Imagining Interactive Museum Experiences Post-COVID 19

A question swirling about in museum association emails, social media, museum colleague conversations, on blogs, and soon, no doubt, in museum journals is: how will museums manage in a post-COVID-19 environment? The scope of this question is far-reaching and overwhelming, affecting funding, attendance, programs, exhibits, facilities, impact, etc. Difficult as this question is, we don’t have the luxury of side-stepping it with a shrug of the shoulders.

We do know the COVID-19 pandemic has changed our world in profound ways and that includes museums, cultural, and public institutions including zoos, orchestras, libraries, schools, and playgrounds.

In short order, museums have risen to the occasion with creative, adaptive responses to the pandemic and shelter-in-place orders across the country. I have been impressed with how museums have responded and adapted to a complex, rapidly changing environment. Their public presence, messaging, and variety of experiences have quickly found their way onto social media and into e-mail boxes. Many museums are delivering their missions more actively than ever in spite of the challenges. They have stepped into a more visible public role in helping the public understand COVID-19 and pandemics, working with partners to reach out and support communities, becoming a resource for parents who are homeschooling, and documenting the pandemic itself.

We are in the midst of a gigantic experiment that will push museums in ways and directions they hadn’t imagined. Just what the nature and implications of the pandemic are and how they will unfold will take months, if not years or even decades, to become apparent.

Full of trade-offs and tough decisions in this dynamic environment, these times are, and will be, challenging and full of change. Some change will be within the control of an organization, its director, and trustees while others will be well beyond any organization’s control. Some shifts may be transitional, temporarily useful and lead to new adaptations. Other shifts will, undoubtedly be more difficult and complex, especially initially. As public spaces where many people come together, museums’ physical settings and beloved objects are likely to be problematic in returning to business as usual.

We can only guess at the changes we will be encountering. On re-opening, there is likely to be pent-up demand to visit familiar and favorite public spaces and do something new. People will be likely to look forward to going somewhere that has been off limits for months; museum visitation may enjoy an early bounce. At the same time, some people  are likely to stay away out of health concerns. Many who do visit will return with new expectations around hygiene in public spaces. If, or when, a second peak of the virus arrives, museum visits are likely to plunge again. Other unknowns are how long post-COVID-19 concerns will affect attendance, whether visiting patterns will vary regionally, or if particular types of museums will be impacted more.

The interactive museum experience that invites touching is likely to undergo transformations in a post-COVID-19 world. With hands-on, multi-sensory engagement with objects and materials at the heart of children’s museum and science center experiences, the impact is likely to be significant. However, since most, if not all, types of museums rely on hands-on, interactive spaces and experiences to some extent in their galleries, programs, family spaces, and festivals, changes to interactive experiences will affect the field more broadly.

2020 in the Rearview Mirror

I believe we will look back at 2020 and recognize the beginnings of a generational shift in museums. Less of a dramatic departure from current approaches, we are likely to see new versions of current practices that are grounded in:

• A commitment to the fundamental value of learning from experience—objects, social interactions,

The learner as active, engaged, curious

relationships, and play across the life-span

• Recent trends in the field especially where museums have been intentional around equity, diversity, and inclusion

• A view of the visitor as curious, active, motivated, and engaged

• A collaborative, creative response of many museums to the pandemic in rethinking the interactive experience

Some changes are already underway, even if emergent and fluid. Channeling the thinking and creativity of museums around the world, they reflect museums’ complex, integrated functioning of spaces and environments, objects and materials, staffing and interaction, operational practices, and resources. Adapting practices from other public-facing settings like libraries, gyms, cruise ships, hospitals, and grocery stores, museum operations and services are going beyond higher standards for cleaning and hygiene. New awareness and practices are differentiating among the variety of loose parts. While digitizing museum content and experiences and presenting them to audiences remotely will undoubtedly be part of this new scenario, museums are also innovating around the value of direct experience with objects and other people. 

In considering what will make returning visitors feel safe and comfortable and nourish the public’s trust and affection for them, museums will be drilling into what is core to their value. Children’s museums will be looking for new ways to stay true to their fundamental purpose as champions for children, valuing interactions and relationships with others and the material world, and the essential role of play in children’s development. Resilient museums will work to be nimble in keeping the visitor at the center and finding new ways to support meaningful engagement and durable connections.

