Fresh in the Museum :Free Range Learning Support

Chris Noessel > Masters Project: Free Range Learning Support> Fresh in the Museum

Fresh in the Museum

I came to graduate school to return my career to museum interaction design. In fact, I began this thesis thinking specifically about the museum experience. How did I get from museums to a lifelong, mobile learning support service?

At first, I considered the differences between the things in museums (including scientific understandings and principles, in science museums), which mostly don't change, and the ideas around the things, which change with shifts in cultural attention, new discoveries, each new interpreter, and even each new observer.

A diagram of Falk and Dierking's <em>Contextual Model of Learning</em>

A diagram of Falk and Dierking's Contextual Model of Learning

Interaction design fits best with the latter space, the idea space. I conducted a search for authors who had developed a theory along these lines, and came across Falk and Dierking’s Learning from Museums: Visitor Experiences and the Making of Meaning.^¤ Their synthesis of different learning theories and associated recommendations led me to conceive of any visitor experience as one of meaning-making and learning. The meaning-making perspective derives from Constructivist principles, which stress that learners are not passive absorbers of information, but active agents using their past experience and knowledge to make sense of new information. Additionally, the learning that occurs at a museum occurs at a whole class of institutions, which Falk and Dierking call free-choice learning environments, where learning is entirely self-directed and self-paced. The class includes zoos, libraries, television, the Internet, and even conversations with friends. With these perspectives, I began to ask a series of questions: how can I design interactions that support the learning that occurs in any of these places? If I can support learning in any of these spaces, why not support learning in all of these places? If you can support learning in all of these places, how about any place? How about the outside world? These questions prompted questions of time. If we can support learning in a particular moment, how about between moments? How about across an entire lifetime? I believe this project provides the beginning of an answer to these questions.

The Fresh service involves museums and other free-choice learning institutions in three ways: as touchpoints for the service, as content providers for the mobile functions, and as destinations for discovery.

Touchpoints

Services are intangible goods. But they rely on tangible interfaces, or touchpoints, to communicate and interact with their users. Museums are excellent touchpoints for a lifelong learning service because most of their audience is expressing an interest in free-choice learning simply through their attendance.

The Ready Room service component was developed specifically to take advantage of the museum as a physical touchpoint. Not only does the service benefit from having a physical presence here, but the visitors benefit from having a moment to prepare and set expectations. Assuming that visitors can achieve the goals they set for themselves (the software should help them set achievable goals), the museum also benefits from having more satisfied visitors who can remember exactly what they got out of their visit.
Learning Circles and events sponsored by the Fresh service need physical places to gather. Museums have been increasingly renting their spaces after hours for purposes such as this, and Fresh could drive recurring use.
Museums concentrate learners who share topic interests and, as such, would provide an environment where members using the Learn Gety watcher are more likely to find others with similar interests. This encourages visits to the museum for this purpose and use of the service in these places.
Museums seeking to encourage their visitors’ interests can provide Real-time Links as a service to their visitors.

Content providers

Museums already have a great deal of content developed for their collections. They also have real-time content experts in their curators. Some of the content is specific to the things themselves, but often this content uses exhibits as examples of more general knowledge.

A museum can further its presence and brand through migrating its existing content to clearly-credited learning modules.
Curators, as experts in their field, can be compensated to participate as top-of-the-line Cavalry experts, answering the deepest and most difficult questions. The museum can also benefit from tracking the questions asked in its space when adjusting existing exhibits or deciding on new ones.
Wunderkasten are essentially mini-exhibits in a box. Curators can work with exhibit and interaction designers to author boxes in their fields of expertise. Many museums have shops that would enjoy an additional channel for people to try their most educational and interesting products. Art museums can host boxes for deep learning about the most popular items in their collections, even when they are not on display. Wunderkasten subscribers benefit by having a self-paced, hands-on experience that might not be available in the museum.
The museum space is dense with opportunities for Genius Loci space-tagging. Many efforts are already underway to provide this sort of interaction in museums. Fresh provides an interconnected, standardized, customizable, and extensible platform for this content.
- In building a single platform to which all free-choice learning environments can adhere, the content becomes standardized and sharable between institutions.
- Genius Loci is by design customizable, filtered for a user's interests, and can augment generalized museum labels.
- It is interconnected because its information derives from SMS Reference and Cavalry queries, which also makes the platform extensible and self-building.

Destinations for Discovery

As was noted in the Body Learning component description, modern mobile devices are too small and slow to be deeply engaging. Learners following their interests may eventually wish to move beyond the screen to spend time in an environment where the learning is social, the displays are awe-inspiring, and the interactions are deeply engaging. It is not Fresh’s core business to provide such concentrated environments. The service would need to point to museums and other free-choice learning environments as places where learners could engage this kind of wonder.

In all these ways, Fresh and museums could be mutually beneficial partners, relying on one other to accomplish their complementary missions.