I participated in some formative evaluation of DMNS's upcoming exhibit, "Expedition Health," this weekend. I was really looking foward to the experience, as I've read a lot about visitor evaluation but hadn't had the opportunity to do it yet (for my research, I just spy on people which, while fun, isn't as exciting as it may sound because apparently wearing the glasses with the fake nose and mustache attached actually makes you MORE conspicuous, and who wants to spy without a disguise???).
On Saturday I toured the exhibit and learned that it was entirely dependent upon technology. The whole series of stations are based around a "Peak Pass" card that records data about your body (the concept of the exhibit is what happens to your body when you climb a mountain). Everything worked well on Saturday...not so well today. Instead of evaluating visitors on the themes of the exhibit, I spent most of the day fixing computers. Those frustrating systems, which worked so well the day before, just kept breaking down. Instead of getting comments back from people about what they thought about the content of the exhibit, all I heard were complaints about the method of information delivery (which, yes, is very important to hear, but that's not all we were interested in learning) .
I'm a fan of using technology when it's appropriate and it enhances the experience, but having an entire exhibit be so reliant on "gadgets" worries me. Technology doesn't always work. What do you do, then, when the technological components of an exhibit dominate content to the extent that it is the technology (functioning or otherwise) that people remember, and not the theme of the exhibit itself?
On the upside, I now know the power of "Alt F4."
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I had similar feelings about the mp3 audio program at the Pojoaque Center--it was a really interesting and unusual exhibit, but there were no labels, only an audio program. The transmitters and/or receivers didn't always work correctly, so it was very frustrating to actually go through the exhibit. Sometimes narration would be cut off if you moved a step too far from the exhibit, or the wrong narration would play. It made me wonder if having an "old-fashioned" cassette player, or some kind of player where you could press a number for the exhibit rather than relying on the signal working, would have been worked more smoothly.
I think a lot of museums have frustrations with overly-technology-reliant exhibits, often from basing an exhibit on a piece of technology that isn't entirely reliable yet, or on something expensive and difficult to repair (broken animatronics, anyone?).
Re: disguises: one of the rangers at my park wears a Hawaiian shirt when he spies on visitors. It's like a disguise, right? (I always wondered, since I've never seen a visitor wearing a Hawaiian shirt....)
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