  

Looking Ahead

Considered both a disaster and an opportunity, these times present creative and innovative opportunities to become better versions of ourselves.

Some of the shifts I have been noticing and thinking about are highlighted below. More like hunches than promises or predictions, they are far from comprehensive. Hovering around the interactive experience, they are adapted to a particular museum, its community, audience, and mission. Because they are more like shifting currents in museum practices than completely new directions, here they are cast as changes in emphasis, from where we are currently to what we are seeing more of.

Recognizing changes in the learning group

• Currently… in most museums, children are viewed as a distinct audience group with parents and caregivers as an important, but separate, audience group.

• We’re seeing more of …families actively learning together. With families sheltering together at home, parents stepping into the homeschooling role, and parents as more active participants in the at-home science experiments, families are playing a larger, more active role as multi-generational learning groups.

Working on multiple fronts

• Currently … museums describe themselves as destinations, recognized public spaces that serve locals and tourists. To serve their visitors, museums develop experiences to bring visitors to the museum.

• We’re seeing more of … museums developing themselves as multi-dimensional resources, creating more experiences that reach their audiences in multiple locations and through diverse formats. These include activities broadcast into homes, home-based and mobile projects in a park and neighborhood, partnering with experts on current topics, and found encounters.

Prioritizing the interests of visitors

• Currently … museums work to understand the interests of their visitors and reach out to invite their input into museum-created experiences.

• We’re seeing more of … a greater permeability between the museum and its community and visitors that follows and supports visitor and learner interests and ideas. Self-directed explorers and learners are children starting a neighborhood newsletter, laying out a solar system across city blocks, setting their own challenges, and families originating content through stories and projects. 

Opening up for new kinds of engagement

• Currently … visitors’ person-to-person interactions occur at the museum with staff and facilitators, family members and complement self-guided experiences.

• We’re seeing more of … the museum as an instigator of family engagement. Museum-inspired ideas launch family explorations which are then shared with the museum and other doers. Teddy bears in the window involve families in a similar activity at home that is shared with others; families go on treasure hunts with maps, flashlights, and backpacks and share their adventures; the museum sends its recorded stories to families to share.

Photo credit: interactionimagination.com.se

Shifting from immersive environments to immersive experiences

• Currently … interactive environments are favorite spaces in many children’s museums. These rooms, settings, and vehicles are familiar in the child’s world: the grocery store, post office, the bus.

• We’re seeing more of … immersive experience. Less like containers for activities or prompting scripts from daily life, immersive experiences wrap, bathe, and envelop the visitor and engage the senses. Sometimes relatively simple full body explorations with color, light, movement, shadow, and sound, they can also be more complex motion-activated experiences, foot-activated floor projection systems, and visual tricks. 

Re-framing experience for a new context

• Currently … children’s museums and science centers offer self-guided exhibit activities, demonstrations, and programs, often planned to fit within timed segments of a field trip visit, classroom activity, birthday party, or curriculum topic.

• We’re seeing more of … projects that unfold over time, evolve through multiple iterations, and respond to new ideas. Initiated by motivated family learning groups, they respond to a museum’s challenge; investigate ideas through drawings and research; head outdoors; and use digital experiences as departure points.

Improvising with materials

• Currently … objects and materials that encourage hands-on exploration invite children to push and carry, build and take apart, pretend with and create, test and transform.

• We’re seeing more of … ways to not lose the richness of abundant materials and objects to hygiene concerns and cleaning needs. Museums are finding new ways to distinguish among tools that are easy to wipe down frequently; volumes of consummables in smaller quantities frequently resupplied; multiple sets of props rotated and cleaned frequently; quarantining objects and materials; and rethinking media like sand, rubber granules, and bubbles.

Keeping close

• Currently … museums are staying top of mind with frequent, helpful messaging across multiple platforms.  

• We’re seeing more of … messaging as high-engagement dialogue. More than ever, communication is a two-way dynamic that strengthens museum relationships, whether it is personal connections developing between families with Zoom-based facilitators like Children's Museum of Houston's Mr. O; visitors sharing what they are making with the museum; or children working on projects at home and sharing them with residents at a retirement home.

Rainbows as a symbol of resilience. (Louisiana Children's Museum)

A Couple of Ideas for the Taking

 
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Chicago Public Library Oak Park Branch

“Hey! I got an idea!” I get a kick hearing someone, usually a child, say that. As a child, I loved the feeling of getting an idea. And I still do.

