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New trends in interpretation and the visitor experience - ‘Making it personal, making it real’
The second of four blogs from TiLEzone London 2013
A Different View attended the 8th TiLEzone conference at London Transport Museum in March. With an impressive list of guest speakers the conference focused on lessons learnt from the London Olympics, the importance of personalising visitor experiences and emerging opportunities in the Far East. In a series of blogs we share with you some of our insights from our visit to TiLEzone.Continuum’s Julian Delaney observed how the visitor experience has evolved from gazing at exhibits in glass cases, to getting hands-on, to interpreting exhibits and stories using new technology. The latest trend is about making experiences personal and so more ‘real’.
Everyone these days has access to very high tech experiences at home, thanks to their I-Pads, Wii gaming machines and much else. The companies behind these products have invested hugely in the technology and, as part of a visitor experience, it is simply not possible to compete with and outdo the technology that people now accept as the norm in their everyday lives.
Instead, Peter Karn of MET Studios argues, we need to look to the visitor’s imagination as the key to the next level of interactive experience, what he called ‘living interactives’. People need to be placed at the heart of the interactive experience and if technology is used then it must be with a personal approach. For example every visitor to Fusion World in Singapore has their faced scanned on entry to the gallery then personalising their subsequent experience of the exhibit.
As a low-tech example of personalisation, visitors to the Warhorse exhibition at The National Army Museum are invited to ‘customise’ with their own decoration one of the thousands of paper cut-out horses. The result is a memorial exhibit which dramatically illustrates the scale of loss in the First World War but at the same time personalising it by the involvement of the gallery visitors.
When asked to refurbish a theatre in Greece, Blair Parkin of Visual Acuity found that the building’s fly tower was simply not big enough to allow full sets to be flown in to the stage. His solution was to project digital images on to the backdrop in place of traditional scenery - reducing costs, speeding up production and turn-round times, and also allowing for infinite variety and customisation. It was a technique they went on to introduce in the vast and historic Radio City Music Hall in New York where ‘digital scenery’ turned all the internal surfaces into a giant projection screen, appealing to the ‘I-Phone generation’ but without contravening strict heritage controls.
Technology in itself is not the key to successful interpretation. These examples instead suggest that interpretation – whether high or low tech - must be designed with the individual visitor as the focus, enabling him or her to gain an intensely personal and therefore more rewarding visitor experience.
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