Effective Engagement @ Cooper-Hewitt
by Elizabeth Phyle
To observe an information environment I spent time at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum watching audiences interact with their exhibit. The Cooper-Hewitt is at the forefront of incorporating technology into their visitor experiences. In addition, they have “Senses: Design Beyond Vision” on view until the end of the month. I am very interested in how museums incorporate tactile activities to facilitate visitor engagement with the material. The “Senses” exhibit and their other hands-on exhibits gave me a chance to observe how these features provide deeper engagement as well as how they potentially divert attention from more substantial information.
Perspective taking
I believe that sense are an under-utilized tool in museums. We ask visitors to look, listen, and read a lot while they walk through a quiet gallery. It was shocking the difference in atmosphere between the more traditional exhibits and the “Senses” exhibit. The energy was palpable while people were engaged in touching and smelling as well as looking and listening. Some of the most interesting installments were the ones that took a risk; using the senses to convey something beyond words. For example there were translucent white boxes with phrases on top of them describing a moment or feeling that is specific enough to conjure an image in your mind. Then you press a button, lean in close, and the artist’s interpretation of that scent whiffs over you. Watching people interact with the exhibit was fascinating. People had strong, immediate reactions; often in the form of interjections, not words. The scent named “the feeling for someone once loved, but no longer” elicited pained “oohs.” The one named “being perfectly entangled with another” caused many visitors to smile and “awwhh”. Not everyone thought that every scent was a perfect representation of the emotion described, but it served as a fantastic conversation starter either way. Any good exhibit asks visitors to shift their perspective. By asking them to uses their senses in unfamiliar ways the exhibit forces perspective shift. Context shifting is an important skill in a multi media and medium world. Other museums could incorporate sound, touch and smell into their exhibit in similar ways to help visitors realize their own perspective and take on the perspective of others.
One installment that compelled the visitor to enter the life of another was called “Portal_Soundscapes” Here visitors listened to sounds from cities around the world including voices from refugee camps. I found it very powerful, but unfortunately not many people visited it while I was in that area. This may be partly because it was slightly off the main path, or it may be that visitors did not want to engage in more serious topics while they were playing. Things like this that offer a wide snapshot of human experience could be useful in history museums. Oral histories are powerful, but visitors can also benefit from abstract views of the human experience like asking “what do humans sound like?”
The nagging questions that I had all the while was, how much are people actually taking away as they flit from one thing to the next? It is a tall order to expect visitors to be able to go from scratching and sniffing a wall to reading the placard text about accessible design. I saw that some visitors would skip any exhibit here that didn’t have some of sensory activity associated with it. Like bee’s between flowers, many people would walk up to the installment, do a quick skim for any feature that they could do something with, but if all there was was something to read or information to listen to they would flutter to the next spot and repeat. This certainly telling about how we prefer to interact with our surroundings, but to what extent should museums cater to these impulses? This reminds me of the discussion of user-centered versus system-centered design that we encountered in Talja and Hartel as well as the class discussion we had surrounding it. They discuss the traps in images about user-centeredness being warm and compassionate opposed to a cold and quantitative system centered design (Talja and Hartel 2007). Compared to traditional museum experiences where the visitor is expected to conform to the museum, we can see with the rise of sensory exhibits and pop-up museums how museums are being pressured to cater to the visitor. However, museums should not lose sight of their mission and institutional strengths. The Cooper-Hewitt overall did a fantastic job of balancing education, collection presentation, and interaction.
Conscious Consuming of Information
At a small out-of-the-way alcove there was a headset with two short hospital soundscapes. One was of a traditional hospital setting with high frequency beepings, rushing of gurneys, panicked footsteps, and doctors yelling out stats. The other one was what a “humane patient experience” could sound like. It explains how information could be communicated between nurses and doctors while preserving a environment that is beneficial to the patient. This reminds me of the way they Sengers ended the article on Practices for a Machine Culture, she argues for “technical artefacts that enrich human experience, rather than reducing it to a quantified, formalized, efficient, and lifeless existence (Sengers 2000).” Hospitals are a great example of a systems-centered environment. Since their work is so technical, fast pace, and high pressure, it is unsurprising that the externalities of their system is not something that has traditionally been at the forefront. This exhibit allows visitors to think critically about these externalities as well as examine the role that sound plays in decoding our environment and on our stress levels.
Cooper-Hewitt is a unique case for consumerism in museums because at its core it is a product design museum. The question then become are they feeding consumer culture or educating on it? There was only one stark example that I found of product promotion in the museum. There was a wall of chocolate bars in different flavors and enticing packaging, which you could conveniently find for sale in the gift shop. I could find no educational value in this installment. The purpose it served was only to generate excitement about a product. Again this brings us back to the user-centered discussion. The designers tell the user what they need and proceed to embed their product into the grooves of our lives. This is not the same as responding to a demand.
On the other hand, working through this exhibit may be an effective way for visitors to learn about the ways we react in accordance with our senses and ways we are likely to be deceived. The disability and sensory design area showed how certain scents can spark appetite and memory for dementia patients, and how color coded design can help our brains understand the functionality of items. Examples like these shows how the exhibit is educating visitors to what product design has the potential to be. In “Saturated: The Allure of Science and Color” there was a old Mac computed on display with this quote from Steve Jobs, “For most consumers, color is more important than megahertz, gigabytes, and other gibberish associated with buying a typical PC.” This placed in an exhibit about color allows visitors to reflect on their own consumer decision and how they are affected by design. This fits in to the discussion about design justice introduced to us by Constanza. The products we buy are all encoded with values, and along with the values are the frameworks of our society and all the power structures that entails (Constanza 2018). Museum experiences that let the visitor “behind the scenes” on how and why things are designed allow them to decode their consumer environment.
Talja, S., Hartel, J, (2007). Revisiting the user-centred turn in information science research: an intellectual history perspective. Information Research, 12(14).
Constanza-Chock, S. (2018). Design Justice: towards an intersectional feminist framework for design theory and practice. Design Research Society. University of Limerick. 25th-28th June 2018.
Sengers, P. (2000). Practices for a Machine Culture: A case study of integrating cultural theory and artificial intelligence. Surfaces. Presses de l’Universite de Montreal.