Interactive Learning in Museums of Art and Design

1718 May 2002

Museums and Their Languages: Is Interactivity Different for Fine Art as Opposed to
Design?

James M. Bradburne, Director, Museum fr Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt am Main

Introduction
I have been invited to speak about whether interactivity is different for fine art as
opposed to design a topic that is already addressed in part by many of the other
speakers at the conference. It is assumed that there is a difference, and that this
difference derives in large measure from the nature of the material a museum is called
on to interpret.

Some content is seen to be more adapted to an interactive approach than others. I

remember vividly the reactions from museum colleagues to our work at
newMetropolis, Amsterdams science centre, when confronted with the statistics that
showed the average visit to the science centre lasted almost four hours. Thats easy
for you, they would say, you dont have objects to interpret. This reaction is what
spurred me to accept the position I currently hold as Director of Frankfurts Museum
of Applied Art: I wanted to prove that engagement with content is not a question of the
nature of the content but with how we interpret it in the museum setting. But this is to
jump too far ahead in the story. First of all, it is commonly assumed that it is the
exhibit that is interactive. We speak of interactive exhibits, interactive experiences
and even of interactives as things that can be designed by specialists, that can be
tested and whose outcomes can be measured. In all these cases it is the object that is
assumed to be interactive: something that can be touched, felt or manipulated is
claimed to be more interactive than something that cannot.

Interactivity is normally used to mean physical interaction with an object or exhibit a

hands-on experience. Most people, when they think of interactive exhibits at all,
think of the experience of the Bernouilli blower, with the ball bouncing gaily on a jet
of air, or making soap bubbles or making bridges out of blocks all commonly found
exhibits in todays science centres. Limiting the notion of interaction to merely
physical manipulation has been challenged for years, although most proponents still
consider hands-on manipulation indispensable. Richard Gregory, founder of Britains
first hands-on science centre, the Bristol Exploratory, speaks of minds-on exhibits
and uses illusions to show the workings of the human mind. Jorge Wagensberg,
Director of the Museu de la Ciencia in Barcelona, speaks of hearts-on exhibits,
which he uses to describe exhibits with a large affective dimension. In all three cases
interaction seems to indicate a particularly tangible engagement with the exhibit. Even
so, the notion of interaction itself whether hands-on, minds-on or hearts-on does
not give any real indication of the quality of the experience. Interaction is too vague a
term. It cannot be used precisely enough to be helpful.

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Physical interaction is not a prerequisite for interaction; nor, as Josie Appleton claims,
is the visitor obliged publicly to interact. For instance, in my office is a display case
specially designed for the Richard Meier monument of which I am steward. In the case
is a selection of beautiful glasses, from a sixteenth-century Venetian masterpiece to a
set of Boris Sipek glasses. I often use the case to test new text panels; after all, we are
not an interactive science centre! I have one text panel with the title Glasses through
the Century. It is amusing, informative and written in a popular style. Visitors to my
office often stop to read it and chuckle at the humour. I also have another text panel,
with another title. This title reads One of these Glasses is a Fake. The difference in
behaviour is striking: often visitors stand for ages closely inspecting the glasses. Nor is
the question trivial: after all, what is a fake glass anyway? The exhibit, through words
alone, confers the property of interactivity on the user, with significant gains in the
amount of time the visitors engage with the objects, even behind the daunting glass of
the showcase. Surely this too is interaction?

It is, however, no co-incidence that interactive exhibits and the corresponding

educational theories that place interactivity at their core stemmed from the science
centre movement. Bereft of objects, science centres had as their challenge to render
phenomena visible, which almost by definition involved inviting the visitor to
participate in the process of creating rainbows, making waves and mixing colours.
Moreover, the cultural discourse that would have us believe that the experience of art
is unmediated is conspicuously absent in the world of science and technology; no one
pretends that a steam engine explains itself or that a chemical reaction can be
appreciated without some small understanding of what is going on. The applied arts
find themselves as always in the middle but, as the new British Galleries amply
demonstrate, this makes it easier for them to exploit the tactile properties of much of
their content to create a wide variety of interactive experiences.