Having ideas is a wonderful feeling of possibility and adventure. Ideas can take us many places, connecting with people, developing new interests, learning more, and doing something helpful. Recently several ideas have popped up in my reading and have stuck around a bit longer than ideas sometimes do. Without a museum that I work with on a long-term basis, I am not able to act on them directly. But I can put them out there for the taking. The three emergent ideas that follow, described in a preliminary way, will hopefully spark someone else’s sense of possibility and move them to take them further.

Local Inventors and Innovators

In late December the business section of our local paper, The Star Tribune, featured the story of two University of Minnesota graduate students who developed a mobile app that is helping to increase the productivity of small farmers in an arid province in India. The story of these young innovators and their thinking that is now doubling the fruit and vegetable yields while decreasing water and fertilizer use tucked itself somewhere in my mind. Recently it reappeared as a question: how could this, or other similar innovations, find its way into science center and museum experiences, programs, and partnerships?

The application of science principles to a current need with tangible, beneficial outcomes is a compelling, timely story–the kind that engages museum visitors and strengthens the museum experience. This story involves young inventors and entrepreneurs, has local-global connections, is located at the nexus of water and food production, and offers potential partnerships with businesses, colleges, and universities. Other innovations are likely to have similar entry points and connections related to local inventors, a problem to solve and its context, the thinking involved, risk taking, and STEM content.

  

School Program Experiments

In a guest post on Museum Questions, Jackie Delamatre, educator at the RISD Museum (Providence, RI) wondered what if… the museum visit for school groups was less like the school classroom and, instead, imagined ways to encourage learners to direct their learning, explore their interests and questions, and make their thinking visible.

That made me wonder, what if… museum educators could truly rethink the school visit by, for instance, optimizing the opportunities museums’ informal learning environments offer. Together multiple small experiments with school programs in many museums could break the mold of current museum school tours. Is it possible to create a shift so schools would learn from museums and borrow their informal learning strategies?

This week on Museum Questions Rebecca Herz identified three field trip related experiments she intends to try at the new Peoria PlayHouse Children’s Museum where she's executive director. A number of interesting ideas are embedded in these experiments. This is hopefully just one of many experiments that are–and could be happening–at all kinds of museums, ones that start with the learner; plan using the museum’s remarkable resources; and focus on thinking or looking skills. Or, develop experiments that go somewhere completely different. Sharing ideas and making connections among museums can happen in many ways, including here on Museum Notes.

Design + Children’s Play + Research

I was sorely disappointed when I wasn’t able to see either exhibition on design for children. The best I could do was to check-out the 2013 Design for the Modern Child at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the 2012 Century of the Child: Growing by Design, 1900 – 2000 at MoMA on-line. With somewhat different emphases, these exhibits featured furniture, toys, tableware, wallpaper, and textiles designed for children. The MoMA exhibit considered modernist thinking about children and design for them.

As engaging as these exhibits appear to have been, I am eagerly looking forward to an exhibition that focuses on designing for children’s play and the research behind it with children playing at the heart of the experience. This exhibition brings together aspects of the Science Museum of Minnesota’s Wonder Years exhibition; Paige Johnson’s Playscapes blog on design of play structures; and The Strong’s American Journal of Play.

Incorporating the perspectives of an art museum, children’s museum and university research lab, it might explore an object’s play value, the learning associated with imaginative play, and design-play connections. Rich with images of children at play, it could also serve as a play lab for conducting research. Above all, this would be an exhibition brimming with play, not just about play. I really hope this exhibition can travel so I can be sure to see it.

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Please Take These Ideas

Let them inspire you and make them into what you can. Share them with colleagues; develop them further. You may find them more helpful by splitting and combining them and connecting them with other project ideas, plans, or practices already in the works. Set them in motion, folding them into an experiment. Let me know what comes of them and your thinking.

Completing the Experience

Imagine a museum that has as its purpose: To serve, produce, and co-produce…people, food, art, and ideas. Visitors to this museum find not only a maker faire, but also an annual mending party where they fix, repair, and upgrade valued possessions, their own and others’. Families build and share their stories. Self-forming groups create their own pop-up exhibits to take out into neighborhoods. What if visitors not only loved the mosaics like those in the City Museum in St. Louis, but were able to contribute to those environments and add details? Everywhere in this museum could be experiences with choices that bring people one-step closer to being the authors of their own experience, not just consumers of others’ creativity. These ideas are not just mine. They come from museum thinkers and linkers like Kathy McLean, Nina Simon, and Reggio thinker, Lani Shapiro.

