Museums have to compete with a wide range of media when they seek to inform and engage with visitors. The public judges museums by the same standards that it uses for television, film and computer games. To succeed in communicating their messages and ideas, museums need to attract visitors and to stimulate their imagination.
The days of dusty cases and hard-to-read labels are long since gone but some museums are actively seeking to broaden the audience for museum exhibitions. And that means doing much more than trying to turn museums into theme parks.
The Museum voor Communicatie in Den Haag, the Netherlands, is using radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to provide visitors to its new exhibition for children with an interactive experience that aims to extend their understanding of the role that communication plays in their world.
| Client: | Museum voor Communicatie
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| Project: | Engaging museum visitors
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| Date: | September 2008
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Reaching Out To A Wider Audience
The Dutch Post Office founded its Post Museum in 1929 but since 1999 the museum has become an independent institute with a broader mission.Today, as well as presenting its collections of post and telecommunications related material, the Museum voor Communicatie also helps visitors to explore a wide range of subjects surrounding the link between communications and the senses, the arts, society and the individual.
The museum is particularly proud of its reputation as an ideal site for first-time museum visitors.
Recent exhibitions have included events such as “Eye Opener”, a presentation of how graphic designers use a pictorial language to communicate ideas internationally and “Alter Ego”, an exploration of the relationship between portraits of on-line gamers and the computer generated avatars that they use in their on-line lives.
Recently the museum opened a major new exhibition: “The World of Back and Forth” (Het Rijk van Heen en Weer). Designed for four to twelve year old children, it is intended to run until 2012, and will be visited by up to 200,000 people. The exhibition uses radio frequency identification (RFID) technology to enable interaction between visitors and the various exhibits.
Interaction Through Technology
The Museum voor Communicatie worked with RFID technology specialists CoreRFID who supplied the tags and readers that provide the electronic link between the visitors and the exhibition. RFID tags embedded in cards given to visitors as they enter allow visitors to activate some of the
audio-visual displays by showing their card to the exhibit’s RFID reader. As well as starting up the various presentations the card also
allows the exhibition to know which exhibits have been visited when and to collect information about visitors from different parts of the
exhibition.
"RFID has been an essential component allowing visitors to immerse themselves,” Femke Burger, Exhibition Designer, Museum voor Communicatie.
The flexibility of RFID technology has allowed a number of different exhibits to be developed across the different “worlds” of the exhibition. Children are encouraged to discover the limitations of trying communicate with people of different languages and cultures, finding out how even sign language can differ form one place to another. It also helps the museum to deliver a series of education programmes linked to different curriculum groups for the different stages of primary education.
Throughout the exhibition the RFID tags can start audio presentations from exhibits by “posting” their cards into RFID readers disguised as bird houses. The Alice in Wonderland-like feel of Dreamland is emphasised by the Fairytale Tree where children chose characters and emotions that the tree then builds into a story specific to that visitor. In Homeland, visitors learn how every family develops its own individual ways of communicating where nick-names, habits and words that have a meaning inside the family mean nothing outside it.
In Digiland, RFID again plays a role in helping children to see the dangers of communication in the on-line world. Using their RFID tagged identity cards, kids take part in online games in which they are encouraged to enter data about themselves. Because of the tags, information from various points in the exhibition can be brought together into one dossier on the visitor. The information is fed back to the visitors as a web page, which twists the data so as to highlight the dangers of passing out personal information on the Internet.
The RFID enabled envelopes also let the museum reach out to children after their visit. Visitor use their envelopes in Alienland as part of an encounter with a space alien. The tag links to the data about the visitors that leads to an email to the visitor from the alien two weeks later, reminding them of their visit and reinforcing the ideas of communication that they have learned about.
CoreRFID worked closely with the museum and the developer of their exhibition software, Kiss The Frog (www.kissthefrog.nl) to make the exhibition a success.