The Museum of Science

Corey and I decided to go investigate the museum of science because we’re engineers and we thought it would be more appealing to us than the MFA. Given its name and prime location, we both thought it would be filled with modern interactive exhibits which really leverage the power of technology to convey ideas. We were wrong and the experience was actually quite disappointing. Throughout our entire survey we kept getting the impression that the museum was stuck 20 years in the past.

Almost every exhibit had a large amount of signage and descriptive written material. Additionally, there were audio devices that would read to you exactly what was on the text. On one hand, this is nice for accessibility reasons, though it is a little sad to see that they weren’t doing more with the ‘multimedia’ side of things. The descriptions were of course static text, and the one multimedia element was actually just another rendition of the existing information. There were however a few instances of the museum using the existing technology for things other than just reading the text, such as this exhibit that would allow you to hear various bird calls.

A relic from the 1989 Chernobyl disaster

This is a poorly done AR (augmented reality) tour of a recreated 19th century mansion. This room is real and you stand inside a control room where this image appears on a screen. From there you simply interact with the screen to explore whichever topic interests you. The problem with this is the very clear disconnect between reality and virtual reality. The program running on this computer is essentially a smartphone app and the actual, real room just serves as an enticing background. To make this better, the room needs to be the focus and not the screen. Maybe the museum could acquire some smart glasses and actually produce an AR tour where you can walk up to an object and some small description would appear in your view. Sure, smart glasses may be expensive and new, but this is the Museum of Science right? Show us cool new science.

Although there were clear attempts to encourage user engagement and incorporate interactive elements, almost all of them required museum visitors to initiate the process. They weren’t captivating in the sense that passers-by might stop and explore; there was always a button that you had to press before something interesting occurred.

This raises the question of what can museums and various public institutions do that will “reach out” and grab attention, without being annoying or having barriers to entry. I think that the Museum of Science could improve this aspect of things simply by replacing old technology with more modern and user friendly renditions. For example, the touch screens that they did have were all very unresponsive, which made the theoretically simple task of poking an animal to learn more about it more challenging. Similarly, most of the devices were running software that simply looked old and unfriendly to users that are well versed in the ‘web 2.0’ world.