Exhibit Critique

Mirror Trace

This exhibit didn't work for me. Upon reflection (!), I realized that maybe my sheer glee at (and total dominance on) the star outlining exploration conditioned me against this exhibit. The two experiences were similar in many ways. But the exhibit, I thought, was deficient in a few areas where the star exploration really excelled. 

Example number one: the exhibit didn't allow you to see how your efforts stacked up--it robbed your of perspective. The mirror trace asks the user to trace a spiral with a plastic stylus while looking at said spiral in a mirror. It's hard for all of the reasons that the star exploration was hard. Just by doing the task, you have some sense that it's much more difficult than it would be sans mirror, but you don't really know how to assign meaning to that frustration. You don't have peers to compare yourself too. Without a reference point for the difficulty of the task, it's harder to appreciate what's going on. 

The exhibit is also missing the accountability that comes with leaving your mark on the paper. By physically drawing something you leave a path that you and others can see. That visual manifestation of your frustration tells a story to you and others. It's a visual summary of your experience with the task. This lack of accountability, I think, is why I (and others that I watched) gave up on actually drawing the spiral a fraction of the way into the task. Once you see that it's hard, there's nothing left to discover.

These aspects wouldn't be too hard to add to the exhibit as it stands. For example, you could improve this exhibit by making the application a tablet that allowed you to see that path you were drawing in real time. After drawing, the application could visually compare your line to the line of the last user. Even better, it could compare your line to a line drawn from the lines of the last 20 or 100 users in aggregate. It could compare the speed and accuracy of your drawing to previous drawings. Both would be interesting, and lend the exhibit a sort of competitive, compelling aspect. Some basic feedback via data aggregation would lend a lot to this exhibit without sacrificing the simplicity of the task itself.  

Giant Mirror

This is exhibit worked for me; and it seemed to work for everyone else in the room, given the clangor and general merriment surrounding it. I loved the way that this piece juxtaposed oddly private and public experiences. On one hand, it provokes an extremely public experience—perfect strangers come careening into your view from unexpected directions, occupying your entire field of vision without warning. On the other hand, it provokes a very private experience—when you find a particularly delightful angle, you're aware that only you can see it. Trying to get someone else to see what you're seeing is impossible given the shape of the mirror, and it doesn't take observers long to figure that out. Some of them never give up, though. I sat for many minutes, watching people tirelessly try to capture specific selfies with their cameras, or directing their family members back and forth, “up up up...up...down a little...up” trying to capture some vision that had delighted them an instant ago.

I also loved how disorienting the whole affair was. By far the most common interaction that I observed was a person walking slowly and carefully toward the mirror with an outstretched hand. People approached the mirror as if they had no idea what would happen, their body language was very timid, they seemed keenly aware that their image could disappear at any moment. One little girl, distressed, kept saying “Where am I?...Where am I?” This all stands in stark contrast to the sharpness of the images from way off in the background. Sign corners and light fixtures from the back of the room startle you as they appear suddenly where your face should be. I heard it called “creepy” and “weird” countless times, but it definitely captivated intentional users and passersby who got sucked into it's vortex. 

This exhibit struck all the right chords. It had an appropriate amount of challenge and mystery (part of the mystery, I think, is that it's hard to look at the actual mirror. The images in the mirror fly at you with such speed and sharpness that it's very hard to see the object behind it all) but retained elegance and simplicity.