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| Professor Geri Gay's students demonstrate the Museum Detective hand-held unit. |
Everyone knows you’re not supposed to touch things in museums—no matter how curious you are. Instead, by manipulating the controls of a handheld guiding device from Cornell’s Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) Group, visitors become virtual “museum detectives.” The result is a more profound and satisfying discovery experience, and a more memorable one than forbidden touching of museum objects ever allowed.
Cornell HCI Group Director Geri Gay, MPS ’80, PhD ’85, the Kenneth J. Bissett Professor and Chair of Communication, knew—from watching kids playing GameBoy devices—the lure of technical toys. And she knew that one field trip experience in Cornell’s Johnson Museum of Art—when school children pair up to learn about exhibited objects, draw pictures on paper, and tell the rest of the class about “their” object—could use a high-tech tweak.
Tested first by school children from rural districts visiting one of the more inscrutable (and breakable) exhibits at the Cornell museum, the Asian art section, the Museum Detective handheld guide system can be adapted to almost any subject. Instead of listening to a droning guide, young museum visitors eagerly try their hand at a series of interactive exercises programmed into the Museum Detective. Compared to other types of museum tour methods, use of the Museum Detective handheld device succeeds in engaging young museum visitors. Within a minute or two, they are using their powers of observation and imagination to discover answers to questions they never thought they’d care about.
To help museum curators and educators design more intriguing exhibits, the Museum Detectives record data about how visitors interact with things they can’t physically touch. Analysis of user data involves some background science—environmental psychology, social network theory and ethnography—before the HCI experts can offer help with the art of displaying art. When Cornell HCI researchers checked back with field trip classes a month later, students who used the Museum Detective devices recalled significantly more about their experience. There were no smudged fingerprints to clean off precious museum objects—just lots of memories leading back to a discovery experience that was facilitated by technology and fun. (Roger Segelken)
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