Step inside one of the NMAI's cornerstone exhibits, Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations for a closer look at how the museum utilizes digital interactives.
In 2014, the National Museum of the American Indian unveiled its exhaustive, compelling, and visually beautiful account of the history of diplomatic relations between Indian Nations and the United States from the colonial period to present. The exhibit description states, "Treaties lie at the heart of the relationship between Indian Nations and the United States." And we are going to look at an interactive that helps us understand just that!
Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations greets the visitor with a winding gallery - setting the stage with vocabulary and imagery to look out for throughout their visit. After coming out of this first gallery, the visitor comes upon this digital interactive (pictured left). It asks you to sort the traditions associated with signing a treaty. Is it traditional for Indian Nations to share food when they sign a treaty? Or is that a tradition of the United States? Or both? It gives you 10 of these traditions to sort.
Accessibility
This interactive was very straight forward and interesting. The directions only took up three sentence on a small box (pictured right) and the objective was easily understood. The physical interactive did not include chairs or audio. This would not have been ideal for a smaller person who could not reach the top of the large screen. One aspect I especially appreciated was the use of words and pictures to represent each custom. This allows for visual learners and english learners alike to particpate in the activity.
Engagement
Often, I have found that visitors are most attentive at the beginning of an exhibit. They are fresh with excitement about the exhibit's content and maybe it's their first exhibit of the museum! This interactive is well-placed in that it comes after a solid section of introductory information, leaving the visitor ready for a change up in activity/mode of learning. Unfortunately, this activity is set off to the side by itself which I think is a contributing factor as to why number of people that stop at it is fairly low.
Technology & Creativity
This interactive is made up of a large touch screen. I appreciated the simiplistic design and usability. It definitely felt like an effective usage of this type of media in that the objective was clear and the functions were operable and visually engaging. The screen worked well and provided a smooth technological expereince.
Connection to Content
As previously stated, the connection between this interactive and the exhibit's mission is clear. This interactive gets the visitor to move past learning about what treaties are made about or how they are broken, but allows them to sit in the idea of what it looked like for two groups to make treaties. While using this interactive, visitors might be thinking, "How might one side act if the other side did _____?" or "I thought everyone shook hands when they agreed upon something!" After sorting the traditions, the answers are checked and the user is given an opportunity to try again and learn a quick tid-bit more about each tradition. This exhibit, on a whole, asks the visitor to consider the founding of America from a point of view often discarded - this interactive takes a small bit of that large mission and effectively distills it into a quick interactive expereince, allowing space to rework biases and imagine interactions from hundreds of years ago more accurately.