Alisa Maximova participates in the interdisciplinary conference "Museums Alive! — Exploring how museums behave like living beings"
On November 4-5 Alisa Maximova participated in the interdisciplinary postgraduate conference "Museums Alive! — Exploring how museums behave like living beings" at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester (UK). She presented a paper "Social organisation of experiments in museum: notes on interaction with hands-on exhibits".
Abstract
Shifting towards a more interactive format of exhibition implies providing visitors with food for thought and greater autonomy, introducing new technologies and hands-on objects. However, the concept of interactivity also brings problems, such as vagueness of script. Failing to grasp the principle of manipulating the object can be frustrating, boring, and even unsafe for a visitor, or cause damage to the object. Thus, engagement of visitors can only be achieved through understanding what they are comfortable with, which norms of behavior they follow and how they perceive museum space.
It seems important to examine in what way are experiments performed by visitors are different from an experiment in laboratory. Therefore, we will compare circumstances of scientific experiments and actions of museum visitors. The paper will elaborate how these “lay experiments” are organized within social activity of exploring exhibition. Unlike scientists working on a study, visitors do not possess a clear frame of reference. They employ environment, written or graphic instructions and their companions to make sense of an exhibit. It is evident that people identify their actions as “wrong” and “successful”, which can be observed and described as distinctive interactional order, constituted in movements, gestures and conversations.
Results of analysis of several situations will be presented, based on theoretical resources of microsociology. I focused on the cases when people encountered problems in understanding the meaning of certain museum exhibits. The data was gathered during ethnographic research in Moscow museums of science and technology.
See the Conference Programme.