Exhibiting Performance: Co‐participation in science centres and museums

Abstract

There is a growing commitment within science centres and museums to deploy computer‐based exhibits to enhance participation and engage visitors with socio‐scientific issues. As yet, however, we have little understanding of the interaction and communication that arises with and around these forms of exhibits, and the extent to which they do indeed facilitate engagement. In this paper, we examine the use of novel computer‐based exhibits to explore how people, both alone and with others, interact with and around the installations. The data are drawn from video‐based field studies of the conduct and communication of visitors to the Energy Gallery at London’s Science Museum. The paper explores how visitors transform their activity with and around computer‐based exhibits into performances, and how such performances create shared experiences. It reveals how these performances can attract other people to become an audience to an individual’s use of the system and subsequently sustain their engagement with both the performance and the exhibit. The observations and findings of the study are used to reflect upon the extent to which the design of exhibits enables particular forms of co‐participation or shared experiences, and to develop design sensitivities that exhibition managers and designers may consider when wishing to engender novel ways of engagement and participation with and around computer‐based exhibits.

Acknowledgements

The programme of research of which this article forms part is supported by grants from the ESRC Science in Society Programme Award No. RES‐151‐25‐00047 and the National Science Foundation—Center for Teaching and Learning, ESI‐0119787. The authors would like to thank all the visitors who kindly agreed to participate in the research and the designers, educationalists and managers of Science Museum in London for their help with the research. They would also like to thank James Bradburne, Jonathan Osborne, Justin Dillon, Heather King, Naomi Haywood, and Hannah Redler as well as our colleagues at the Center for Informal Learning and School (KCL) and Work, Interaction & Technology (KCL), in particular Paul Luff, Jon Hindmarsh, and Katie Best, for their ideas and insightful comments concerning the issues discussed in this paper.