In her recent post Press Here, Nina Simon describes two ingenious children’s books, Press Here and This is a Book Without Pictures. Reflecting on how the authors cleverly use the basic elements of the page and words to break the fourth wall of book reading, she wonders, "How do we use the essential tools of museum-ness to disrupt, surprise, and delight people?" 

Trying to answer this question by analyzing it too thoroughly becomes problematic. Too many rules and qualities constrain the potential seismic shift the question invites. Breaking the fourth wall of museums by using museum-ness comes, perhaps, when users complete the experience museums offer, by filling in with their imaginations, questions, creativity, experiments, and previous experiences.

Museums are inclined to plan a little too thoroughly to assure they serve their visitors well. Consequently, the user fits into a designed experience others have determined for them. To be fair, users implicitly agree to experiences that others have planned for them by virtue of visiting the museum. But would visitors like something that they might direct or control more? Why not give them the opportunity? Do we have the confidence and courage to let users struggle, wrestle, spin, and delight in their accomplishments? Do we have the restraint to step back and give the visitor a greater hand in an experience intended for them? 

How do museums create experiences that allow visitors to complete the experience by directing it and changing it? Below are four shifts in constructing museum experiences I have been chewing on that might significantly rechannel museum thinking and energies to disrupt the current museum experience paradigm.

One big, bold idea, solid and true. An idea capable of creating a major shift in a museum wholeheartedly takes the visitor into account. Starting with a strong image and high regard for the visitor, the museum values and plans around possibilities meaningful to the end user–the visitor. A roomy and compelling idea is one that resonates intensely with the user. It is a generous host for the curiosity of many and diverse visitors and connects with their interests and passions rather than through our subject matter areas. Meaningful and relevant but not necessarily serious, a bold idea actually becomes bigger through engagement, capturing the visitor’s imagination, leading to new questions, and opening up possibilities. The museum certainly has a critical role to fulfill in this new dynamic. Its focus, however, shifts to locating and understanding an idea worthy of visitors investing in it.

An experience that can’t be completed without the user. More goals, outcomes, square footage, objects, components, design, and graphics can't substitute for what is essential that each person brings to the exhibit experience. Even expansive, interactive, immersive, dramatic spaces are static without the visitor’s curiosity, imagination, engagement, conversation, meaning making and physicality. When experiences are too complete, the visitor becomes irrelevant; there is no room for their voice, choice, or control. Central to completing the experience is the visitor easily seeing herself as a competent agent that can impact the course of the experience in a significant and relevant way. Physical or metaphorical, there must be ways to leave behind a physical trace or expression; make an imprint for others to engage with; or carry a mark of the experience forward.

Play with form. The stage and the book Press Here express a kind of play with their forms that allow the user to bring something significant to the experience. By removing the imaginary front wall of the stage, the audience enters the world of a play. In Press Here, the reader shakes the book. This gesture, unusual in the page turning conventions of reading, seemingly moves the dots on the next page. In museums, maker-based experiences may be compelling because the museum visitor becomes the maker of objects in a setting where they typically observe objects others have made. By selectively rethinking and applying rules and sidestepping expectations, a museum may create an experience that, not only surprises and delights, but also extends unexpected invitations, provokes novel responses, or just stops visitors in their tracks. 

Curating Opportunities. Shifts beget shifts. When a museum focuses on creating experiences the visitor completes, its thinking and energy is redirected. The roles of curator, exhibit developer, and designer, for instance, shift from helping visitors understand content to being able to curate opportunities. By exploring the big bold idea; making room for the user; and playing with form, exhibit planners set a course to make very different decisions about what goes in and, more important, what is left out of exhibitions to allow users to step into the role of creator and change agent. Rubbing away rough edges of a design might also eliminate what is essential to an unscripted but valued exploration. More opportunities do not require more space, more objects, more activities, or more money. They do, however, mean more openings to the possible directions an experience might lead; more ways to see, assign meaning, and layer, unlayer, and relayer experience.

Related Museum Notes Posts

• Experience Goals for Exhibitions  

• Framing Experiences