Interpreting Tools by Imagining Their Uses

ABSTRACT

By prompting imagined or actual bodily experience, we can guide interpretation of tools to emphasize the action that those tools perform. The technique requires little more than an extension from looking at an object, to imagining how the body engages with it, perhaps even trying out those specialist postures, to nourish an interpretation centered on how the tool is used. This empathy-based approach, developed for use in classrooms and museum study environments, emphasizes tool users – scientific, trade and craft practitioners – rather than the products that the tools were used to create, and interprets science and craft as embodied processes in space and time rather than as mere precursors to their static products. This approach also encourages close inspection of specific objects to reveal wear and other changes that offer clues about how they were held, and how they moved. Interpreting objects in this way provides insights that center the object in a visitor engagement, letting objects speak for themselves. The technique may also be applicable in exhibition, using mannequins or augmented reality to add bodily information.

KEYWORDS:

• Museum object interpretation
• embodied pedagogy
• scientific instruments
• tools
• design theory

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

About the author

Alistair Kwan is an historian of science focused especially on the material and spatial culture of knowledge, approached as primary sources. He has taught through both object interpretation and historical process replication at Yale and Rochester, where his students spent classes in museums, galleries and rare book libraries. His research centers on the history of scientific and technical education as told by its material and spatial remains.

ORCID

Alistair Kwan http://orcid.org/0000-0003-3890-9650

Notes

1 For a description of the first version of this course, see Kwan, “Determining Historical Practices through Critical Replication”.

2 Fleming, “Artifact Study,”. For application to scientific objects, see also Anderson et al., “Reading Instruments”.

3 Prown, “Mind in Matter”.

4 See also the challenges of prompting object engagement without using words as described by Hein, “The Matter of Museums”.

5 Metropolitan Museum of Art, “‘Juicy Salif’ lemon squeezer,” http://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/491871. See also the description, including instructions on how to hold it for both juicing and washing, on Alessi’s sales website, http://www.alessi.com/en/products/detail/psjs-juicy-salif-citrus-squeezer.

6 For an example, consider the astronomical telescope in the on-line catalogue of Te Papa, the Museum of New Zealand (http://collections.tepapa.govt.nz/object/58251). The on-line interpretation addresses two broad research contexts – one to do with navigation, and one to do with instrumentation – that do not draw on this particular telescope.

7 Krippendorf, The Semantic Turn, especially chapter 3. Krippendorf’s design theory identifies two broad categories of communication: semantics, conveyed by the language of conventional symbols and metaphorical positioning, and affordances, conveyed by forms that relate physically to bodily interaction. My approach here depends on developing viewers’ perception of affordances by scaffolding them into imagined (or indeed actual) bodily experiences with the object.

8 Horrebow, Basis astronomiae plate 1.

9 Scheiner, Rosa ursina, sive, sol, 150.

10 On astronomers’ seating, see Stott, “Observatory Chairs,” 291.

11 Cf. Weisberg, “Moving Museum Experiences”.

12 For examples of how scientific instruments and body interact, see for example Kwan, “Vernier Scales and Other Early Devices for Precise Measurement”; Schaffer, “Astronomers Mark Time”.

13 On the importance of nature of science in curriculum, see the first three chapters of American Association for the Advancement of Science, Science for all Americans.