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Enabling Social Interaction in the Museum through the Social Display

Environment
Conference Paper · September 2015
DOI: 10.1109/DigitalHeritage.2015.7413898

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Paloma Díaz Andrea Bellucci

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 Enabling Social Interaction in the Museum through
the Social Display Environment
Paloma Díaz, Andrea Bellucci and Ignacio Aedo
Institute of Culture and Technology
Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
Spain
pdp@inf.uc3m.es, abellucc@inf.uc3m.es, aedo@ia.uc3m.es
Abstract— Visitors of museums and cultural heritage sites are
not different from other types of citizens and, hence, they are
getting more and more engaged into a participatory culture that
encourages them to play an active role and not only acting as
information consumers. In this paper we describe a technological
platform that makes it possible to enable such proactive behavior
by supporting social storytelling and interaction in the domain of
cultural heritage sites. The platform development was inspired
by a workshop run with cultural heritage professionals and
students who identified social interaction as a key feature of an
enhanced experience with cultural objects.
Keywords— Social storytelling, participatory culture, digital
heritage
I. INTRODUCTION
Creating more attractive and pleasant visitor experiences
has become a priority for many museums and cultural
institutions pursuing to establish a stronger and long term
relationship with their visitors [1]. New interactive
technologies have been explored as a way to support more
rewarding experiences, among them gamification and virtual,
augmented and mixed reality [2, 3]. All of them try to engage
visitors in activities that make use of different senses and
abilities to promote a better experience. At the end visitors are
not only looking for content but also for a rewarding
experience [4], and what rewarding means depends on many
personal, cultural and social factors. In this paper we posit that
engagment can also be promoted by adopting participatory
models that give the voice to visitors and enable social
interaction in or around the cultural heritage installations.
Cultural heritage has been traditionally dominated by an
authoritative knowledge transmission, where the producers
(the experts or curators) provide adequate interpretations to
the receivers (the visitors). In such model, curators conceive
the exhibition as a one-flow process where they convey the
meaning to the visitors. However, recent approaches recognize
the active role that visitors might play in the construction of
that meaning and the need to provide higher levels of
participation and engagement. For instance, allowing both
professional and unprofessional to tell stories like in [6]
activates a process of value creation that otherwise would
remain unuttered and find in participatory models the ground
for its expression. Cultural exhibits could benefit from being
inscribed in a participatory culture framework that affords
“[…] relatively low barriers to artistic expression and civic
engagement, strong support for creating and sharing
creations, and some type of informal mentorship whereby
experienced participants pass along knowledge to novices”
[5]. In our hyperconnected society most people are engaged in
different forms of participation, from affiliation through social
media, to collaborative problem solving or even to creative
expression. Cultural heritage professionals should take this
reality into account and look for ways to take profit from it.
Our main assumption is that technology can be used to
enable a participatory culture in the cultural heritage arena in
order to provide better visitor experiences. In the paper we
describe a workshop run with cultural heritage professionals,
visitors and students who identified social interaction as a key
feature of an enhanced experience with culture. Inspired by
the outcomes of this workshop, we developed a technological
platform whose first prototype is described from a pure
technical point of view in [9]. In this paper we will focus on
the interaction features that might move the visitors from
curiosity to connecting the exhibition with their personal
interests.
The remaining of the paper starts framing the problem by
describing the exploratory workshop run to understand how to
improve the users’s experience and how we detected that
social interaction was worth of being explored as a motivation
source. In the next section, the prototype implemented to
support social interaction is described. Finally, some initial
conclusions and further work are summarised in section 4.
II. PROBLEM FRAMING: ENHANCING THE
EXPERIENCE OF VISITORS USING TECHNOLOGY
According to Csikszentmihalyi and Hermanson theory of
flow [7], a cultural exhibition promotes a higher engagement
and impact in the visitor when it links with his personal
enduring interests instead of the more ephemeral situational
interest. Personal interests refer to values and long-term
motives of persons and they are intrinsically motivating, that’s
why they enable ‘flow’ experiences that provoke emotional or
intellectual changes in the visitor.
In the era of the Internet of Things, the meSch EU project 1
explores how smart objects integration in cultural heritage sites
can support such enriched experiences. Smart objects introduce
1 http://mesch-project.eu
the concept of physicality that is a powerful mechanism to
enable tangible thinking, that is, the ability to think by means
of corporal actions and the physical manipulation of objects
that can be augmented with digital information or properties
[8]. Combining the benefits of tangible and augmented spaces
can be exploited to support richer experiences that create more
meaningful links with visitor’s previous experiences,
knowledge and motivations.
As part of this exploratory endeavor, we carried out a
workshop for an in-depth anlysis of personal and group
perception of the concept of enriched experiences with
cultural heritage. Though the findings of the study might not
have statistically significance given the size of the sample,
they reaffirm what has already been stated in the literature and
also pointed out the relevance of adding social participation as
a feature to be taken into account to create more personal links
with the exhibition. Next paragraphs summarize this study,
whose results inspired the design of the Social Display
Environment described in the following section.