It is widely believed that science centres and, with the example of the V&A,
increasingly applied art museums are themselves more interactive than their fine arts
counterparts. On the one hand, a visit to the science centre would seem to confirm this
belief. Children run, shout, babble and bellow with abandon, and the scene at
Launchpad (in Londons Science Museum) or its many cousins is one of unbridled
activity. The visitors pull this, push that, peer down microscopes and shout down
tubes. On the other hand, in the traditional fine arts museum one is struck by the
listless lack of engagement with the works of art. At best a visitor will remain a few
minutes in front of a piece of art, and then only in the museums that still have few
enough visitors to preserve the calm and quiet needed for thoughtful reflection. At
worst, a visitor is caught in the Vermeer shuffle that characterizes the blockbuster
exhibition, squeezed relentlessly past a selection of masterpieces in a peristaltic
procession towards the inevitable shop at the exit.

But is all as it seems? A closer look at the science centre gives quite another
impression. On closer inspection the much-vaunted interactivity often masks
experiences that in fact close down the visitors ability to explore and limit the ways in
which they can direct their own discovery. For decades now it has been clear to many
science centre professionals that all was not well in the world of hands-on. In a study
conducted at Canadas largest science centre in 1987 Drew Ann Wake and her
colleagues recorded the following startling findings: visitors tended to use hands-on
exhibits for an average of under two minutes, and rarely completed them. On the basis

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of these statistics the art museum comes out quite well! Curiously, the same visitors
were often prepared to spend over ten times as long with simple wooden puzzles.
Moreover, while working on puzzles, visitors tended to talk with each other, share
experiences and strategies and use the opportunity for exchanging information. As
informal educators, we were reluctant to throw away all our claims to being an
educational environment, but it seemed to us that if a visitor spent no longer than 40
seconds with an exhibit, it was unlikely that any serious learning had occurred. On the
other hand, while we could not say with conviction that learning had occurred if the
visitor spent 20 minutes, it certainly seemed more probable. Apparently not all
interactive exhibits are created equal. We therefore started to look at exhibits in a
different light, and posed different kinds of questions.

Interactivity as a property of users, not exhibits

What if we started to look at interactivity as a property of the visitor, and not of the
exhibit? What if we looked at the exhibit as a tool that if properly conceived, conferred
the property of interactivity on its user? What would this interactivity look like?

The trouble with the word interaction is that it can refer to an extremely wide variety
of visitor activities, some trivial, some satisfying. These can range from pushing a
button to set an exhibit in motion without waiting to see it begin, to spending 20
minutes spent trying to fit three wooden blocks together into a pattern. This variety of
behaviour seems to be unrelated to the type of museum: intense concentration can be
seen in a fine art museum as readily as at an interactive science centre. It also seems to
be largely independent of the technique employed: many hands-on exhibits hold
visitors for less than a minute, while a provocative text can keep them engaged for 20
minutes or longer. What does seem to matter, however, is the way in which the
interaction is structured by the museum. What is missing is a way to talk about the
various ways that we as museum professionals invite our visitors to interact in the
museum setting, and to describe the kinds of interaction we want to elicit. Many
attempts have certainly been made. In a conference at Tate Britain on 16 April 2002
about evaluating informal learning (organized by the Visitor Studies Group and the
Group for Education in Museums) Eilean Hooper-Greenhill listed the following
outcomes as being important indicators of engagement: persistence, asking questions,
creativity, asking anothers support, making ones own definitions and show and tell
all highly desirable.

Some years ago, in an attempt to answer these questions for ourselves, the design team
at newMetropolis established several criteria by which we could assess whether we
had improved the informal learning environment. In this we followed the work of the
American psychologist of creativity Mihly Czikszentmihlyi, who described in 1990
what he called the flow experience, which he argued characterizes most intrinsically
rewarding human activities, from sport to music to art appreciation. Activities that
manifest flow are self-initiated, self-sustaining and often self-structuring.
Czikszentmihlyi defines flow as:

a subjective state that people report when they are completely involved in
something to the point of losing track of time and of being unaware of fatigue and
of everything else but the activity itself [italics in original]. The experience should
ensure that the opportunities for action are more or less matched by the visitors
ability to act at any given time. In order for this experience to be self-sustaining, it

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 must also create the possibility for increasing complexity, to differentiate new
challenges in the environment, to integrate new abilities into our repertoire of
skills.

In order to continue the flow experience, the visitor should want to return, to try the
exhibit again, to do it better a second, third or fourth time.

