By Laura Knott
Museum exhibit professionals are always working on two difficult problems: achieving a balance between giving too much or too little information in an exhibit and catching visitors’ attention long enough to ignite their curiosity.(1) People cannot participate fully unless they have access to the content of the exhibit and they won’t participate fully unless they’re excited.
The MIT Museum in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Photo by Eric Roth.
At the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Museum, we have begun to incorporate into our exhibits some new, simple elements to deepen visitors’ understanding of and engagement with exhibit content. These elements can be understood in the context of the key principles of interpretation: How can museum visitors, many of whom expect to simply receive information, be provoked into active participation?
The MIT Museum is the public face of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the premier research universities in the world. With over 100,000 visitors annually, the MIT Museum aims to make “research accessible to all,” a complex task made even more complex by the difficult subject matter that the MIT Museum presents.
Exhibits at the MIT Museum reflect both the rich history of the institute and the importance of ongoing research being conducted in MIT’s labs and research centers. Exhibitions include “Sampling MIT,” a set of seven mini-exhibits featuring recent MIT “innovations to change the world”; “MIT 150,” an exhibition of 150 iconic objects and ideas on the occasion of the institute’s 150th anniversary; and a small exhibit announcing the recent acquisition of 10,000 historic artifacts from Polaroid. Other galleries feature selections from the MIT Museum’s collection of holography, the largest of its kind in the world; kinetic sculptures; and an homage to Harold “Doc” Edgerton, the inventor of flash photography.
One of the Sampling MIT mini-exhibits features recent research on the use of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to identify specific areas of brain function. fMRI helps researchers understand how information is processed in the brain, using volunteers who are awake and interacting with researchers during the painless procedure. The exhibit gave the brain researchers an opportunity to explain their work to the public and, they hoped, to attract new volunteers to participate in fMRI studies.
Discussions with the neuroscientists led MIT Museum staff to add to the exhibit what we were soon referring to as “the red phone,” a direct line allowing MIT Museum visitors to volunteer for fMRI studies. Of all the ways that we could have included a volunteer sign-up mechanism in the exhibit, the red phone seemed the most interesting. It wasn’t an online form just like the other online forms that many of our visitors fill out frequently, it wasn’t a handout with follow-up information that would likely be stuck in a pocket and forgotten, but (for 2010) it was an unusual-looking instrument: a red, old-fashioned desk-set telephone with a cord and no buttons.
The key elements in the success of the red phone are: 1. It is visually intriguing; 2. It is placed in the exhibit directly beside other information about the research; and 3. Most importantly, it directs visitors to an immediate, concrete action (pick up the phone, listen to the message, and leave your contact information) that results in making a concrete contribution. By meeting these three conditions, the phone entices visitors to participate. Researchers involved in the exhibit report that they have received a steady stream of volunteers for fMRI who reached them from the MIT Museum while they were viewing the exhibit.
Another of the seven Sampling MIT mini-exhibits features work from labs led by Subra Suresh, dean of the MIT School of Engineering. Each Sampling MIT exhibit includes two research questions that frame the exhibit content; in the Suresh exhibit, the main question is, “How can an engineer help fight malaria?” Text and videos highlight nano-scale tools that measure changes in normal red blood cells’ elasticity and stickiness when they are infected with malaria. The research topic, though, is much more complicated than we could ever address in the limited form of the Sampling MIT mini-exhibits.
We were aware that some visitors would want much more detailed information than could reasonably be included in the exhibit, while others would be satisfied with the general overview. We decided to use this exhibit as a test of how we could address this problem.
Observations of our visitors, especially our younger visitors, revealed that many of them walk through the galleries with their cell phones in hand. This observation led us to think about how to harness those phones to provide extra information for visitors who wanted to dig deep into the exhibit content, a process that then led us to begin using QR codes.(2)
A QR code printed on a panel in the malaria exhibit allows visitors with Internet-enabled cell phones to connect to the exhibit page on the MIT Museum website by taking a picture of the QR code. On the Web page, they find a list of nonprofit organizations that are fighting malaria, information about the worldwide incidence of malaria, and links to scientific papers published by the Suresh Research Group.
When the malaria exhibit opened, a guide to QR codes was distributed to visitor services staff, and staff was briefed on how to help visitors who wanted to know what it was and how it worked. Typical use of the code is currently averaging about one visitor per day, a number that we expect to increase as we add QR codes to new exhibits and as their use becomes more common in the U.S.(3)
These two telephone techniques aim to address basic questions about visitor experience. How can we give some visitors detailed information without overwhelming others who simply want an overview of an interesting research topic? How can we move visitors to action while they’re engaged with an exhibit? What can we do in exhibits to propel visitors to extend their experience beyond the site, to learn more, to act, to become real participants in understanding and creating cultural heritage?
And, of course, how can we get visitors excited enough to volunteer their brains for science?
Notes
- In an April 12, 2010, post on a Smithsonian Magazine blog (http://blogs.smithsonianmag.com/aroundthemall/2010/04/slow-it-down-at-the-american-art-museum), writer Erica R. Hendry noted that, “The average person takes, on average, less than eight seconds to examine a work of art.” I have seen varying estimates of this phenomenon, but all of the estimates indicate that many museum visitors skim through exhibits. Hendry’s blog post focused on the Smithsonian’s participation in Slow Art Day (http://www.slowartday.com), an international program designed to help visitors spend more time with exhibits.
- The QR code was developed in Japan and is in wide usage there. QR codes can be generated online at many sites, including http://goqr.me and http://qrcode.kaywa.com/
- The codes are now commonly seen on utility bills and bank statements in the US. We anticipate that they are likely to be more widely adopted here as current cell phones are replaced by phones with Internet connectivity.
Laura Knott is interim exhibitions coordinator at the MIT Museum in Cambridge, MA, and curatorial associate in the museum’s architecture and design collections. She can be reached at lknott@mit.edu.
By Heidi Bailey
Here are examples of “Tweets” from Joseph Cornell’s Sharing Nature with Children:
