Designs For. Learning. Vol. 5 / No. 1 2

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A SENSORY4 IM M ERSIVE EXPERIENCE

Designs for Learning

Volume 5 / Number 1–2

2012

Vol. 5 / No. 1–2

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A SENSORY4 IM M ERSIVE EXPERIENCE

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Editorial:

gunther kress

&

staffan selander

6

sophia diamantopoulou

,

eva insulander

&

fredrik lindstrand

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Making meaning in an exhibition: technologies, agency and (re-)design

f r e d r i k l i n d s t r a n d

&

eva i n s u l a n d e r

:

30 Setting the ground for engagement: Multimodal perspectives on

exhibition design

kerstin smeds

:

50 On the meaning of exhibitions

c a r ey j ew i t t

:

74 Digital technologies in museums:

New routes to engagement and participation

pa m m e e c h a m

&

e l e na s t y l i a n o u

:

94 Interactive technologies in the art museum

va i k e f o r s

:

130 The empty meeting-place – Museum metaphors and their implication

for learning

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©

Rob

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e d i t o r i a l a n n o u n c e m e n t

–

t h e n e w d e s i g n s f o r l e a r n i n g

By this issue we present some changes of the journal. It will still have its

profile on design and learning, and it will still be edited from Sweden and

Denmark. However, its institutional basis has changed. In Sweden,

Learn-ingDesignLab has moved to the Dept. of Computer- and Systems Sciences

(DSV) at Stockholm University in Kista, and in Denmark ILD –

Forskning-slab I IT og Læringsdesign has moved to the Dept. of Learning and

Philoso-phy at Aalborg University in Copenhagen. To celebrate these changes, we

have decided to give the journal a bit of a new graphical profile. There have

also been some changes in the Editorial Board, as well as in the Advisory

board. And we have engaged Versita to help us with getting articles into all

relevant data-basis.

In this issue, we have invited Professor Gunther Kress at Institute of

Education in London to be co-editor for a special issue on multimodality,

design, and meaning making in museums.

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6 Recently a group of scholars from Sweden and (a smaller group) from the UK,

came together and worked on a project “‘The Museum, the Exhibition and the

Visitors: Meaning making in a new arena for learning and communication’

(funded by the Swedish Research Council - Vetenskapsrådet). As the title

indi-cates, the frame set for the project was large and ambitious. At the largest it was

an attempt to look at a the change which has affected museums over significant

slice of history, and tracking in outline what that change had been about; at the

smallest level, looking in great detail how one might document the processes

of learning in an exhibition. In between these two poles, the project examined

various aspects of two contemporary museums: the Museum of National

An-tiquities in Stockholm, and the Museum of London, in London, UK. In that

space between the meta-level historic sweep, and the micro-level of individual

learning was the interaction of curators and visitors, seen through a lens not so

much of communication than of learning – or rather, in the light of our sense

of the histories of this institution, learning seen as the fundamental instance

and purpose of communication in this site.

Clearly we needed to draw on the understandings brought by historians of

the Museum, on ethnographers who were engaged with Museums; scholars

whose background might be seen as Museology (as a hybrid/species of

Soci-ology and Cultural Studies); of SociSoci-ology; and inevitably, given the focus on

‘learning’, scholars whose business it is to think and know about education.

The project drew on researchers from Stockholm University, the University

of Umeå, Halmstad University College, and from Institute of Education in

London. Inevitably, given that the project happened while all around there

Introduction to the special issue on

museum identities, exhibition designs

and visitors’ meaning-making

GuNther Kress, university of London, uK

staffaN seLaNDer, stockholm university, sweden

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7 was profound social change, museums were urged by their paymasters (the

various government agencies, local and national) to respond to these. At

the same time profound changes in media technologies were taking place at

an accelerating pace. Both were beginning to affect museums in

far-reach-ing ways. In relation to the latter, the London Knowledge Lab (LKL), with

its focus precisely on the effect of the ‘new technologies’ in environments of

learning, was a very good place to involve in the project.

The profound changes in what museums are and what they are expected

to achieve, led to a range of different kinds of questions: from ‘why should

we have museums?’ to ‘for whom do they exist?’ to ‘what should museums

focus on and present? and ‘how should museums construct their

exhibi-tions as environments for learning’? Contemporary political demands as

well as new technologies raise the question of exhibition designs as much as

the role of the object in a world that is both physical and digital. One large

political and social question concerns the role in conditions of intense

so-cial diversity and fragmentation. How can the museum address an audience

that brings with it into the museum an unknowable degree of difference?

