Slowing Down And Noticing The World: An Interview with Beck Tench

Beck Tench is a simplifier, illustrator, story teller and technologist. Formally trained as a graphics designer at the University of North Carolina’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, she has spent her career elbow deep in web work of all sorts – from the knowledge work of information architecture and design to the hands dirty work of writing code and testing user experiences.

Currently, she serves as Director for Innovation and Digital Engagement at the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC where she studies and experiments with how visitors and staff use technology to experience risk-taking, community-making and science in their everyday lives.

Since a new round of Beck's awesome Experimonth project just launched, I thought now would be a great time for an ExhibiTricks interview!




What's your educational background?
I was formally trained as a journalist and visual communicator. I also minored in creative writing.  My boss, Troy Livingston, pretty much summed up my entire educational and career pursuits one day when he said to me, "You've spent your entire career working to better communicate through speaking, writing and drawing. You must've at some point in your life felt misunderstood."

Pretty much, yep. :)



What got you interested in Museums?
Two things: 1) Freedom; 2) Purpose.

When I joined the Museum of Life and Science, I'd been working at other web pursuits in the corporate, non-profit and higher ed worlds.  I wanted freedom to take risks and have autonomy over my projects more than anything else. The museum offered that, and also wanted someone to help change the culture of our institution so that we were more risk-tolerant overall.

The purpose of most museums — slowing down and noticing the world —  sealed the deal.  It's feel good work and never gets boring.



How does working with local and/or online communities to create museum experiences inform your creative process or vice versa?
Digital engagement requires innovation and novelty to be interesting enough to get folks to loan their attention your way.  To create innovative things, you need to create space.  My creative process has changed significantly in that it requires lots of open space in order for me to create new ideas. 

I make space in the morning for writing, in the evening by turning off my internet via a light timer. I make space for getting outside. I work from home instead of at the museum to get a daily dose of solitude. All of these practices give me space to think up, vet and refine new ideas that appeal to online communities (and/or adults goofing off at work).



Why did you originally start Experimonth?
I have a love/hate relationship with New Years Resolutions, and I started Experimonth in 2009 to play with the concept a little bit. I invited friends and family to suggest things I could do, and then vote on them. I mapped the top twelve across the span of the year and invited folks to try them out with me one month at a time. 

The idea didn't turn into a museum project until April of 2011, when we worked with a local researcher, Frances Ulman, to create an Experimonth that collected mood data (we texted participants five times a day for a month and asked the same question everytime: "Rate your mood (1) low to (10) high.")  The project resulted in over 18,000 mood data points for the researcher and impressively high retention (96%) and compliance (82%) rates.  In addition, we learned that the project allowed her to play with data in a way she wasn't afforded in her lab. 

We decided to do more of them at the museum and have hosted several since. The ones we're launching this February are a part of NSF grant in partnership with the Exploratorium called "Science of Sharing."



What are some of your favorite online (or offline!) resources for people interested in finding out more about community engagement?
I'd be remiss not to mention that one of the best sites out there for community engagement is from an IMLS grant project we did in partnership with the Science Museum of Minnesota and Michigan State University.  It's called the Facilitation Toolbox and has some great techniques and a framework for facilitating learning using social media.

In doing that work, we realized that sometimes you don't have to create community in order to have a successful group interaction that results in learning.  We call it "groupness." Groupness occurs when participants in a digital experience exhibit behaviors that indicate learning is happening.  Groupness is more attainable than "community" and in some ways may be just as or more meaningful.



What advice would you have for fellow museum professionals, especially those from smaller museums, in bringing more community input into their exhibitions and programs?

• Ask a lot of your participants. Think the best of them and expect them to be decent and open. Be that way, too. Participate alongside them.

• You don't need to be a content expert to explore expert-level content with an online community. You just need to be curious, ask questions and most of all listen.

• Turn everything into an experiment. Put time-boundaries around it. And give yourself a question to answer in the end.

