Exhibit critique

An exhibit that worked quite well for me was the Giant Mirror. I had passed by it when I visited the Exploratorium over the summer, but there was a huge crowd around it, so I just walked by and dismissed it as a huge concave mirror. Having the chance to actually engage with it though, I found it an extremely powerful exhibit.

I will walk through some notable points in my process of exploration.

[Initial contact] hmm big concave mirror. It makes stuff upside down. ...Great, I think we talked about that in physics... What's the big deal?

[walk closer because I see other people walking closer] whoa... but if you get really close it's no longer upside down. ha! I can make Alex huge and distorted!

hmm I wonder at what point it changes from backwards to forwards... [takes a few steps back] 

WHOA. I'M HUGE.

HA! I can even eat Emily! :P

What I see is different from what my phone sees... hey, I can make my phone huge too! :D

Emily is pretty amazed at the possibilities too, but it's hard to take a photo of yourself reaching out to yourself. Collaborative photo opportunities begin. 

What really worked for me here was how naturally the exploration process unfolded. Unlike some exhibits where it's hard to interact with a stranger, here, it is precisely because of the people walking around me and getting in my way that I, too, start walking around. 

Furthermore, each step I took was a new experience. In general, I feel like there's quite a bit of sensory overload at the Exploratorium, which makes it easy to get distracted and move quickly from exhibit to exhibit, but the giant mirror was able to keep me engaged beyond the initial flashiness phase. 

A lot of exhibits are catchy at first, and then you have to stay there and think really hard to learn: in those exhibits, "learning" often doesn't co-occur with sensory engagement. For the giant mirror, however, I was eager to learn and apply the physics I had learned in school, while my senses were still being stimulated by the exhibit. In fact, even pulling out my camera was a learning experience. I guess this is pretty basic, but it struck me that what I saw through my eyes was different from what I saw on the screen of my phone camera, and got me thinking about how cameras work.  

Fulfilling Oppenheimer's original vision, the giant mirror was an extremely sensory rich exhibit. The images in the mirror were almost 3D and often looked even richer than they do in real life. And there were so many possible ways to explore the mirror. These possibilities weren't just given to the explorer upfront, but required this addicting process of discovery that was perfectly calibrated in its level of difficulty (given that we're in a museum with highly distractable visitors). I suspect that this exhibit is as accessible to a kindergartner as it is to an adult. I think this exhibit captures the essence and playfulness of exploration. 

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An exhibit that didn't quite work for me was Rotating Faces. 

There were a lot of great things about this exhibit. It captures a phenomenon that caught me by surprise and that provoked a lot of thought. When I circled around the exhibit and read closely, I saw that it gave some great clues: put your finger on one cheek (this lets you see whether your image is flipped - if it's flipped, your face will spin) and put one finger close to the mirror, count how many fingers you see, divide that by two (to see how many inversions of the image there are - if it's even, your face will spin). 

My problem with this exhibit is that I don't think these written hints are enough for a satisfying encounter with the exhibit. If I wasn't carefully analyzing the reflections exhibits for this class, and simply had a few hours to go through the Exploratorium on a day by myself, I probably would spend two minutes at this exhibit with my curiosity piqued, but when it takes too long to figure out how it works, I would probably move on. I doubt that I would go through all 6 mirrors and make a table and analyze patterns. I can imagine that experiencing many such disappointments at different exhibits would leave me quite exhausted. 

Perhaps one fix to this is having a sign with diagrams that explain what is happening. Perhaps a more interactive solution could be having a mechanism that allows visitors to move the mirrors themselves to the different angles (with "stops" of some kind at the interesting angles - 180, 90, 60, 45, 36, 30). The stops could then be marked (perhaps digitally) based on whether your head will spin or not, with a few sentences pointing out what to pay attention to in the mirror at that stop. Since it is hard to circle around the exhibit to keep track of what is happening, I think actually being able to change the angles on one contraption will allow visitors to observe patterns more readily.