Let's take a look at Deep Time, Natural History's innovative new exhibit on evolution. How do the dinos get down with the digital?
In June 2019, the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History unvieled its new and improved Fossil Hall. The previous exhibit closed in 2014 after almost 100 years of displaying the skeletons of big dinosaurs. With this new exhibit, the team hoped to create a relevant journey charting the interconnectedness of beings and our planet from the beginning of Earth through our future.
This exhibit asks you to "travel back in time" by walking to the very back of the exhibit and then moving forward in time as you make your way back towards the entrance. As museum professionals know, visitors don't always read the directions (neither do I!) and will start and end where ever they please. The digitial interactive I have chosen to focus on takes these facts into account. After an initial moment of awe as you enter and take in the gigantic dinosaur castings and bones around the space, three digital interactive experiences line the second level of the exhibit, just a few steps (and ramp) up. Here, six touch screens in pairs of two offer the chance to explore how climate, evolution, and topography have changed over time on our planet. Each digital interactive set offers a variation of content but a similar mode of engagement. For interest of discussion, we will be evaluating the pros and cons of this set as whole, rather than singling out just one of the pairs.
Accessibility & Usability
These interactives gave the user a lot of physical space to engage with the digital interactive. Chairs were not included so it didn't espeically encourage people to stay but the height of the screen allowed people of all heights to operate it.
All the interactives used a lot of visuals to guide the user alongside text bubbles for those that wanted to engage further. The biggest barrier I saw to accessibility and usability was the amount of information included on the screen at once. As you can see in the picture the right, there are four different areas to engage with on this screen. This meant people had to spend a lot more time figuring out how to use the device rather than just using it. With the loudness of Easter Sunday visitors, I had to really focus my attention to engage with the content - but I wasn't disappointed when I did :)
Technology & Creativity
Each of these interactives is a very large touch screen. They were easy to operate with minimal to no lagging. "Evolution Through Deep Time" asked visitors to drag and drop different species into a family tree. I thought this was a more exciting use of a touch screen rather than just clicking through content. "Our Planet Through Deep Time" (video below) allowed visitors to drag thier finger along a timeline and watch as the topography of our planet changed. Visitors could click on small dots along the timeline to activate a text bubble about that moment in time.
Connection to Content
The connection between these interactives and the exhibit was clear. Unlike some of the other exhibits that have been evaluated, this interactive was not tied to one section of the exhibit, but to the themes at large. Deep Time, "invites you to explore the epic story of how Earth’s distant past is connected to the present and informs our future." While these three interactives focus more on the past to the present and don't do much to project about the future, they certainly drive home the point that the past and present are deeply connected. I appreciated the level of differentiation availble on each device. If you were interested in just doing the matching/moving activity, you could! If you wanted to understand more about a species or a time period, you could! But neither version was forced on the user.
Engagement
Each of the digitial interactive pairs played on a larger theme of the exhibit. I thought these were a really nice way to engage visitors in the larger themes, no matter where they were in their journey through the exhibit. These interactives were placed looking out onto the biggest, most impressive dinos of the exhibit and I think that drew a lot of people to the interactives. Often people came to the overlook for a photo op and stayed for a digital interactive (and sometimes the other way around). I found that a lot of people of all ages did not spend much time engaging with this activity. As mentioned previously, it took some time to grasp the vareity of ways to engage with the interactive, which I think meant it didn't grab people quickly enough. However, all is not lost! People were pulled into try them very consistently due to the placement and draw of digital interactives in general and some spent multiple minutes engaged with the content.