Do the new technologies offer any means of tackling such issues?

So the question becomes one of communication conceived in its aspect

as a process of learning. At that point the various disciplines which we had

brought together needed some means of intellectual cohesion and

coher-ence, some theoretical cement. Social organization founded on hierarchies

did not face or need to deal with the problems that surround learning now.

Transmission models of teaching met metaphors of learning as acquisition;

the power of institutions saw to it that authority was not challenged: where

it was not accepted, then its internalized rejection and refusal acted, just as

much as its acceptance, to buttress the hierarchical models of learning. The

agency of the visitor – at least ostensibly – exhausted itself in ‘absorption’;

and the multiple choice questionnaire which was offered to some visitors

(to school-children, certainly) contained the truth of the exhibition

dis-guised as a riddle.

We realized that if this project was to achieve anything useful and

plausi-ble it needed more than the recruitment of fancy new gadgets (which we did

recruit); it needed a plausible theory of communication. That theory would

move away entirely from the early 20th century assumptions about

com-munication, founded on power and hierarchy (epitomized in the middle

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8 of the century by the Shannon and Weaver model of Sender-code-receiver

model; though earlier also the foundational assumptions of the

stimulus-response models of behaviourist psychology). Those models conformed

with the hierarchically ordered, structuralist nation state and its economy.

The contemporarily plausible, apt model, would recognize that it is the

in-terpreter who, in communication, guarantees the success or otherwise of

the interaction. Communication happens when a participant in the

inter-action has interpreted what she or he has taken to be a prompt in

commu-nication and for interaction.

In the classroom it means that it is learners who decide and define

wheth-er communication has taken place or not. It is their intwheth-erpretation of the

teacher’s presentation as prompt which is central and crucial. In the

mu-seum, it is the visitor, whose interpretation of (elements of) the exhibition

guarantees communication – and thereby learning. This moves away

en-tirely from the multiple choice questionnaire which had set the agenda and

attempted to engage the visitor in some faux action-as-evaluation.

In that context, our innovative move was to make the response of the

visitor central. We devised a simple practice that would give us insight into

what the visitor had taken as prompts and how she or he had interpreted

those prompts. This corresponded at one stroke to the givens of the

con-temporary period in which the interest of the consumer decides

engage-ment in the question: what? and shows interpretation in how an eleengage-ment of

the exhibition is transformed/interpreted. We have used the term signs of

learning for these elements. In several of the papers in this issue that notion

is explained and developed.

This notion arises out of the notion of ‘agency’ used in the theoretical and

methodological frame of social semiotics. Here the ‘interest’ of the agent is

central in the always motivated formation of the sign: and that interest can

then legitimately be the subject of hypotheses about the interest giving rise

to the interpretation, and its meaning. In the context of the classroom, this

theoretical frame offers the possibility, at last, of a genuinely learner centred

pedagogy. In the Museum, the approach places visitors and their interest

at the centre, in the context of a plausible theoretical frame and replicable

methodology. We think this presents a fundamental shift in direction.

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Editors

Susanne Kjällander, Stockholm University, Sweden Robert Ramberg, PhD, Stockholm University, Sweden Staffan Selander, Stockholm University, Sweden Anna Åkerfeldt, Stockholm University, Sweden Birgitte Holm Sørensen, Aalborg University, Denmark Thorkild Hanghøj, Aalborg University, Denmark Karin Levinsen, Aalborg University, Denmark Rikke Ørngreen, Aalborg University, Denmark Editorial board

Eva Insulander, Mälardalen university, Sweden Fredrik Lindstrand, University of Gävle, Sweden Eva Svärdemo-Åberg, Stockholm university, Sweden Copyrights No 1–2, 2012

Front cover:

p. 4 van Gogh Alive: The Exhibition. © Grande Exhibitions p. 10 Staffan Selander p. 14 Sophia Diamantopoulou p. 19 Eva Insulander p. 21 Fredrik Lindstrand p. 23 Sophia Diamantopoulou p. 24 Sophia Diamantopoulou p. 36 Museum of National Antiquities p. 41 Fredrik Lindstrand

p. 82 Flickr

p. 125 Google’s Art Project.