III. THE WORKSHOP SETUP
A key requirement of this exploratory workshop was to be
able to recruit a heterogeneous and non predetermined group
of users of cultural heritage, so we could gather different
points of view. With this purpose, an open call was launched
on social networks. The final group consisted of 16 people
aged between 20 and 50 years, with different backgrounds,
experiences and professional horizons including the following
profiles: curators and cultural heritage professionals; cultural
managers and innovators; art and humanities students; other
professionals related with cultural heritage (journalists and
teachers) and visitors.
The goal of the workshop was to contribute to the definition
of an abstract concept: the ‘enriched experience’. This is a
challenging activity, especially for people who are not used to
externalize their opinions, feelings and expectations. Even if you
know what an enriched experience is for you, wording it in a
precise way is not trivial. Taking this as a basic assumption, the
workshop was designed as a practical and situated activity in
which participants had to recreate a scenario of a digital enriched
experience in the context of a specific exhibition. We selected the
works by Halil Altindere displayed at Centro de Arte 2 de Mayo
(CA2M) in Móstoles, Madrid since the material exhibited invited
to reflection and discussion. Such an open exhibition made a
perfect context to think about enriched experiences with cultural
heritage. The willingness to collaborate in any new experience of
the CA2M managers was also very helpful to reach the workshop
goals.
A. The process
CA2M is a centre of contemporary art devoted to the
preservation of the region contemporary art collection, and it
has more than 1.500 pieces of all kind of disciplines (e.g.,
sculpture, painting and installations). Opened in 2008, the
centre is situated in the southern city of Móstoles. The centre
occupies 5.886 square meters over 3 floors open as a cultural
offer to a target of more than one million people and, more
widely, to five million people across the region. Since the
museum is 20 mn far by car form Madrid downtown, participants
were collected in the UC3M Campus in Madrid downtown where
they were introduced to the workshop goals and dynamics before
taking a bus to the exhibition. On the way to the museum, they
were invited to start discussing informally what they valued from
cultural digital heritage experiences and the role technology
might play to improve such experiences.
Once in the museum and after visiting the exhibition,
participants were organized in heterogeneous groups of 5-6
people to ideate a new digital experience in the museum. They
were provided with material to craft their ideas (notebooks,
markers, crayons and so on) and were also invited to record
their own embodied narratives or use any other media they
needed to create their stories about an enriched experience,
that we called ‘encounter’, with the exhibition. After one hour
of work they were invited to share their encounters with the
others by performing them in the exhibition area of the
museum in front of the collection.
Eight researchers collected information, opinions and
comments during the whole process. Performances in the
museum were also recorded to enable further analysis. Finally,
each participant recorded a short 1 minute video describing
what an encounter was from her own personal perspective.
B. The findings
In the short videos, most of the participants defined the
encounter as the result of an action of mutual interchange
between all the parts involved: artists, curators and visitors.
Indeed 8 out of 11 videos recorded used words such as
conversation, interaction, communication or sharing to
describe how an enriching experience was perceived. As one
of the participants pointed out, “since I love some much
culture I would really enjoy being able to share views and
opinions with other visitors”.
Aditionally, three very creative stories were created by the
participants to represent enriched experiences with the
collection (see Fig. 1).
Fig. 1. Participants’ stories on how to augment the exhibition
In the first one, “Sharing bubbles”, each exhibition visitor
had a holographic bubble where they could put everything
they liked or disliked and then they could share it with other
visitors. The second story, “Change & Share” was about
personalizing the items in the exhibition and being able to to create stronger personal links with the objects. For example,
share these personalisations in the museum or using social for the military hat in Fig. 2, some visitors were playing with
media. In the image, two participants simulate they were it, wearing it and then they went to google to find out pictures
changing the message in one of Halil Altindere pieces and of real people wearing such hat. When the museum pieces
posting their own message in a Facebook page. The third cannot be touched, replicas similar to those used currently in
story, “Guess what is behind and share it”, played with the museums to support visually impaired visitors can be used.
idea of interpreting the piece and sharing that personal
interpretation with other visitors to start discussion threads on
the possible meanings.
Analysing the videos both, those with the definitions and
those with the stories, two features were repeatedly
highlighted: ‘immersive’ and ‘ social’.
Participants pointed out the relevance of involving
motivation and different senses in an activity as a way to
better understanding the exhibit. This finding is consistent
with the factors that, according to [7] promote intrinsic
motivation: contextual stimuli that attract initially the attention
and more personal stimuli (sensorial, intellectual and
emotional) that promote interest.