• Let things die. Each year kill some of what you do online even if it's going well. You have to make space to create new things.



What do you think is the "next frontier" for museums?
The next frontier for museums (and libraries and journalism and healthcare and so on) is experiences for and by the visitor and community your mission situates you (locally or globally or somewhere in between, depending).  We have to let go of fetishizing our objects, stories, phenonmena, and information.  We've all got to be about changing the lives of individuals by understanding how the things we know best are relevant to their lives (and letting go of the things that aren't).    



What are some of your favorite museums or exhibitions?
I'm not much of a museum person and I hold onto that as tightly as possible to make my work better.  That said, I've had three remarkable experiences in museums, in this order:

• The Power of Children exhibit at the Indianapolis Children's Museum moved me and my friends to tears and has stuck with each of us for years.

• I think regularly of the movie I watched in the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore that showed clips of people losing their smiles in the seconds right after their photograph was taken.

• The big NASA telescope mirror at the Exploratorium that allows you to see yourself with uncanny clarity, upside down, face-to-face, blew my mind.



Can you talk a little about the current incarnation of Experimonth?
Right now, we're working with a handful of scientists from all around the world on four experimonths about cooperation, competition, negotiation and trust as a part of that NSF-funded "Science of Sharing" project I mentioned earlier.  The first of the four is called "Frenemy" and it starts on Saturday, Feburary 1st. 

Participants will play a prisoner's dilemma-style game with an anonymous stranger everyday.  We beta-tested this in 2012 and it was super interesting to watch how the games unfold across the day and also read what folks wrote about their participation in the online, also anonymous, confessional.  We'll be launching three other Experimonths after Frenemy. You can read about all of them on the website.




If money were no object, what would your dream museum project be?
I'd give anyone who wanted one, a heart rate monitor to wear for a month. I'd build technology that would autostream the data to a website where they could see their heart rate in the context of everyone else participating.  I'd also build in the ability to geo-locate where people's heart rate rises and falls.  And we'd ping folks with questions about their mood and whether or not they feel they belong. We'd assign them random tasks like doing good deeds or taking small risks.  We'd ping them when rates spiked to find out what was happening.  I'd also buy a big laser projector and project a visualization of the heart rates of the participants across the sky on a cloudy night or on the side of a tall building.

I wore a heart rate monitor for a few days in a row once and was surprised to learn that mine lowers when I'm in a stressful confrontation. I also discovered a crush I didn't know I had!  I think the participants would learn a lot about themselves and the researchers would have more data than they knew what to do with (a personal mission of mine currently).




Thanks again to Beck Tench for sharing her thoughts with ExhibiTricks readers!  You can find out more about Beck and her work via her website.  You can also find out more (and join!) experimonths at the Experimonth website.



Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

P.S. If you receive ExhibiTricks via email (or Facebook or LinkedIn) you will need to click HERE to go to the main ExhibiTricks page to make comments or view multimedia features (like videos!)

Technology's Kaleidoscope --- Reflecting on the HCI+ISE Conference

"You should always think about what you really want to accomplish first, before you start thinking about the technology you want to use."  This became a common refrain at the HCI+ISE (Human Computer Interaction in Informal Science Education) Conference that happened just last week in Albuquerque.

The why before the how, if you will.

However, "technology" is a slippery term, as is the implementation of technology in informal learning environments.  And everyone who uses (or creates) technology, especially digital technology, tends to view its uses through a very personal lens --- like a kaleidoscope that shifts and changes depending on who is using it.  I still see so much cringe-worthy digital technology deployed in exhibitions that I wonder if the WHY really does happen before the HOW in the most museums.

