The Exploratorium museum creates hands-on, minds-on experiences that enable inquiry-based learning. Most Exploratorium exhibits can be categorized as serious play. However, a subset not only involve playful inquiry, but interesting and novel game-like interactions. A set of exhibits under current development involves exposing human social behavior as observable scientific phenomena. This session will discuss specific prototypes, and the museum's highly iterative design process. A feedback-loop tightly couples each exhibit developer's efforts with those of Visitor Research and Evaluation staff. Data collected from the live museum floor, about how visitors interact with prototypes and each other, allows rapid optimization of both visitor engagement and learning outcomes.

1. Seriously Playful Exhibits at the
Bill Meyer
New Media Director & Exhibit Developer

2. Exploratorium:
Museum of Science, Art & Human Perception

3. “No one ever flunked a museum.”
Exploratorium’s founder, Frank Oppenheimer

4. Inquiry Based Learning
First-hand experiences help visitors to make sense of our world
• Based in phenomena:
– Outside: physics, life sciences
– Inside our minds: psychology
– In our behaviors: social psychology
• Inspire the question “What’s going on!?”
• Explainers lead deeper dives

5. In-House Exhibit Development
museum floor = ongoing “focus group”

6. Exhibit Developers
• Member of team with:
– visitor researcher
– scientist
– writer
– graphic designer
• Immerse in content
• Antennae up for “exhibitable” ideas

7. Exhibit Prototyping Process
encouraging originally planned behaviors
or/or support places visitors naturally go
Analyze
Interaction
Iterate
Design
Visitor
Floor Test

8. Science of Sharing
NSF Award 1114781
Turn academic research on Social Behavior into
cool exhibit experiences

9. Scientists Have Predictive Theories
Applicable to Social Behavior
• Visitor behavioral strategy and social contexts,
at exhibits, apply to real-world issues
– resource sharing/depletion
– social conflicts/crises
• Altering variables alters social outcomes

10. Will Folk Compete or Cooperate?
Variables exhibit development team
and social scientists study
• Personality and biases (formative Eval.)
• Group sizes (floor testing)
• Amount of communication (floor testing)
• Reciprocity of actions (floor testing)

11. Goals for Exhibits
• Unmediated
• Engage two or more people
• Works for all ages
• Self-reflection (metacognition)

12. Tragedy of the Commons
Garrett Hardin’s 1968 Paper in Science

13. Individuals add slowly to their flocks for personal gain
Impact to larger pasture seems small in comparison

14. Each animal added eats more grass,
faster than pasture can grow and replenish…

15. Ultimately, pasture all eaten. Everybody loses.
From litter to carbon emissions, same story.

16. Resource Racing

17. Hacked Commercial Slot-Car System
custom digital control, automated resetting of car positions , etc.

18. Racing with a twist
• All cars share common tank of “gas” on multi-
lane racetrack
• Each visitor controls speed of own car
• Each car’s fuel consumption (MPG):
– Good at slow speed
– Terrible at high speed
• When shared tank depleted, all cars stop even
if nobody finished.

19. Large 46” Shared Display
(video next slide)

20. Prototype Goals
• Get system “good enough” to conduct visitor
research to discover how interesting and
effective activity is, what visitors are
understanding
• Look at different ways to frame the “race”

21. Early testing (6 sets of visitors)
• Framed as “Qualifying race.” Pair of racers on
same team trying to make best total time
• Exhibit “Mediated” by museum staff
• Timer automatically starts at beginning of
race, stops after both racers each complete
five laps, unless...
• If team runs out of fuel, both cars stop
automatically, no time recorded

22. Two Teen Boys (16 & 17)
“hey, save some for me --- we are halfway
through, save some for me!”
“Hey, we have to work together!”
“Stay with me man.” “I’m amazing, so follow
me!”
“we will use up all of the gas if we don’t hurry
up.”

