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Do museums’ mobile apps encourage their visitors to spend more time looking down at their phones and less time interacting with their environment and each other? Matthew Fisher and Jennifer Moses' paper for the 2013 Museums and the Web conference entitled Rousing the Mobile Herd: Apps that Encourage Real Space Engagement, explores how mobile apps can encourage social engagement, tapping into the museum’s distinct potential as a social learning space. This paper seeks to answer the question: How can mobile apps encourage and support meaningful, face-to-face social interaction in museum spaces? Museums are increasingly focused on creating more engaging visitor experiences, in part by encouraging participation in dialogue and social interaction in the exhibit space. At the same time, we are embracing mobile technologies. At first glance, social interaction and mobile engagement might seem to be antithetical. Many popular museum mobile apps divert visitors from interacting with exhibits, objects, and each other, undermining social interaction and dialogue. In surveying the top-rated museum apps in the iTunes store, as well as popular social apps outside the industry, we examine how apps both limit and nurture real-space social interaction. We identify key characteristics of mobile-supported social exchange, assessing which app features provide the best opportunities for fostering meaningful social interaction, both between visitors and other visitors, and between visitors and the museum. We explore specific social interactions conducive to the museum environment—game play, team work, polls, affinity-mapping, creating and sharing content, conversation prompts—and align them with mobile app features. We both analyze existing social engagement models with the greatest potential for contributing to mobile-museum projects, and identify opportunities to leverage those successful engagement models to create new types of mobile experiences.
Citation preview
Rousing the Mobile Herd Apps that Encourage Real Space Engagement
Matthew Fisher 4/18/13
night kitchen
interactive
1996 vs 2012http://alonetogetherbook.com/http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.04/
Social in real space or “real social”
Things we do in real space with other people
Social engagement supports more effective museum experiences
“conversation is a primary mechanism of knowledge construction and distributed meaning-making.”
Lienhardt & Crowley, 1998
groups observe each other to learn, to understand exhibit interactions and model behavior.
Falk & Storksdieck, 2005
Playing single-player games
Web browsing
Listening to audio
Watching video
Playing multi-player games
Posting/commenting
Sharing links/retweeting
Favoriting/friending
Shopping/bidding
• A) want to be social in the museum• B) want to make apps• C) think radically differently about their design.
So how are museums using mobile?
• Over 80 of the top museum apps in the iTunes store*• Quantity and quality of user reviews and comments• Assessed their social and anti-social features• Apps were NOT designed to be social in real space
* Complete list available at www.whatscookin.com/mweb13
http://www.metmuseum.org/en/about-the-museum/now-at-the-met/features/2012/murder-goes-mobile Photograph by Don Pollard
Twitter: @mefisher
What we missed
A LOT…• New apps since summer 2012• Apps installed on museum devices
Talking about the exhibit
Games in the space
Facilitated discussions
Touch-tables & multi-person interactives
Photographing/observing others
Getting social: app features
• Location awareness• Gaming• Crowdsourcing• Polling• Personalization• Affinity-mapping
Location awareness
• AMNH Explorer• MOMA• London Museum• High Museum
social location awareness
Kismet: See mutual Facebook friends & interests
LoKast: Create “spaces” for
different types of “conversation”
Highlight: alerts you when potential “friends” are near
The London Zoo app’s “Friend Finder”
• Have to have a PIN• Can see where
your friends are on the zoo map for 24 hours if you both have the app open.
Gaming
NOT real social• Single player• Multiplayer
– One device per player
Real social• Group plays together
– “Host” controls device– Players share device
SCVNGR
Location check in & participate in challenges to
get rewards
View check-ins by Facebook
friends
Locate pre-packaged treks nearby
Share pictures with other users
Museum Hunt
Find a nearby museum or
search for one in another city
Choose from a list of scavenger
hunts
Follow the clues in a gallery
specific hunt
Share your final score
Murder at the Met: Metropolitan Museum of Art
Choose a path and follow the
clues
Find witnesses, possible suspects, and crime scenes
throughout the galleries
Take notes on your findings
Choose a suspect, weapon, and crime scene
to solve the murder
Crowdsourcing: Access American Stories
Polling - Amen
More “popular” statements
“Nearby” sort
Polling – Show of Hands
vote on numerous polls—political, social, cultural
Filter results: state, national, gender,
age, income, politics
Make and read comments on
results
Personalization
• Hermitage Museum • Powerhouse Museum PHM Walks• AMNH Explorer
Allows visitors to focus their interactions with personally relevant content, a more comfortable area for visitor conversation and reflection.
Affinity Mapping
• Object or experience affinities– “Related” objects in museum online collections
• Visitor affinities– Compare interests and favorites with other visitors
A model for “real social” museum apps
• What NOT to do important as what TO DO• Discard conventional approaches• Don’t overload the visitor
Give visitors space
http://www.flickr.com/photos/link2lando/8034351762/ Family watching television. Evert F. Baumgardner, ca. 1958.National Archives and Records Administration
What an app SHOULD NOT do: Be a guide.
• Be too engaging• Provide too much text• Play lengthy audio• Play length video• Require too much interaction• Require typing
What an app SHOULD do: Be a host!
• Engage you in your environment• Provide prompts for discussion• Engage you with your group• Engage you with other visitors
(comfortably, safely, optionally)• Provide insights into the community• Reflect back what’s important to you• Make unexpected connections
Personalize your visit?
OK Skip
Museum parlor game
A prototype that provides a social learning experience in the museum gallery space facilitated by a mobile app.
Welcome to the Fisher/Moses Museum of Curiosity!
Thank you!
• Jennifer Moses, Ph.D., co-author• MWEB committee
• All articles copyright New York Times• All screenshots copyright of the app publisher
• Contact:– matthew@whatscookin.com– @mefisher
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