Multimedia Design Research for the Museum Education Consortium's Museum Visitor's Prototype

The design and development of interactlve multimedia applications is a complex and challenging process which is still evolving as the hardware, software, creative talent, production services, publishers, and target markets all evolve at the same time. Compared with other media, such as print, film, radio, or N, interactive multimedia, as a medium that combines many media and makes use of them interactively, Is still relatively new, at best f ieen years dd. The design and development process is far from standardized, although effective design formats and templates have begun to emerge in certain sectors, such as for corporate and militarytraining materials and for children's videogames. Technical advances continue at such a rapid rate that even experienced designers have been kept on a steep learning curve for over a decade. Many design issues of how best to use interactive multimedia, why, when, for whom, and where are still being explored. The project described in this paper is an example of a research and development effort that has attempted to address some of these questions in the context of museum education. From 1988 to 1991 the Museum Education Consortium, comprised of the Directors of Education of seven major art museums, contracted a team of consultants, coordinated through the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, to design and produce an interactive multimedia prototype for museum visitors. The design research effort involved the acquisition of a database of images of paintings and documentary text, film, sound, and motion video materials, the creation of a discovery-based lnteractive prototype for musuem visitors, experimentation with high resolution digital imaging and high definition television filming, and formative testing with museum vlsitors using the lnteractive prototype, which provided Invaluable feedback about the effectiveness and appeal of the lnteractive design. Copyright by Archives & Museum Informatics, 1991 International Conference on Hypermedia & Interactivity in Museums The Museum Education Consortium The Museum Education Consortium is a collaborative effort among the education departments of seven art museums: The Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, The Brooklyn Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum of Modem Art, The National Gallery of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. It was founded in 1987 to investigate the roles that technology might play in museum and art education in efforts to provide more effective access to the arts. Several research and development prototypes have been developed over the past five years as part of this research and development effort. This paper briefly describes the design and development of one of these prototypes, called 'The Museum Visitor's Prototype" (1988-1991), which was created as part of the larger research effort to explore new methods for introducing visitors with little or no background in art or art history to different ways of looking at and thinking about paintings. The work of the consortium has been funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts, the J. Paul Getty Trust Grant Program, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. The Museum Visitor's Prototype The Museum Visitor's Prototype is an interactive multimedia prototype that was developed as a discovery-based learning experience for testing with adult museum visitors, who have limited knowledge of art history or art. It was designed to be used in an art museum setting by one person alone or by small groups of visitors for five to fifteen minutes. The goals of the prototype were several: 1. To introduce users to new tools for learning to look at and reflect on works of art using the features of interactive video technology to facilitate this process and to enjoy the experience of looking at art, 2. To pique curiosity and foster self-directed exploration in an engaging way so that the experience of using the interactive prototype would be enjoyable as well as informative and would be based on each user's individual interests and evolving knowledge base, 3. To offer easy access to a rich multimedia information base of images, films, and text so that users would come away with an increased understanding of selected Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists and their work. Although the final product will most likely explore several artists, their work, and their life and times, the prototype focuses, for the sake of example, on one artist and, in fact, on one painting: Claude Monet and his "Waterlilies" painting (1926), which is currently at the Museum of Modern Art in NewYork. The discovery-based design of the prototype allows for access to information about a variety of paintings, sketches, details, artists, and documentary images and films, particularly as they relate to Monet and his work. The three frameworks for exploration in the prototype include: Copyright by Archives & Museum Informatics, 1991 Chapter 4 Multimedia Design Research 1. Paintings looking at the painting, "Waterlilies," itself, 2. Artists finding out about the artist, Claude Monet, through his studio, 3. Context finding out about relevant historical contexts, such as Monet's life in his garden at Giverny, that reveal something about the life and times of the artist. A video overview introduces the prototype's contents and how to use its interactive features. Audio commentary, often accompanied by "talking heads" video, is available from several different characters, including a museum educator, a museum visitor, a cultural historian, and an art student. Various interactive features include visual zooms to details of paintings, a timeline of cross-referenced historical and contextual information, open-ended questions for directed looking, and side-by-side comparisons of paintings or between paintings and film clips depicting the location painted. Access to information is made available via selectable, "hot," sections of visual menus, such as canvasses and journals depicted graphically in an image of Monet's studio, and through the selection of pictographic icons at the top and bottom of the screen. Since the project was a research and development effort, the consortium decided to experiment with the creation of a design research prototype that included a potpourri of design ideas and features which could be tested with visitors for their effectiveness. As such, the prototype is somewhat unusual in that it attempts to explore the possiblities of a discovery-based design for adults and has a variety of features and options for testing, rather than a single, consistent interactive blue print for a final product. The prototype runs on a hardware platform that includes a Macintosh I1 computer with extended memory and Truevision's Nuvista image capture and overlay board, a Pioneer 4200 videodisc player, an Electrohome color monitor, and stereospeakers. In an effort to test reactions to the image qualtity of images stored in different formats, images in the prototype are displayed in both analog form from the videodisc and digital form from the computer's hard disc. Some of the motion