Interactives: Thing of the Past?

Are interactives at museums about to become relics themselves?

Reading Dan Spock's "A Post-Coronavirus Museum," it hit me that interactive activities at museums and science centers may quickly become a thing of the past.

As COVID-19 started to spread through the U.S., museums began talking about temporarily removing their interactives. No more touchy stations for kids, no more equipment for them to climb on, but just for now, as a precaution. At the museum I was working at, there was discussion about putting hand sanitizer stations in the room of touch-screen interactives, rather than completely closing off the room.

But it's now five months later, and "for now" and "temporarily" are still going. Many museums are currently closed, so their interactives are a moot point for the moment, but at some point, they will reopen (Won't they?), and there will need to be discussions about all of those hands-on activities for kids and adults.

Spock states: "One museum I’m aware of is already discussing plans to pull all interactive activities from its exhibits in anticipation of reopening," and refers to "the idea that children’s and other museums might ... revert to static displays like the ones I grew up with five decades ago."

Wow. That idea of possibly getting rid of all interactives is just... wow. How much time have museum professionals -- exhibit designers, curators, education departments -- spent researching interactives and thinking of how to incorporate them into each museum? How much time have we spent thinking how a physical activity could be integrated into the theme of our museums or science centers -- hammering away to build a railroad, pushing buttons to create tides, spinning a knob to make a sign light up, touching a screen to make your choice in a game, using building blocks to construct a bridge or high-rise, touching a plasma ball to see electricity and how it's conducted -- especially as a way to help a visitor make a connection with what they're learning? As far as I know, interactives are still a relatively new thing (booming within the last 10-20 years), and now we're having to either rethink what an "interactive" could/should be, or get rid of them altogether? How much time have we invested in these aspects of museums and learning, and now they may have to become obsolete?? That realization blew my mind.

If we can't touch things, or should be touching many fewer things, what will "interactives" look like in the post-Coronavirus world? How will those multi-sensory and tactile goals be accomplished? Will everything be virtual reality? For me, one of the great things about most interactives was that they forced you to look at something in the real world, and to get physically involved, rather than staring at a screen, as if you were at home watching TV or streaming movies online. It can be argued that some virtual reality activities require involvement, but there are others that are "Sit there, put on this headset, and watch this," much like the "Stand there, look at that wall, and read this" of gallery spaces.

On the other hand, in episode #79 of the "Museum Archipelago" podcast, exhibit designer Paul Orselli lists a number of other options, like interactive touch screens or projection systems that are activated and controlled by foot, rather than by hand, allowing social interactions while being socially distanced. "[It's] sort of full-body and it doesn't involve people touching their hands."

He describes what he calls "empty interaction," such as "a flip label [with] one piece of text and information on a little flap or a door, and to encounter the rest of the information, or to get an answer to a question, you have to open up the flap," as well as push-button interactives. Those are certainly easy interactives (and kind of fun, with that moment of "Here's my guess. Did I get it right? Let's see!" and "What's going to happen when I push this?"), but as Orselli laughs, "That might be about the lowest level of interaction possible." He then asks whether there's a way to create a more intellectually engaging version of a flip label.

Orselli says that possibly having to get rid of these simple interactives could be a good thing, forcing us to ask ourselves, "How could we provide a satisfying experience, and what are the interfaces or other kinds of opportunities that we could provide that would carry the content, would carry the emotional ideas that we want to carry across?" As Orselli concludes, "Constraints are a good thing for creativity, and now we've just been thrown some public health and perceptual constraints. We have to think about that because certainly our visitors are going to be thinking about that, and if we don't show that at least we're sensitive to that, our visitors could rightfully think that we are insensitive not only to those design constraints and those design considerations, but insensitive to them as people who want to have fun and want to be safe." This gives us new things to think about, new approaches to interactions for our visitors, new ways of learning. It's going to be a whole new world.

Someday (maybe soon), is there going to be a Museum of Interactives? Lots of old flip panels, push buttons, and hammering toys, all sitting on shelves? We'll visit with our kids or grandkids, they'll then visit with their kids, and say "Back in the 2010s, there were things called interactives. You had to do stuff with your hands to make them work. Look at that old technology!"