinions, is stripped out.
The Science Museum does a fantastic job of explaining concepts and opening visitors’ eyes to things they actively want to understand, but may never have known how to approach before. It doesn’t tell them how to think about something, but allows them to find out things they didn’t know, and thing more about the things they thought they did know. There is a difference. Bristol’s Exploratory, sadly now closed, was immensely inspirational to me as a child: this was somewhere where all learning was through actual interaction with the (mostly physics-based) exhibits plores.
As we’ve noted before, much of education is about changing behaviour, even if we define the behaviour we want to change as “being ignorant”. Control is one way of attempting to force a change in behaviour, manipulative persuasion is another (thanks Toby) but allowing people to learn because something interests them cuts out the necessity to use force or deceit. If you can make something interesting, you overcome the resistance.
Hm. The wall text often tells me things I don’t know. Like who painted it. Where and when. What the materials were. What the painting’s called. I’m not going to get any of this, no matter how hard I try, just staring at the canvas.
My problem with wall text is that it’s so small. I have to lean way in to be able to read it. I get in the way of other viewers. They make it small so it won’t distract from the painting, but reading it now becomes more of a chore than looking at the painting.
Also. Some stuff about the painting I’m not going to get on my own. Voice of Fire, for example. What’s the point? Is the part of a movement? Is the artist making a statement? It says nothing to me without context (and context is, of course, the key to understanding meaning in art).
So, give me my wall text. Just make it bigger, so I can read it.
My wife used to be on a taste testing panel. Before tasting a partcular food, they would spend time tasting the different taste-components. For example, in chocolate icecream, they would taste different chocolates, cream, cherry, burnt, sugar, etc. Once they could identify the different components, they would start the taste test.
Translate that process to art, and that’s what I’d like a museum’s explanations to do for me.
Without context the object has only contrast, a form of information to be sure, but not on the scale that humans communicate ideas with. Without context, a piece of art can be anything. If someone came from a culture with no ideas of weapons or violence, an object or picture of a gun wouldn’t mean the same thing as it would to us. Just as the artist can’t know the audience, the audience, without context can’t know the artist.
http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2006/11/warphotography-interview-with-simon.html
Geoff Manaugh of BLDGBLOG posted an interview with Simon Norfolk the other day. I thought Norfolk gave an interesting example:
“And unless you can really understand what the fellow stood for, how can you comprehend what his ideas were about? How can you judge whether his paintings were good paintings or rubbish paintings?
The thing that pisses me off about so much modern art is that it carries no politics – it has nothing that it wants to say about the world. Without that passion, that political drive, to a piece of work – and I mean politics here very broadly – how can you ever really evaluate it? At the end of the day, I don’t think my politics are very popular right now, but what I would like to hear is what are your politics? Because if you’re not going to tell me, how can we ever possibly have an argument about whether you’re a clever person, your work is great, your work is crap, your art is profound, your art is trivial…?
For instance, I’m doing a lot of work these days on Paul Strand – and Paul Strand is a much more interesting photographer than most people think he is. The keepers of the flame, the big organizations that hold the platinum-plating prints and his photogravures, or whatever – these big museums, particularly in America, that have large collections – they don’t want the world to know that Strand was a major Marxist, his entire life. He was a massive Stalinist. That just dirties the waters in terms of knowing who Strand was. So Strand has become this rather meaningless pictorialist now. You look at any description of Strand’s work, and he was just a guy who photographed fence posts and little wooden huts in rural parts of the world. If you don’t understand his politics, how can you make any sense of what he was trying to do, or what he photographed? These people have completely laundered his reputation – completely deracinated the man.”
I think this ends up leading almost to ideas of censorship. Who decides what information a viewer should and shouldn’t get immediately upon reaching a piece? Who decides what’s important enough to stick next to the art? Who decides the format, the placement?
If a piece is more of a free-form aesthetic one, then I wonder what the context of it’s aesthetic is? Is art-as-meaningless-decoration that’s pretty to stare at still contextualized by concepts of ‘pretty’?
Does the artist decide that the viewers personal interpretation is the contextualizing act itself? If so (and if they were curating their own show) then I imagine they would choose not to put any text about the piece there. They would be making a choice to make the viewers act of perceiving, the act of contextualizing, the act of making meaning. The question is, what do you do about all the other art-with-context pieces in the world? If we leave them without their originating context, it completely changes our methods of judgement and our ability to communicate.
Museum exhibits are like essays. As much as we might like the objects to speak for themselves, it is impossible to arrange an exhibit without a curator’s voice. While a physical space is not explored paragraph by paragraph, there is an implicit ordering, in some cases chronological, in some cases geographical, in others conceptual, depending on what the curator is trying to say in the essay. The organization might be alphabetical, by weight or by dominant Pantone color, but this organization will be read by the viewer.
How much explanation is necessary? That depends on the essay and the essayist. At a minimum, enough information should be provided to link the object with other information the viewer might have. Not everyone can identify every object in every cultural tradition. There is a theory that art and objects can transcend culture, but there is no evidence to support this theory. Once we suspect that an object was made by an intelligent entity, we want to know more. Why was the object made? Who made it? Was it common or exceptional? Were their others like it? How as it made? People who don’t ask questions like this tend not to go to museums.
I have been to exhibits that offer biographies, travelogues, manufacturing guides, technological histories, vignettes, political critiques and countless other analogs to familiar literary forms. The wonderful variety is one of the great reasons for going to a museum in the first place.