Project

The app asks visitors what they think and feel about an artwork whilst looking at the same artwork in the gallery. A collaborative effort across an interdisciplinary team of 5 researchers, graduate students, developers and curators.

Concept

Freeing Ourselves From Content and Towards Musing and Looking

Float was an experiment in thinking outside of content. Our team asked ourselves “What is already occurring among visitors within the galleries? And how do we use technology to bring that process to the forefront?”

We looked at the fundamentals of a gallery experience to draw our answers and very broadly decided, that in its simplest definition, visitors look at art and muse about it. So, then, how can we enhance or amplify the act of looking? And how do we make musing visual and tangible?

We looked to a program that Heather Gaunt saw come out of the Harvard Art Museum, developed by a museum educator by the name of Ray Williams called the ‘Personal Response Tour’ as inspiration.

This program uses sets of open-ended questions in combination with an educator-led facilitation to engage visitors on a personal level with art environments and artworks.

This method, according to Ray Williams, “honors the memories, associations, and emotions that visitors bring to their encounters with works of art”.

Our challenge was translating his work into a digital environment that facilitated visual observation and honored contemplation in the same breath without the skilled aid of a person. And, on top of that, encourage movement throughout the whole space.

Structuring questions in just the right way would be key to leading visitors to engage with the process and find themselves in introspection; and by somehow showing other people’s perspectives and how they arrived to them, it would add layers of additional introspection as it did in educator-led group discussions.

Process

Content Strategy

Given the limited resources the Ian Potter Art Museum had, they required passive content management in the long-run. With the current structure of their team, they could not spend a lot of time researching, editing, approving  and publishing content for every exhibition. As the concept for Float evolved, it was focused on user-generated content and user-centered interaction as opposed to museum-generated content to be mindful of the organization’s bandwidth.

Indoor Location Navigation

The Ian Potter Museum of Art required that no additional infrastructure be used. As a result, our team of computer science researchers and developers concentrated on non-infrastructure indoor tracking through WiFi fingerprinting. This technology tracks where you were within the museum through existing WiFi access points. Current WiFi RSSI fingerprinting techniques and algorithms (WASP, Redpin (kNN), SSD, SVM, Gaussian Naive Bayes and Random Forests) were tested.  Their experiments found that Large Random Forests (200 trees) yielded the best performance, which was further improved by calibrating for average differences in RSSI between phone models, to achieve an average of 90% correct classification of exhibits within the top five hits.

The results of our work were presented at the 2014 International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation.

Team

I was invited to share the communication, design and research approach to Float at Museum Next, Europe’s largest museum technology conference. The slides for the presentation are here and the full text is over here.

Finkel, A, Harwood, A, Gaunt H & Antig J 2014, ‘Optimizing Indoor Location Recognition Through Wireless Fingerprinting At the Ian Potter Museum of Art’. Proceedings of the Fifth International Conference on Indoor Positioning and Indoor Navigation, Busan, Korea. Available from: IEEE Xplore.

Sykes, E 2014, Experiencing Art Through Personal Response: Is a personal response mobile application effective in facilitating a meaningful experience for art gallery visitors?Master of Art dissertation, The University of Leeds.

Finkel, A 2013, Optimizing Indoor Location Recognition through Wireless Fingerprinting at the Ian Potter Museum of Art. Master of Computer Science thesis, The University of Melbourne.