 Parallel Universes: How the Museum brings exhibits like Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination to life—for everyone.
Article courtesy of the Museum of Science, Boston
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Ever push a baby stroller to the Museum—or a mall, restaurant, or bank? It makes you wonder how people with strollers, let alone wheelchairs, managed before the Americans with Disabilities Act made ramps ubiquitous. Physical alterations like ramps and sidewalk curb cuts that were meant to improve access for people with disabilities also made life easier for the stroller set—and lots of other people too.
Today, there's a name for that: universal design. It means planning in advance so that a product or place will be usable by all people without the need for special modifications. In the past half century, social and economic changes have fueled the universal design movement, changes like the fight for civil rights and the economic power of a growing population of seniors and people with disabilities. Now, many architects, engineers, and product designers recognize that designs intended for people with disabilities are not so specialized after all. In fact, they seem like plain old common sense.
Expanding Choices
The Museum of Science has pioneered universal design in its exhibits. Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination is no exception. The exhibition will bring together visitors living in parallel universes of learning. Universal design, it turns out, is not just about access ramps. It's also about how people absorb information in different ways—some respond to pictures better than words, for example, or sounds better than sights. For people with disabilities, it's a necessity; for everyone else it's a choice, says universal design expert Kurt Kuss. If we offer more choices, it's a much more enjoyable educational experience.
The story of universal design at the Museum of Science begins in New England Habitats, an exhibit featuring 19th-century taxidermied animals inherited from the Museum's founding institution, the Boston Society of Natural History. In 1987, long after the Museum had established itself as an interactive learning lab, New England Habitats—according to now-retired exhibit planner Betty Davidson—was still simply a diorama viewing room. Mothers with toddlers would come and let the kids run around, and they could sit and chat, Davidson recalls. Other than that, people would cruise through.
Davidson conducted a formal evaluation and discovered that fewer than 20 percent of visitors surveyed had noticed the exhibit's educational content. So she added ways for people to experience New England Habitats with their noses, ears, and hands: musks to smell; audio labels to hear; taxidermied animals and realistic bronze replicas to touch. After the changes, 100 percent were able to name at least one example of animal adaptation, Davidson says. It became a very lively place. People had choices for ways to experience it. Grandma could look at the beautiful dioramas, kids could race around and smell things, and people who preferred not to read—and that turned out to be most people—could just use the audio labels.
Cutting Through the Noise
Davidson, who has an orthopedic disability, made the alterations for the purposes of accessibility and inclusion; the result was that everyone learned more. The dramatic change sold the exhibits department on the virtues of Davidson's multimodal approach. Now, the Museum calls in universal design experts Barbara Ceconi and Kurt Kuss when planning new exhibits. The married couple runs a Brookline consulting firm called Access Umbrella. Both Ceconi and Kuss are blind, but perhaps more importantly, each has a different learning style. I am a real book learner. I like excruciating detail, Ceconi says. Underline excruciating, her husband puts in. By contrast, Ceconi continues, He's a real learner by doing.
As a Museum exhibit is developed, Ceconi and Kuss bring in children and adults with different disabilities to try out the activities. The exhibit team incorporates the consultants' suggestions, which can encompass issues as subtle as noise control. If you're blind, Ceconi points out, getting overwhelmed by sound gives you a headache, basically. If you're hard of hearing, you can't differentiate between the thing you're trying to listen to and all the background noise. And everyone has to expend extra energy to pick out the
educational value.
Kuss and Ceconi know that no exhibit can meet absolutely everyone's needs. The goal, then, is redundancy—or presenting the core information in more than one way—to reach as wide an audience as possible. If there's a model, there's also an audio description of exactly what's going on, Ceconi says. If there's a video, it has captions. And so forth.
Magnet Trains and New Terrains
The couple has helped the exhibit team add neccessary redundancy to the activities they're planning for Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination. One example is the Maglev Engineering Design Lab, an activity in which visitors build and race trains using electromagnetic propulsion. Kuss and Ceconi made sure the track included an area for wheelchair users to park and participate. But the activity didn't work well for people who couldn't see, or for anyone having trouble understanding magnetism, the force that makes the trains float. So Museum technical designer Peter Ford created twin tubes out of Plexiglas®, magnets, and wire coils (pictured below). Anyone can press a button to activate a current, and push a plunger to feel the cushiony sensation of traditional and electro-magnets repelling. The gadget has helped visitors with and without disabilities alike, Ford says.
Twin plexiglass tubes, magnets, and wire coils, allow anyone to activate a current and feel the sensation of traditional and electro-magnets repelling.
The consultants also helped refine an activity in which visitors design robots to navigate different surfaces. The first challenge: choosing a robot base suitable for a particular terrain. Ceconi and Kuss asked blind people to try it out. The consultants quickly realized that it was difficult to snap the robot bodies on to the different bases—difficult for blind people, but also for anyone with manual dexterity or hand-eye coordination problems. The consultants advised the exhibit team to include some pre-assembled robots in the activity.
National Exposure
The popularity of the Star Wars films is likely to draw big audiences to Star Wars: Where Science Meets Imagination as the exhibition travels around the U.S. It's an opportunity to demonstrate to a wide audience what Betty Davidson already knows about universal design: If we provide something meaningful and enjoyable to everyone, we will satisfy far more visitors, she says. And of course, it's the right thing to do.
Universal Design at Work
Help! My Exhibit Is Trapped in a Plexiglas Cube
Kurt Kuss and Barbara Ceconi of Access Umbrella are not fans of museum objects encased in impenetrable plastic. Obviously, that kind of display doesn't do much for visitors who can't see. Then there's the questionable educational value: For kids, the challenge becomes, 'how can I break into this?' says Kuss. Here's an example of how a static piece can be transformed into a multisensory learning experience.
- Step 1: A piece of real magnetic levitation train track in a display case, accompanied by a text label, explains the concept of electromagnetic propulsion.
- Step 2: Add a way to press a button and start the current, sending a car down the track, and a few more people will stop at the display and perhaps read the label.
- Step 3: Add a descriptive audio label to include people who can't read the text label: perhaps a young child, or someone who is blind or dyslexic. People who learned English as a second language often have an easier time hearing it spoken, as opposed to seeing it written.
- Step 4: Take away the glass case, and let people play with the train and track.
- Step 5: Have visitors construct their own train to send down the track, as in the prototype pictured above. People who learn by doing, and people who learn by watching others demonstrate, get more out of the activity—and the exhibit becomes more attractive, interesting, and potentially educational for everyone who uses it.
Endnote
This exhibit's material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0307875.
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