Advisory board

Bente Aamotsbakken, Tønsberg, Norway

Mikael Alexandersson, Gothenburg university, Sweden Henrik Artman, KTH, Stockholm, Sweden

Anders Björkvall, Stockholm university, Sweden Andrew Burn, London, Great Britain

Kirsten Drotner, Odense, Denmark

Love Ekenberg, Stockholm university, Sweden Ola Erstad, Oslo, Norway

Chaechun Gim, Yeungnam University, South Korea Erica Halverson UW/Madison, USA

Richard Halverson UW/Madison, USA

Ria Heilä-Ylikallio, Åbo Akademi University, Finland Jana Holsanova, Lund University, Sweden Glynda Hull, Berkeley, USA

Carey Jewitt, London, Great Britain

Anna-Lena Kempe, Stockholm university, Sweden Susanne V Knudsen, Tønsberg, Norway

Gunther Kress, London, Great Britain Per Ledin, Örebro university, Sweden Theo van Leeuwen, Sydney, Australia Teemu Leinonen, Aalto University, Finland Jonas Linderoth, Gothenburg university, Sweden Sten Ludvigsen, Oslo, Norway

Jonas Löwgren, Malmö University, Sweden Åsa Mäkitalo, Gothenburg university, Sweden Teresa C. Pargman, Stockholm University, Sweden Palmyre Pierroux, Oslo, Norway

Klas Roth, Stockholm university, Sweden Sven Sjöberg, Oslo, Norway

Kurt Squire, UW/Madison, USA

Constance Steinkuehler, UW/Madison, USA Daniel Spikol, Malmö University, Sweden Roger Säljö, Gothenburg university, Sweden Elise Seip Tønnesen, Agder, Norway Johan L. Tønnesson, Oslo, Norway Barbara Wasson, Bergen, Norway Tore West, Stockholm university, Sweden Christoph Wulf, Berlin, Germany ISSN 1654-7608

E-journal: ISSN 2001-7480 © The authors, 2012 © Designs for Learning, 2012 DidaktikDesign, Stockholm University, Aalborg University

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Submission of manuscripts

Manuscripts, fully numbered and typed in double spacing throughout, should be sent both as a Word-compatible file and as a PDF-file to:

Susanne Kjällander

Department of Didactic Sciences Stockholm University

SE-106 91 Stockholm Sweden

[email: [email protected]] Covering letter

Please attach to every submission a letter confirming that all

authors have agreed to the submission and that the article is not currently being considered for publica-tion by any other journal.

Format of manuscripts Each manuscript should contain:

(i) title page with full title and subtitle (if any), prefer-ably not exceeding 60 signs. For the purpose of blind refereeing, full name of each author with current affiliation and full address/phone/fax/email details plus short biographical note should be supplied on a separate page.

(ii) abstract of 100–150 words. (iii) up to 10 key words.

(iv) main text and word count - suggested target is not exceeding 5000 words (or 30,000 signs, includ-ing spaces) unless by prior agreement with the edi-tors. Texts are expected to be clearly organized, with a clear hierarchy of headings and subheadings and quotations exceeding 40 words displayed, indented, in the text.

(v) end notes, if necessary, should be signalled by superscript numbers in the main text and listed at the end of the text before the references.

(vi) references in both the text and end notes should follow APA manual.

Illustrations

All line diagrams and photographs are termed ‘Figures’ and should be referred to as such in the manuscript. They should be numbered consecutively. Line diagrams should be presented in a form suitable for immediate reproduction (i.e.not requiring redraw-ing). Photos and digitally generated images should be in 300 dpi resolution at 100% size. Images made for web publishing (normally 72 dpi) are not suf-ficient. They should be reproducible to a final printed

text area of 205 mm x 142 mm. Illustrations on disk should be supplied as TIF or EPS files at high resolution. All figures should have short descriptive captions typed on a separate page.

Authors are responsible for obtaining permis-sions from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. Permission letters must be supplied to Designs for Learning. Style

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On acceptance of your manuscript for publication, you will be asked to supply the final version in a new Word-file and PDF-file.

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Authors will receive proofs of their articles and be asked to send corrections to Susanne Kjällander (see address above) within 2 weeks. They will receive a complimentary copy of the journal and electronic offprints of their article.

Reviews

In future issues Designs for Learning will include a section in which books and other significant contri-butions to the field are reviewed. This includes both essay length and shorter contributions. Books for review and manuscripts of reviews should be sent to Susanne Kjällander (see address above). Advisory board