Following this line of reasoning, the question is: how could we create informal
learning environments that became self-structuring and self-sustaining? How could we
support the conditions for the flow experience? How could we shift the focus away
from the exhibit as end-in-itself towards the exhibit as a support for human activity:
discussion, dialogue, debate? How could we develop exhibits that registered the
activity of the user, and made it available to other users? Finally, how could we
develop exhibits that genuinely changed as a consequence of the users activity and
intentions?

Another way of looking at the challenge is to examine the tension between variety and
coherence. This tension can be described in several ways. Fundamentally it is a
tension born of the desire to support the greatest number of coherent experiences for
the greatest variety of users. However, traditionally coherence has been purchased at
the price of a loss of variety: the scientists taxonomy, the curators schema, the
designers storyline all militate against the users freedom to shape the experience of
the museum according to his/her own needs. Conversely, an increase in variety often
comes with a corresponding loss of coherence the user is left to his/her own devices
to create an infinite variety of confusing and incoherent experiences. When we hear
the science centre is under attack and watch its attendance drop sharply, we can see the
consequence of delivering neither the variety nor the coherence demanded by the late
twentieth-century user. Given the proliferation of media that seem to promise both in
abundance, the institution must take a critical look at the opportunities it offers.

At the level of the exhibit the tension can be seen by taking two examples. One has the
visitor construct a catenary arch out of carefully shaped blocks that illustrate the
principle perfectly but in only one way. The other is an open-ended play area where
the visitor can use a variety of blocks to make a variety of bridges that all stand but
why? Neither exhibit is sufficient to create the conditions for the self-structuring, self-
sustaining activity that characterizes what Czikszentmihlyi calls flow or what would
characterize user-driven learning. Neither exhibit fully supports its user. What kind of
activity would we look for in an effective support to informal learning, a support that
maximized both variety and coherence at the same time? Two familiar examples allow
us to describe such supports: language and games. Both are self-sustaining and self-
organizing, and tend towards maximum variety at the same time as maximum
coherence. Both constrain the user but at the same time unlock an infinite variety of
structured activity. Both rely on the users ability to decode patterns of intention
latent in the structuring of the environment, and use that information to structure new
activity. Both can be used as models for the design of successful exhibits.

If simultaneously maximizing variety and coherence is seen as important, the question

is: how can we create learning environments that show some of the positive
characteristics of language, or of games? How can we create and support experiences
that are self-organizing and self-sustaining?

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In her book Reading Frames in Modern Fiction the literary critic Mary Ann Caws
examines the fact that, post-structuralism notwithstanding, many readers remember the
same passage in a book. This suggests that, despite the putative death of the author and
the uncontested constructive agency of the reader, authors do something with text to
create framing devices independent of the individual reader. What if we looked more
closely at our work as museum professionals to discover the ways in which we confer
properties on our visitors by means of our interpretation? What follows is an attempt
to look more precisely at how we create framing devices interpretive tools that
confer the property of interactivity on our visitors.

Shaping interaction with user-languages

In order to develop a more precise way in which to discuss these questions, I would
provisionally suggest that we put aside the word interaction for a moment. Instead I
suggest we ask ourselves what kind of activity or if you wish, what kind of
interactivity we want to observe in the museum. The first is sustained engagement
with the emphasis on the word sustained whereby the user engages in the self-
initiated, self-directed, self-sustaining activity described by Csikszentmihlyi as
flow. The second is variety, by which I mean that the visitor him/herself generates
new ideas and new directions. We define variety as the degree to which the visitor is
directly shaping the course of his/her own experience. With these two criteria in mind
we are in a position to define more clearly what we want to see in the museum setting
a self-directed visitor engaged and in control of meaning-making in the museum.
The ideal we are looking for is self-sustaining, but it is more than a hamster on a
treadmill; it is self-absorbed concentration in which the user helps control the activity.
Coincidentally perhaps, this is the behaviour that characterizes puzzle-solving,
working in an interactive laboratory, playing an enjoyable game or reading a murder
mystery. Self-initiated, self-directed, self-sustaining engagement is a hallmark of
experiences whereby we learn, in Jonathan Millers words, that the life of the mind is
a pleasure.

