Abstract
Museums are no longer places where guests aren’t allowed to touch anything. They have increasingly become adventure parks, where visitors are invited to directly interact with exhibits to discover new knowledge. This raises questions regarding how to design such interactive exhibits, so they invite and persuade people to interact with them and therefore help visitors to learn new things. How to optimize exhibitions so exhibits are exposed to visitors in effective ways has been the subject of many studies. Most of them rely on resource intensive observations and interviewing of visitors. In this paper, a privacy-savvy and automated method for observing, how exhibits are actually used by visitors, is presented, and the benefits of such long-term monitoring for improving the exhibit design process are discussed. Long-term usage is an often-neglected factor in existing studies. Differences in exhibit usage are mostly attributed to changed versions or changed arrangements of exhibits within an exhibition rather than time of day or season. Results of the case study presented in this paper show that listening durations for an audio player exhibit varied slightly during daytimes, and seasons, but not between weekdays and weekends. Also, an effect on listening durations between different dynamic social settings could be observed. These results give an indication that besides the variation of the exhibits, the consideration of the time of day, season, and variation of social setting is important when different versions of persuasive objects are to be compared in terms of their use in a live setting in a museum. In a next step, the automated interaction monitoring setup will be used to investigate combined effects of time and variations of persuasive exhibits on visitor interactions.
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Notes
- 1.
Exploratorium San Francisco: https://www.exploratorium.edu/.
- 2.
Ontario Science Center: https://www.ontariosciencecentre.ca/.
- 3.
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR): https://gdpr.eu.
- 4.
inatura museum: https://inatura.at.
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Ritter, W., Künz, A., Paldán, K., Kempter, G., Gort, M. (2021). Continuous Monitoring of Interactive Exhibits in Museums as Part of a Persuasive Design Approach. In: Kurosu, M. (eds) Human-Computer Interaction. Theory, Methods and Tools. HCII 2021. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12762. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78462-1_31
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