Connecting Museum Visitors to the NW Coast

Today as I make a loop of the fourth floor at the American Museum of Natural History, visitors’ reactions are different than normal.  Many people are quite surprised to see me and some actually jump in surprise.  Many are very enthusiastic and the words I hear most often sounds something like “That is so cool”.  (Although, to be honest, “That’s kind of weird.” seems to take second place.)  If I time my loop through the fourth floor exhibits poorly, schoolchildren crowd around me, blocking passages, impeding my passage and occasionally annoying their teachers.  Normally I talk to nobody except a visitor who notices my badge and asks for directions, but this time I talk to at least 30 different people, many of whom approached me, but some who I approached.

Driving a telepresence robot through a museum is both similar and different from visiting a museum in person.  While the physical space is the same – I have walked down those hallways and through those exhibits many times – distances feel exaggerated, the sounds of the hallway arrive through headphones, and the focus has shifted.  While walking through the museum I am usually looking for something, looking at something, or try to get to another location in the museum such as the copy room.  When driving a robot through the museum, at least in my testing, my main concerns are not running into someone (unlikely because of the LIDAR on the model we use, but still possible), not freaking visitors out too much (a rare occurrence, but sometimes unavoidable) and sending the very expensive machine down a flight of stairs (and these are big flights of stairs.)

This robot, technically a BeamPro telepresence device from Suitable Technologies, is part of one of the three projects I am focusing on as an intern at the American Museum of Natural  History.  My role is to support my supervisors, Barry and Hannah, in the implementation and evaluation of three different projects designed to increase engagement and achieve some learning goals all centered around the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians at the American Museum of Natural History on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

The hall itself is in many ways an artifact in and of itself.  As one of the original halls at the museum, it has changed relatively little since establishment in 1900.  It was originally designed to house artifacts collected on an expedition from 1897 to 1902 and led by Franz Boas, a historically important American Anthropologist.  While the arrangement of the hall was cutting edge at the time, the age of the hall and of the exhibits now shows.  As much as I love the hall and artifacts it houses, the lighting is poor, some alcoves are still empty due to smoke and water damage, and bits of racist terminology still litter the displays.

For many visitors it is a just a hall to pass through.  It is dark and cool and lies between the 79th street exit and the IMAX theater.  Families seem to use the hall as a place to rest and reorganize their belongings after seeing the film.  For a group of tourists with only limited time in the city and very limited time in the museum, it is easy to pass over in favor of some of the more visually impressive and more recently constructed halls.  Even some who spend time in the halls come away without an understanding of where in the world these cultures exist or even if they still exist today.

The projects I am working on aim to address some of the issues which result from the Hall of Northwest Coast Indians being a hall visitors just pass through.  Our goals are to have visitors who engage with our projects understand where the objects in the hall come from and that the cultures which created them still exist today.

The three projects designed to address these goals consist of using a BeamPro, the telepresence robot described above, to allow Sean, a curator at the Haida Heritage Centre on Haida Gwaii in British Columbia to interact with visitors and give tours of the Haida alcove in the hall.  We usually refer to this as our virtual guide project.  The same technology allows visitors to the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) to explore the Haida Gwaii Cultural Centre with another Beam telepresence robot and a co-op student, Emily, from the University of Victoria as their guide.  We call this the virtual tour.  The last project related to these is an activity guide and coloring book developed by high school students in an AMNH summer program based on objects around the hall and illustrated by a Haida artist.  Titled “Dreams of the Haida Child”, the activity guide includes the story of a young Haida who helps create gifts for her older brother’s wedding.  At the end of every chapter she goes to sleep and sees her gift come to life in her dream.  A mobile app designed to be used in conjunction with the activity guide allows users to see her dreams come to life with the object they created on the activity sheet.  The user can manipulate this object and act out the last chapter of the story, choosing which object to offer as a gift.

Several weeks ago we tested all of the projects in the hall with volunteers facilitating and it seemed to go very well.  I contributed to the design of observation worksheets and surveys to capture as many of the interactions between visitors and the engagement projects as possible, and currently I am sorting through the data from this test.  Once the data has been processed it will form the basis of ongoing modifications to the implementation of the project as well as the ongoing development of the app for Dreams of the Haida Child, all of which I hope to write an update about in the coming weeks.