In order to speak of differences of quality in engagement, however, I need to introduce

a new term, borrowed from systems research: that of the user-language. As defined
by Dutch theorist Gerard De Zeeuw, a user-language is the collection of constraints
that helps shape the variation generated by an actor into patterned behaviour. The
exhibits user-language is defined by the constraints it places on the visitors
interaction the exhibit implements the user-language by imposing constraints on
the visitors experience.

From the moment a visitor arrives, the museum (its designers, its educators, its staff) is
constantly placing constraints on his/her experience. Contrary to some opinions, there
are relatively few unconstructed and unmediated moments in a museum setting; the
museum wittingly or unwittingly shapes virtually every aspect of the visit. It does this
by presenting some things and not others, in a particular order and not another in
short, by constraining the visitor. These constraints could take the form of directional
text, they could be the choice of colours, or they could involve the deliberate
placement of objects in a room. For instance, we may decide to put a Picasso painting
beside an African mask. By doing so we have deliberately made meaning, and are
inviting the visitor to explore that meaning. This interpretation is a large part of what
we do as museum professionals. We often think that what we are communicating is

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purely content. We write texts and we tell ourselves it is only about content and that
all that matters is using the active voice, writing short sentences, avoiding difficult
words in order to communicate the content clearly. But the meaning we want the user
to construct is not just about the relationship between Picasso and his sources; it is also
about the relationship between the museum and the visitor/user. Who is in control?
Who makes the meaning? Who gets to say which features were important to Picasso
and which werent? I would argue it is very important to see that no label is just a
label, no juxtaposition of objects just two objects together. Everything we do in the
museum is intended to create meaning for the unknown, and by definition
unknowable, user and proposes a specific role for the visitor in his/her own
exploration of the museum environment his/her own meaning-making. In this
respect it is not only what we say that matters but also, more importantly, the
invitation we make to the user to enter into a certain relationship with the museum.
The means through which we structure a specific relationship to the visitor by means
of our exhibits is the user-language.

The exhibits user-language describes what counts: what can be included and what is
made invisible. The user-language constrains interaction with the exhibit, and in so
doing confers specific properties on the user. In the museum the most significant user-
languages are textual authority, observation, variables, problems and games,
in so far as these user-languages impose constraints that confer certain desirable
properties in the museum setting. The notion of a user-language allows us to describe
and analyse the museum label in terms of both its content and its intent. For instance, a
text about a given subject written in the first person could use any of a number of
different user-languages; it could cite canonical texts, recount observations, weigh
different possibilities, propose a murder mystery or suggest a game.

What do I mean when I say that a user-language can confer a property? A loaded gun,
lying on a table in an empty room, has certain properties in terms of which it can be
described: its weight, size, calibre etc. If this loaded gun is given to a person in a
crowded railway station, the gun confers the property of being dangerous. A new
entity is created a person with a loaded gun.

Neither the person with the gun nor the gun itself remains the same. The person has
become dangerous, certainly, but the gun too has a new property: its trigger can now
be pulled. The properties conferred, both on the gun and on the person, are largely
independent of the individual character of either. The person need not be a psychotic
to be dangerous. The gun need not be a particular calibre in order to be fired.
Moreover, these properties are only conferred in a specific kind of setting. If the gun is
handed to a person at the bottom of a swimming-pool, the property of being dangerous
is presumably not conferred nor even, perhaps, the property of being able to be fired.

What is true in the example above is true of all support systems, which is what gives
the notion its strength. Support systems convey properties independent of the specific
particularities of the user. All the user has to do is to choose to use the support. The
person could refuse to accept the gun, of course, just as a user can refuse to accept a
support.

As in the example of the gun, interpretation can be studied by looking at the user-
languages it employs, the properties these languages confer on the user, and the

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properties the user confers on the means of interpretation. It should be possible
consistently to develop exhibits that confer desired properties on the user, and for
these properties to be largely the consequence of the choice of user-language of the
exhibit, in so far as particular user-languages are more effective at conferring certain
properties.

For the our purposes user-languages can be ordered in terms of the ways in which they
support variety generated by users from the user-language of authority at one end
of the scale to the user-language of infinite games at the other. In the user-language
of authority, effectively the interpretation has only one dimension: that of the voice of
somebody else as an authority. In the user-language of observation the user is
addressed as an observer and hence given the property of being his/her own authority.
The user-language of variables, an extension of the user-language of observation,
marks the emergence of the modern museum, as it confers the ability to see not only
the visible but also the invisible relationships between things. The user-language of
problems confers on the user the power to act, while the user-language of games
makes this agency an indispensable condition of the experience, and confers the
additional property of other players: with only one player there is no game.

