Museum objects have fascinating stories but are often presented in a detached, objective way that tends to keep visitors at a distance. How can we engage visitors’ with objects on display in glass cases? Can we measure the visitors’ interest in the objects?
If a visitor looks at an object for a long time, than we may assume interest. If we can track this over a period of time, we might get a popularity index of each object on display. How could this information about object’s popularity improve the exhibiton?

In collaboration with MUSEON we designed a “popularity contest” between 15 objects selected from the wide museum’s deposits.  Toi get visitors more engaged, we created a Twitter account for the installation and each object had an individual # 
The 15 objects would compete for 4 display cases. Each case displayed an object, a projector showed on the front glass case: the musuem lable; the voice of the object itself; and the Twitter conversation. 

Which 4 objects would stay on display depended on their individual popularity calculated as visitors’ interest. We used two measures: via proximity sensors we monitored presence in front of the case and counted the number of tweets received by each #

The use of Twitter was intended as a way to engage visitors. Could we provoke Twitter feeds about the objects on display and show them as part of the object information? So the object could ask the visitor a question fun like cap with porcupine quill (image above, on th eleft) asking “#EcsiteCap Hey there! Beautiful person! Would I go with your outfit?” or the object could try to provoke curiosity such as “#EcsiteKorwar Which of your ancestors would you most like to be able to take advice from?” for the Korwar that in Papuan culture hosts the spirit of an ancestor and is consulted at critical times for advice. The object that score the lowest is removed for a new one, but before it can call on the visitors to “Help me! I’m last! Stop and look at me! Tweet me @ #<exhibit>! I don’t want to go back to the basement!”

Twitter was also the metaphor for the curated information displayed. Not well structured pieces of information about the objects but small chunks the size of a tweet, not with a fixed and well thought out sequence but in a more or less randomized way. Will ithis stimulate the curiosity of the visitors and enhance their experience?

There was a final question that played an important role in the discussion. Where to display the information? We did not want to used a traditional screen separated from the object as this would divert attention. Instead we chose a projection on the glass next to the object. This offered the opportunity to show just below the  curatorial content, the point of view of the object displayed as a speech bubble  like in comics.

Findings

 
The cases were on display during the Ecsite conference and for three months afterwards and we took the opportunity to collect opinions. 
The museum experts were split: some considered the humour a trivialization of the museum’s mission, others fully embraced the idea and appreciated the fresh and novel approach. The idea of exhibits with personality was particularly well received by curators of challenging collections, such as human remains from the same place but from different ages and different social settings with each person telling their personal story.

The Twitter feed was particularly well received as a very different use of social media (from the museum announcing events via Twitter) and can provide a channel to capture visitors’ contributions while in place that goes beyond the selfie. However not many had a Twitter account and only one tweet was by the professionals visiting as part of a workshop.

An interesting conversation sparked with one museum expert on the possibility of installing the cases in the museum’s entrance hall and using the museum’s Twitter account to enable followers to vote for the four objects to go on display the following month. This would give a sense of what visitors may want to see on display beforehand and would enable the museum to put on display highly interesting objects that do not fit with the current organization of the permanent exhibition.

We observed visitors for 2 days and collected data for 3 months. We noted that where visitors stopped was influenced by the physical trajectory they were following and therefore only two of the cases were looked at. The cases were positioned in the permanent collection in an area of scarce traffic as confirmed in the logs we collected (1400 hours of continuous data). The trajectory was significant: the second case from the left consistently scored higher than the others and overall twice the score of the second place (case 1). However, the Chinese shoes (used in the past by women with miniature feet mutilated for beauty purposes) were the ones who received the most attention independently from their position in the four cases.

Project dates
2014

Publications

Marshall, M. T., Dulake, N., Petrelli, D., Kockelkorn, H. (2015)From the Deposit to the Exhibit Floor: An Exploration on Giving Museum Objects Personality and Social Life. Extended Abstract of ACM CHI’15 International conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Seoul, Korea, April 2015.

Research by

Daniela Petrelli

Mark T. Marshall

Nick Dulake

Partners & Stakeholders MUSEON

Funders
EU FP7 meSch