footage was filmed in HDTV, as a part of the image quality testing, then down converted and stored on the videodisc. The input device is a mouse. Key Design and Production Issues Many people contributed to the various phases of the design and production of the Museum Visitor's Prototype, as with most interactive multimedia projects. The team included people who worked on project management, design treatments and storyboards, content and image research, production, image, film, and sound acquisitions, post-production, digitizing, disc mastering, C programming, graphics, and formative testing. Among the major contributors were Jane Freeman, Mary Lewis, Frankie Mann, Judy Meighan, Alan Newman, Sharon Picker, Nancy Richner, Robin Sand, Dorothy Shamonsky, Susan Stedman, and Kathy Wilson. While the design and production team worked on the evolving interactive prototype, a number of key development issues became recurring themes discussed by the team, as well as by the consortium as a whole. Some of these issues included: Copyright by Archives & Museum Informatics, 1991 International Conference on Hypermedia & Interactivity in Museums a 1. What is the more appropriate pedagogical approach for a particular application? What are our goals? What do we hope users will gain or learn by using a particular application? a 2. What is the best use of interactive technologies in museum settings and in art education in general? a 3. How do you define the target audience of museum visitors? Who is this application for? What is the target context for use? Where within a museum setting will interactive technologies best be used? Where outside the museum? Where will a particular application be used? a 4. What is the expected interaction time? How long do we expect users to actually use it? a 5. What is the content area we are interested in? What kind of content research should be done for a multimedia database (photographic images, film clips, sounds, music, text, etc.) and who should do it? What are the key image acquisitions and rights clearance issues? How is this research different from traditional scholarly research? How is editorial control determined? Who is the "author"? a 6. How relevant is an interactive application to current museum practice? How does it complement existing materials (for example, wall labels and brochures) and practices (for example, gallery talks and lectures)? a 7. What is the optimal user interface design? What is the nature of the interaction we want to encourage? How will we introduce, contextualize, and facilitate the interactive experience to make it more inviting, accessible, and meaningful? a 8. What is a prototype? What is a "deliverable" for a research and development project? How important are production values in a prototype? How complete and consistent should a prototype be? a 9. What is the most appropriate hardware and software to use? How do you make such technical decisions? 10. How can the effectiveness of a prototype best be evaluated to meet our goals with our target audience in our target context? a 11. Can interactive programs be designed that will encourage seeing the real works of art in museum galleries? a 12. Is the image quality of existing hardware and imaging systems good enough to display works of art? How can you display the best possible color and clarity? Highlights of the Formative Research Over the course of 1990 and 1991, Nancy Richner and I conducted some small scale formative research studies with museum visitors at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Brooklyn Museum using the preliminary Museum Visitor's Prototype, described briefly above. As with most formative research, our goal was to get a better feel for the effectiveness of the prototype with our target audience in our target context. Toward this end, we observed visitors using the prototype to get a sense of which of the design features among the potpourri of design ideas we experimentally included in the prototype seemed to work best. We used this feedback from visitors as a basis for focusing and revising the design of the prototype in an effort to create a more effective product. 29 Copyright by Archives & Museum Informatics, 1991 Chapter 4 Multimedia Design Research In our formative study, we considered some of the classic formative research questions that typically have to do with issues of, 0 1. Appeal Do they like it? 0 2. Useability Can they use it? 0 3. Relevance and Meaning What do they get out of using it? Of what value do they think it is? What kinds of things do they learn from using it? (although this last issue is always difficult to assess with a protoytpe, which by nature is incomplete in terms of content depth and richness). We also tried to observe more closely how museum visitors deal with and think about the challenges presented by a prototype such as ours, which is unfamiliar to many on at least one, if not all three, of the following fronts: 0 1. In terms of the technology it uses, 0 2. In terms of the discovery-based navigational design, 0 3. In terms of its content. We met with 45 visitors, mostly in pairs. These were people who came to the museum with someone else: husbands and wives, mothers and daughters, mothers and sons, unmarried couples, female friends, male friends, fellow students, work colleagues, etc. For our formative studies, the prototype was set up in spaces allocated by each museum for educational activities. In both museums this space was somewhat remote from the museum's lobby entrance, cafeteria, gift shop, or galleries. We approached visitors for our studies mostly in the lobby areas. Two researchers met with each pair of visitors for 20 to 30 minute sessions. The reactions and comments from visitors during and after using the museum visitor's prototype, combined with our observations of their strategies for using it, illuminated a number of interesting, and perhaps general, issues about the great variety among adult museum visitors in terms of things such as their comfort level with using new technologies, their attitudes toward learning something new, and their great variety of styles for approaching and learning to navigate through a discovery-based environment. Although the reactions from visitors led to specific ideas for revising the design of the museum visitors prototype, we will focus here on some of the many issues raised in the course of our observations, which are, perhaps, pertinent in a more general way to the design of discoverybased interactive multimedia environments for adults. 1. There was a Wide Variablity among Museum Visitors The variability among museum visitors to these two museums was amazing: in terms of their age range (ages 14 to 77 in our sample), their familiarity with art or art history, their prior use of computers, and more specifically their use of the mouse and Macintosh interface, their geographical distribution (MoMA, for example has many international visitors), their time commitment to their museum visit, their inclination to try new and different things, their relationship to the person with whom they're visiting the museum, etc. Copyright by Archives & Museum Informatics, 1991 30 2. Different Strategie International Conference on Hypermedia & Interactivity in Museums