Designing Event Potential with ICTs in a Museum Context
Designing Event Potentials with Information and Communication Technology in a Museum Context, is action research that aims to understand the process of designing event potentials with information and communications technologies (ICTs) in a museum context. I identify ICTs as actors that can create event potentials, a concept suggested by Elizabeth Ellsworth (2004). Event potentials are learning activities that engage learners in forming associations with the self and others to construct knowledge. Event potentials in this study refer to social media’s capacity to facilitate emergent knowledge by making social and cultural associations and differences visible in a pedagogic assemblage. Pedagogical assemblages are comprised of learning activities that network learners in constructing knowledge through interactions with others about their perspectives, knowledge, and life experiences. Building upon Ellsworth pedagogic approach of creating event potentials, I argue that a museum exhibition is a pedagogic assemblage of personal memory and public discourse and that the design of ICTs can translate a museum exhibition from an assemblage of events into a space of emergent knowledge.
Actor-Network Theory (ANT) is the analytic approach of this study. ANT offers perspectives to investigate how humans and non-humans influence one another in complex interactions, that is, how interrelations assemble (or do not assemble) between museum visitors and artworks within exhibitions within museums. Fusing innovative teaching & emerging technologies, I designed ICTs for Gallery Conversations about the Surveying Judy Chicago: Five Decades exhibition at the Palmer Museum of Art in 2014 and observer museum visitors’ interactions and responses to my ICT designs and redesigns.
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The data for this research consists of artifacts, reflective journal entries, semi-structured participant interviews, systematic observations, and documentation of my process of designing event potentials. To assist my analysis, I also created a website titled Finding Squirrel for this study to post my reflective journal entries and related field notes to record my thoughts and observations on the process and significant events throughout my practice. The reflective journal is a means to trace and explore my journey as an ICT designer and a researcher.I ask: What is social about media networking? What/who is the network? How might social media engage museum objects as nodes between museum objects and people? In examining my self-development, my concern is to improve my understanding of the process of designing event potentials in a museum context. Through the examination of the process of designing ICTs in this exhibition, I investigated the process of designing ICT to engage visitors’ active participation and explore ways to facilitate museum audiences’ interaction with the integration of ICTs.
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Related publication:
Lin, Y. (2020). Critical dialogue and the re/making of pedagogic assemblage: Teaching with social media and feminist online pedagogy. In Knochel, A., Liao, C., Patton, R. (Eds.), Critical Digital Making. 10.3726/b17298
Lin, Y. (2016). Designing with Information and Communications Technologies for Event Potentials in an Art Museum Context. [Doctoral dissertation, The Pennsylvania State University]. https://etda.libraries.psu.edu/catalog/28929