Lets take some examples to illustrate different user-languages in action. Most

conventional museum texts are written in the third person dispassionate, the voice of
authority, the voice of God or, if not God, perhaps a Nobel Prize winner or a
distinguished scientist. For example, a text written by (anonymous) curators at the
Museum of Natural History, Washington:

Maintaining high body temperature is very expensive. In fact, dinosaurs could

enjoy the advantages of high and constant body temperature on the cheap.
Because of their enormous bulk dinosaurs retained the heat generated by normal,
everyday activity, such as walking. They did not have to add to it by processes that
required additional food, as birds and mammals do. Perhaps this is why so few
kinds of dinosaurs were small.
So when I read this text, it is not just about palaeontology the manifest content of the
text. It is about the palaeontologist as well the authority of the text writer. More
importantly, it is about the readers relationship to this authority. The implicit message
of the text seems to be, I know more than you do. At the very best it suggests that the
visitor is to be a listener, the museum a storyteller. The text not only gives
information; it proposes a relationship between the text writer and the text reader.
Such texts propose a relationship based on authority: the currency of the text is the
authority of the writer. Most museums rely heavily on their curatorial staff to write
their texts and on what we can call the user-language of authority to communicate
their messages. Authority is not the only user-language, although it is perhaps the most
common one found in museums of all kinds.

Some museums, particularly science museums, use the user-language that in fact
characterizes science itself the user-language of observations. Look at this. What do
you see, what does it tell us? In the user-language of observation the currency is
shared observations: things are true if observations can be reproduced and shared. A
science centre exhibit label may say to the visitor, Do this, turn a handle and
something will happen. What happens if you turn the handle faster, or slower? For

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example, a text accompanying the tornado exhibit in the Palais de la Dcouverte in
Paris in 1993 read:

Look at the tornado. Three coils heat the water in the basin, and the steam is thus
put into motion with the help of a fan at the top of the cylinder. The vapour
condenses into fine droplets of water to give a thick mist. If you press on the
button, the fan stops. What do you notice?

The exhibit has made a certain observation available for sharing and confirmation.
This user-language actually offers the visitor a role to play albeit a minor one.
Science centres also often make use of the user-language of variables, a mainstay of
science itself, which is really a way of grouping several different observations.

However, in all of these three commonly used user-languages the user-language of

textual authority, the user-language of observation and the user-language of variables
we instruct the visitor and we decide which role he/she has to play. The visitor might
well say, Look I saw that and endorse the observation. However, it is an
endorsement of the observation we wanted him/her to make. We expect our visitors to
see what we have put there for them to see.

With the user-language of problems, the user is in the drivers seat and the user, not
the institution, sets the agenda; the role of the museum is to support him/her. In the
user-language of problems the activity is structured according to a constellation of
solvable challenges. Take, for example, a text by Drew Ann Wake for the exhibition
Beyond the Naked Eye (1991) in Calgary, Alberta, Canada:

#3 Be a Brain Surgeon!

Youve always thought youd make a great brain surgeon. Cool hand. Quick mind.
Patience of a saint. Well, now is your chance to try your hand at it.

If doctors suspect a tumour within the brain, they will use CT scans to help find out
where it is located and how big it is. But, they will also want to make as few scans
as possible.

Take an apple (or a potato) out of the jar and put it on the cutting board. Imagine it
is a brain. Your challenge is to find a tumour hidden inside.

Or in the event that you think that only science centres are in the position to use the
user-language of problems, take the following example by Joaneath Spicer, from the
Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore (1992):

A Renaissance Puzzle: Heemskercks Abduction of Helen

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 Panoramic Fantasy with the Abduction of Helen, painted in Rome in 1535 by the
Dutch artist Maerten van Heemskerck, is one of the most famous northern
landscapes of the 16th century. Its fascination rests not only on the visual appeal of
its haunting luminosity, but also on the intriguing insights it offers into the
Renaissance mind: to begin with, the search by Heemskerck and his
contemporaries for a new pictorial language derived from antiquity. []
Heemskerck, with his Netherlandish love of appealing detail, has created an
amazing picture-puzzle, offering an intriguing and humorous challenge to the
educated 16th-century viewer who could locate and identify the pieces. We hope
that in this exhibition you experience again the delight in this challenge. Many
clues will be offered, including surprising ones as to Heemskercks intentions
found even in his choice of materials.