Similarly, most of them valued social interaction as a key Fig. 2. Interacting with narratives about a physical object
feature to provoke higher engagement; to move from the
concept of visit to the one of encounter. An encounter is not an The second relevant feature of SDE is the encouragement of
individual activity, but the result of interacting with other social participation and interaction. Narratives about objects take
elements in the exhibition, both the objects exhibited but also the form of short videos created whether by the curator or by the
the visitors. Participants thought about stories were they could visitors, so that collective production of knowledge can be
share something with those who are visiting the exhibition at supported. Visitors can interact with the narratives watching
the same moment and, more importantly, with those who them, voting them and commenting them as shown in Fig. 2.
visited it or will visit it at a different moment. Visitors can also add their own narratives to the object
These stories didn’t end up into prototypes since that since the platform has its own video camera that can be used
wasn’t the goal of the workshop. Instead they inspired the both record a story about an object on display or to comment
implementation of a prototype that could gather one of the an existing story, so interaction among visitors is also
features all of them shared: the possibility of sharing supported. If the visitor does not want to talk or interact in
experiences with other visitors to make your experience more front of the window, something we realized in [9], she can
personally meaningful. Next section describes the prototype open a web version in her mobile device by scanning a QR
called the Social Display Environment (SDE). code above the physical object (see Fig. 3). This option also
IV. THE SOCIAL DISPLAY ENVIRONMENT: makes it possible to continue the participatory experience
PROMOTING SOCIAL INTERACTION THROUGH outside the museum.
STORYTELLING
The SDE is a prototype that aims at enriching the visitors
experience by relying upon two main sources of motivation:
physicality and social interaction. As said before, the technical
architecture and a preliminary evaluation were presented in
[9]. In this paper we focus on its interaction capabilities and its
contribution to promote higher engagement in visitors.
From a technical point of view, the SDE consists of a
transparent window equipped with a RFID reader platform to
place objects and a video camera on top of it. When an object
is placed inside, the narratives generated for such object are Fig. 3. Using a mobile device to create content added to the SDE database
displayed. The visitor can then interact with the narratives
whilst still watching the object so that her attention is not To analyze how the SDE can increase the visitors engagment
diverted for the real focus: the physical object (see Fig. 2). we will make use of the Csikszentmihalyi and Hermanson theory
From an interaction point of view, the SDE relies upon the exposed in [7] as shown in Fig. 4. According to this theory that
value that having physical contact with real objects adds to the describes how intrinsic motivation takes place in the museum, the
whole experience. Thus, visitors are offered with a set of first step consists of having a “hook” that will capture the visitors
physical objects they can interact with. In our previous curiosity. The SDE “hook” is the transparent window that brings
experiences [9] we have realized that this kind of stimuli helps the attention
of visitors stimulating their natural curiosity to experience a
novel device. In the different experiences we had, we could
realize that whenever we set up the platform, many people
came to ask about it. The second step is aimed at moving from
simple and short-tem curiosity to a personal interest by
offering different ways of getting involved with the exhibition.
In the SDE, visitors are offered opportunities to get actively
involved with the objects displayed, from sensorial
(interacting physically with them), to intellectual (creating
their own stories or discussing other visitors contributions)
and emotional (developing links with objects through
physicality or through the narratives). The next two steps in
the theory, Conditions for flow and Growth of Complexity in
Consciousness, are devoted to support learning experiences
that are outside the scope of this work.
Fig. 4. Moving from curiosity to personal interest in SDE
To sum up, we could conclude that the interaction
capabilities offered by the SDE might potentitally help to
create higher levels of visitor engagment though this will
strongly depend on the objects selected. Moreover, the
possibility to take active part in the generation of knowledge
might connect also with the long-term individual interest of
visitors, particularly in a society that is becoming more and
more participatory [5].
V. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS
In this paper we have discussed a platform that tries to
increase social participation in the context of museums and
cultural heritage institutions. Though the authoritative stories
created by curators have an undeniable value, this hierarchical
model does not satisfy the expectations of all visitors and
indeed museums have been looking for different ways to
attract and, particularly, retain visitors. One of the issues that
might be taken into account to provide richer experiences is
the fact that the cultural process is inherently social and based
on the co-production of knowledge. Promoting a more active
and proactive attitude in visitors might help then to create
stronger links with them.
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The prototype described in this paper has been evaluated in
some pilot and controlled experiments, one of which is reported
in [9]. Results were encouraging and helped to improve the
prototype including the possibity of creating the story with your
own device and accessing the narratives through a web site.
However, they are not conclusive enough as to help other
researchers to envision how and why to engage visitors in
participatory models like the one discussed here. We also
described how we used the Flow theory [7] as the theorical
foundation of the SDE design. As future work, we are currently
preparing an SDE exhibition in a cultural institution in order to be
able to collect more data on the utility, possibilities and
challenges this model opens up from the point of view of the
interaction and relationship with and among visitors.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
meSch is funded by EC FP7 ‘ICT for access to cultural re-
sources’ (ICT Call 9: FP7-ICT-2011-9) under the Grant
Agreement 600851. We’d like to thank CA2M staff for their
help in running the workshop at their installations and to all
the participants for their very inspiring ideas.
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