But rather than concentrate on the bad examples of tech implementation, I wanted to share some things that resonated with me in a positive way from the HCI+ISE Conference.  I'm honestly still mentally unpacking lots of meaty conversations and ideas to try to make better sense of it all.  But here, in no particular order, are projects, people, and ideas that stuck out for me:

Accessibility, and accessible technology, was a big part of the HCI+ISE conference.  Folks who are doing really interesting work in this regard include the Boston Museum of Science's "Creating Museum Media for Everyone" team.  Some interesting things that came out of these discussions included ideas about "sonification" --- the idea of supplementing, or augmenting, traditional visual approaches with additional sonic cues and layers.  (Check out the work of the Georgia Tech Sonification Lab.)

One of the Conference's participants and presenters was Sina Bahram.  He spoke about looking for ways to create standards for accessibility interfaces and the notion of creating graphic overlays where each layer could relate to different learning abilities and modalities.  (Imagine a sonic layer over a traditional iPad interface for people with visual impairments, for example.)  You should definitely check out Sina's website for more ideas in this regard.

We spent a bit of time at the Conference articulating differences between "digital" and "physical" exhibits and environments, including the social aspects of those differences.  I liked the discussions about:

• The differences between wall-based and table-based multitouch units and how visitors use them

• How do the types of devices used shape visitor expectations.  (Does every touchscreen now have to act like an iPad --- to be able to pinch or expand screens, or to sweep through images?)

•  Does NUI (Natural User Interface) only "work" if the objects don't "misbehave"?

Geeky, but good, stuff!  Which naturally led the Conference conversations and presentations into interlocking conversations about AR (Augmented Reality.)  There's a lot to say about this topic, but one of the HCI+ISE projects using AR that I really like is the NSF-funded ARIEL (Augmented Reality for Interpretive and Experiential Learning) Project out of the Franklin Institute in Philadephia.  One of the goals of ARIEL is to make "invisible" forces more visible (like the magnetic field exhibit pictured below.)

Also, I liked one of the ARIEL team member's quotes that exemplified their team's willingness to take risks:  "Everytime something worked, it was a happy accident."

Check out the ARIEL website --- there are lots of good resources there.


Seb Chan highlighted the cool things happening at the Science Gallery in Dublin, an edgy, program-heavy place programmed with temporary exhibits on current science that only allows visitors over the age of 16 to visit their space.  (They had me at Blood Wars, a program where blood is drawn from different visitors to have their white blood cells fight in a "death match" !)


Erika Kiessner was feeling a bit conflicted about "usability" but articulated three key aspects of good usability for visitors in exhibits, either with or without digital technology.

Good Usability:

• Is comfortable (physically appropriate)

• Does not make people feel dumb

• Puts people in control (with no obvious limits)


Dave Patten from the Science Museum of London, spoke about the many possible uses of digital technology in a large, object-based museum (and showed some cool experiments involving projection-based media) but I couldn't help but fall in love with a deliberately low-tech artist intervention called the Cockroach Tour!


Some other things that are still bubbling up in my mind from the HCI+ISE Conference include:

• The role of digital technology in "Citizen Science" projects.
( iNaturalist.org is a good website to check out in this regard.)

• Funky Forest --- an interactive/tech ecosystem where children create trees with their bodies and then divert the water flowing from the waterfall to the trees to keep them alive. The health of the trees contributes to the overall health of the forest and the types of creatures that inhabit it.  Check out the video!

• The book Consumer.ology about the "myth" of Market Research sounds fab!

I guess the mark of a great conference (and interesting conference participants!) is that I'm still thinking and sorting ideas that I encountered in Albuquerque.  I may revisit some of them here on ExhibiTricks in the future, but for now I'll leave you with a quote from one of those interesting participants, Beck Tench:

"At home I want to use tech to make time, not waste it."



Don't miss out on any ExhibiTricks posts! It's easy to get updates via email or your favorite news reader. Just click the "Sign up for Free ExhibiTricks Blog Updates" link on the upper right side of the blog.

P.S. If you receive ExhibiTricks via email (or Facebook or LinkedIn) you will need to click HERE to go to the main ExhibiTricks page to make comments or view multimedia features (like videos!)