But it is for you to put the pieces together!

The next level of text is more specific, and supports the visitor to think like an art
historian:

Theories as to what the painting really means

I
A discourse on the transience of life, taking its cue from the eventual decay of
Helens beauty and examples of once-great civilizations. This moral consciousness
is found in Heemskercks later engravings in the Netherlands, but such moralizing
is uncommon in Rome.

II
A romantic, light-hearted celebration of the excitement of sexual love that takes its
cue from Paris and Helens mutual infatuation and his abduction of her (more an
elopement). This is amusingly amplified by the aroused pigs and the statue of
Priapus, Roman god of sensuality and regeneration. Italian society was not
bothered by moral ambiguities, and the subject is found on many contemporary
marriage chests, where allusions to the sexual pleasures of marriage are traditional.
The cityscape is then a pretext for a splendid array of marvels as evidence of the
greatness of the ancient world a romantic setting on an epic scale.

If a celebration of love and if a commission, the marriage would be a celebration of

a specific marriage or engagement, probably signaled by the arms on the Trojan
galley shields. Only the first three from the right are now clearly legible: France,
Holy Roman Empire (Habsburgs), the Farnese, (a blank), Austria and Savoy
(illegible). Among these families there are many ties of allegiance and possible
weddings, one being that of Alexander de Medici, Duke of Florence, and Margaret
of Austria, daughter of the Emperor and god-daughter of Margaret of Savoy, in
1536 (Paris was called Alexander by some writers).

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 See which solution you prefer!

In terms of engagement, the most interesting and the most challenging user-
language is the user-language of games. A true game structures play and provides
goals and closure rules. Most importantly, a game provides a measure of improvement
and is open to infinite variation by the players, who participate voluntarily. In most
games, such as football, hockey, tennis or cricket referred to by Carse as finite
games there must be a way to win. In other games, far fewer in number but not as
rare as you would imagine such as tag the goal is not to win but to sustain play.
These games are referred to by Carse as infinite games. In a finite game the rules
must stay fixed by convention and are inviolable by the players in order that closure is
achieved. In an infinite game the rules must be plastic in order that the players can
sustain play as long as they desire.

Consider the following example taken from newMetropolis (1997):

Welcome to a special factory a BALL factory.

This factory sorts and codes SIX different balls.

Both the YELLOW balls and the BLUE balls come in two sizes.
The small RED balls come in two weights.
Your assignment is posted on the computer screens.
Sort orders of SIX BALLS by weight and by size
then send them away to be coded!

How fast can you make up the right order?

In the case of this user-language science centres have a certain advantage over other
museum types, although it is not impossible to imagine games being developed
effectively in an applied art, or even a fine art museum.

Conclusion
To conclude, the user-language of textual authority always constrains the amount of
variety a visitor can generate. The constraints of the user-language of textual
authority privilege the authority cited, and make acceptance of the authority of the
authority a take it or leave it affair. The user-language of observation, which
exploded like a bomb under the foundations of centuries of intellectual discourse
based on the exfoliation of texts, grants an important role to the observer but is obliged
to constrain both the observations and the conditions of observing. The user-language
of variables, which is in effect a prolongation of the user-language of observation,
confers the property of control on the visitor. The visitor can experiment, test, compare
and classify observations. Nevertheless, both the observing and the conditions of
observation remain constrained.

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The user-language of problems supports the visitors attempts to define, analyse and
solve, and to compare the merits of different formulations. The solution to one
problem may in fact lie in redefining it. Here the property of agency is conferred on
the visitor, and acceptance is encouraged by identifying problems related to and
derived from human experience. Finally, the user-language of games creates the
conditions for enormous variety, by conferring the property of other players, with
other, competing interests. Some games come to an end at an agreed point (the
expiration of time, the reaching of a certain score, the accomplishment of an action);
others (what Carse calls infinite games) end only when the players decide to stop. The
goal of an infinite game is to keep playing. Infinite games remain open to new rules
and new information to achieve this end. It is important to note that only the latter two
user-languages that is, those of problems and games confer the property of
agency on the user. That is to say, they allow users to structure their experience in
terms of time rather than in terms of some kind of infinite timelessness as, for
example, happens in the case of the language of textual authority.