23. Dad, young daughter and son
Dad asks:
“So the idea is to go as slow as you can?”
We answer:
“To eventually to get the best time with both people
finishing with gas left.”
After race, dad:
“Teamwork is important, but you still want to win!”

24. Metacognition:
Thinking about thinking

25. Metacognitive areas we look for:
• Experience
• Skills
• Knowledge

26. Metacognitive Experience
I want to just floor it
and win!! I can see how
we might end up
fighting for the last
drops of oil on Earth…
Resource Racing

27. Metacognitive Skill
Every man for himself
doesn’t seem to be
working for any of us.
Maybe if I help us
collaborate, we’ll do
better…
Resource Racing

28. Metacognitive Knowledge
She’s so competitive! She
gets surprisingly selfish in
this shared race.
Maybe this is this what
social scientists try to
understand about human
nature?
Resource Racing

29. Visitors interactions
• Metacognition occurring
• When sustainability state reached, can feel
boring. Ideas:
– Add challenges (such as collecting “flags”)
– Allow visitors to explore different rule frames
– Automated audible “race announcer”
commenting on player behavior
• Mechanism complex to support

30. TextFish: 1 to 10+ visitors
(video next slide)

31. Custom Channel to Each Visitor

32. Guerilla Label Prototyping

33. Detailed Visitor Research Report Example

34. Next Iteration: Goal beyond staying alive
• Sustainable behavior interesting
• Make bystanders researchers

35. Deutsch and Kraus: Trucking Game
two-player bargaining in social situation (1962)

36. Players each own trucking company
• Take longer private route or one-lane road.
• control of gate at one end of short route
• To use short route must negotiate
• Best strategy to cooperate, but most compete

37. Explainer Mediated Trucking Game:
Visitors as trucks, scripted instructions

38. Prototype Goals
• Visitors compare personal vs. collective gain
• Balance cooperation (waiting and taking
turns) with upside (more treats).
• Gate are stanchions/velvet ropes, one treat
per trial. No talking allowed in first game, then
talking permitted (as in research)

39. Floor Testing Revealed:
• Visitors liked activity.
– physicality important to keep.
• Too many instructions create barriers to use.
• Next prototype iteration made sense:
– Unmediated
– Incorporate physical movement
– automatic scoring
(video next slide)

40. Team Pac-Man
(aka “Collaborative Controller”)
(video next slide)

41. Exhibit’s Design
• Familiar/iconic game
• Visitors come with lots of knowledge
• Physical design tweaks expectations
• Separated controls easy to use, naturally
enforcing cooperation

42. Visitor Research Findings
• Very social, groups collaborate to compete
• Collective affect, minimal talk
• Coercive/forceful conversation occasional
issue, not big problem
• Fast restart to new game, extinguishes
negative feelings quickly
• Girls and boys, young and old, all engaged

43. Prisoner’s Dilemma
Flood and Dresher RAND (1950)
Developed to study nuclear arms-race strategizing
• Why two individuals might not cooperate,
when it would seem in both’s best interests if
they did.
• Classic Game Theory example
• Albert Tucker gave catchy title
– over 1000 articles published in 60s and 70s

44. You robbed a bank and got caught!
You and accomplice interrogated separately: PAYOFF MATRIX
Accomplice stays silent
Accomplice
snitches
You
stay
silent
You both get 6 months
(accomplice goes free)
You get 10 years
You
snitch
You go free
(accomplice gets 10 years)
You both get 5 years

45. Public workshop to generate ideas

46. All ideas in public domain (CC0)

47. Idea hatched
Conducted same-day visitor floor test using squirt guns

48. Trust Fountain (aka “Sip or Squirt”)
(video next slide)

49. Discoveries and Open Questions
• Can’t play alone, collaboration comes for free
• Equally joyful experience to Pac Man, but
content is more serious and complicated, still
hard to communicate.
• Is game delivery methodology complementary
to presenting this content?
• If squirt seems “fun” for some, does this
negate content understanding?

50. Discussion / Questions
Bill Meyer
bmeyer at exploratorium dot edu