Meyouandus: interactive in-venue displays. Research and development report
Eilbeck, Alistair and Stewart, Hannah and Jacobs, Naomi and Quick, Andrew and Salinas, Lara and Porter, Joel and Harvey, Gareth (2015) Meyouandus: interactive in-venue displays. Research and development report. Project Report. University of the Arts London.
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‘Can the public spaces in an arts venue engage visitors directly and personally?
‘Will this increase the dialogue, visibility and relationship of the organisation and its public, to inform and affect the behaviour of all parties?
‘Will providing a flexible digital platform facilitate arts organisations to explore their own digital strategies?’
These are the proposition/research questions submitted to the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts in December 2012 and resulted in a project, TILO, installed in two venues starting in July 2013 and ending in December 2014.
The central concept of the project was that an arts venue is more than the sum of its parts. We wanted a system that displayed content on public screens and that blurred the lines between the marketing and curatorial teams. We wanted our screens to show information about upcoming events one minute, and the next an interactive piece of media art – to play a short video showcasing an organisation’s community outreach project, followed by a rich visualisation based on live data. We wanted the screens to represent all the activities and inhabitants of a building in creative and interesting ways.
This was an artistic concept but our research partners came back and told us it had commercial value: if people found the screens interesting and engaging they would give them more attention generally. This means that people would look at the more basic promotional information in anticipation that something more engaging would appear. We also discovered that people trust the cultural sector and that 37% of visitors questioned would be happy to share access to their social networks and even GPS (location) data with an arts venue. They also expressed an implicit expectation that cultural venues would use digital technologies in interesting and thought-provoking ways.
From an arts, technology and audience perspective this was great news. Nevertheless, our small sense of missed opportunity comes from our experience that organisations can be slow to take full advantage of digital tools. Staff and budgets are already stretched and it can be difficult to get them to embrace new ways of working. This meant that some of the other ambitions of the project – of creating an interface and dialogue between the organisation and its visitors – were not as successful.
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