This last conclusion has striking consequences for the future of the museum. User-
languages that do not confer the property of agency are, in a sense, exhausted by
their use. They support the user while they are being used, but the properties they
confer disappear when the user stops. However, if the goals of a museum can be said
to support repeat use and, perhaps more ambitiously, to support the acquisition of new
skills, the museum can no longer rely on user-languages that do not confer the
property of agency. It cannot rely on user-languages that are limited to conferring
certain properties to the user only while she is using the support: in order to foster
acquiring new competence, the properties conferred must be sustained over time. This
possibility of support over time is only possible with user-languages that confer the
properties of agency and also other players the user-languages of problems and
games, and presumably languages that still have to be designed.

To return finally to the question posed at the outset: is interaction different in

museums of fine art from what it is in museums of applied art or design? I would have
to answer, no. The nature of the engagement in any informal setting is potentially the
same, subject to the way in which the museum chooses the user-languages it employs,
and the degree to which the museum reduces the barriers that prevent the user from
engaging with the material. Where museums do differ, however, is in their deliberate
use or avoidance of specific user-languages. Science centres were among the first
to be forced to explore the user-languages of observation and variables, as both are
proper to the natural sciences. Given their history, they were also among the first to
explore the user-languages of problems and games. This is not to say, however, that
fine art museums cannot make equally good use of these user-languages. Joaneath
Spicer at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore turned her entire museum into a
resource to solve an art-historical puzzle, and the new British Galleries at the V&A are
rich in exhibits that employ the user-languages of puzzles and even games.

What is important, I believe, is not the nature of the museums content but the degree
to which we make explicit use of particular user-languages in order to engage our
visitors in the pleasure that comes from actively exploring and constructing the world
in which we live in all its variety.

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Bibliography
Bradburne, J. (1998): La Problematique dune Cration: newMetropolis, in Vers les
Muses du XXIe Sicle: La Rvolution de la Musologie des Sciences (Lyon:
Presses Universitaires de Lyon)
Bradburne, J. (2000): Interaction in the Museum (Hamburg: Libri)
Carse, J. (1986) Games and Infinite Games (New York: Ballantyne)
Czikszentmihlyi, M. (1990): Flow (New York: Harpers)
de Zeeuw, G. and Robinson, M. (1988): Support, Survival, and Culture (Amsterdam:
UVA/OOC)
Gregory, R.L. (1988): First-hand Science: The Exploratory in Bristol, Science and
Public Affairs, vol. 3, pp. 1324
Gregory, R. L. (1989): How Hands-on Exploration May Turn Minds on to Science,
unpublished paper (Bristol)
Monmaney, T. (1993): The Dinosaur Heretic, The New Yorker, May 1993
Schiele, B. (1997): Nouvelles Perspectives Amricaines, Europennes et
Australiennes (Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon), pp. 3977
Wake, D.A. and Mitchell, J. (1987): An Informal Study of Visitor Behaviour at Two
Exhibits, unpublished research paper, Toronto: Ontario Science Centre

Dr. James M. Bradburne AA Dipl MCSD

James Bradburne is a British-Canadian architect, designer and museum specialist who
has designed World's Fair pavilions, science centres, and international art exhibitions.
Educated in Canada and England, he developed numerous exhibitions, research
projects and symposia for UNESCO, national governments, private foundations, and
museums world-wide during the course of the past fifteen years. He currently sits on
several international advisory committees and museum boards, and recently curated
and designed exhibitions including Rudolph II (Prague 1997) and Blood: perspectives
on art, power, politics and pathology (mak.frankfurt/Schirn Kunsthalle). He lectures
internationally about new approaches to informal learning, and has published
extensively. In 1994 he was invited to join newMetropolis Science and Technology
Center in Amsterdam as Head of Design, Research and Development, and was
responsible for the planning of new exhibits, exhibitions, programmes, and products
for newMetropolis. As of January 1st, 1999, he has been Director of the Museum fr
Angewandte Kunst in Frankfurt am Main (mak.frankfurt).

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