How humans learn, navigate and use technology

Dennis Hong (RoMeLa, Virginia Tech) in his TedxNASA talk in September 2009 talked about biologically inspired tripedal robots, smart wall climber robots, cheap hydraulic arms, anthropomorphic football player humanoids, and even an unmemorably named artificial amoeba that is capable of chemically induced locomotion. His imagination of designing such autonomous mobile robots is not limited by the fact that very few of these exact motions exist in nature (i.e., take his 3-legged STriDER for example).

However for a cognitive psychologist, the really cool stuff is not these futuristic technological solutions, but Hong’s self-explanation about the source of his creative thinking when around 11:55 he asks himself a question: “Where do we come up with these ideas?”

He identified 5 sources of creativity:

1. Dreams

Inspiration from one’s own dreams is what he calls out first. Every social scientist should be relieved that finally a real computer scientist dares to talk about the necessity of such soft human processes as dreams in the process of creative thinking. At nights when Hong goes to bed and about to fall asleep, he jots down on a paper notepad his wildest ideas (”..I scribble everything down and draw things before I go to bed”, 12:53). The next morning, he deciphers the ideas. Most days, there’s nothing on the page or nothing interesting, but occasionally he has something that he call a “Eureka moment”. When it happens, he logs these ideas carefully on his computer. What happens to these Eureka-ideas? Hong uses them to write RFPs (Request for Proposals) for his future research projects. In other words, he already has some answers for upcoming research questions and doesn’t have to wait for the inspirations to come.

2. Collaborations

Dreams on a group level could be called brainstorming sessions. Since individual ideas are not enough, Hong and his group have group brainstorming sessions. To facilitate discussion and make sure that students don’t feel intimidated, the golden rule is that nobody can criticize the other person’s ideas. All sorts of wacky ideas fly around, just like in one’s dreams. Once these ideas are recorded, people can decide which idea to pursue.

3. Education

Does school education really kill creativity? The fact is that to challenge the grand questions of science, you need tools. These tools are maths, physics, linear algebra, biology, etc. (neuroscience and philosophy are my additions to this list). While schools may not promote creativity per se, they provide the essential basis for students.

4. Work hard

The really good indicator of a creative and productive researcher labs – according to Hong – is that students and researchers are working on their ideas 3am in the morning. Not because they have to, but because they enjoy it.

5. Play hard

Finally, he admits that having lots of fun is the key. No need to explain this to anyone who has ever felt the joyous moment of a research Eureka-moment in their life before…

Nina Simon

What makes a museum space good? For Nina Simon, the author of Museum 2.0 blog, the answer is simple: the more people use the exhibit spaces to interact with each other the better. Nina was giving an excellent talk recently at the BayCHI March meeting in the Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). She discussed issues of museum space design that engage visitors more by applying concepts from Web 2.0.

Museums are more and more looking for ways to break up with the image of being traditional and authoritative. In fact, most modern institutions shift towards a more participatory approach, where visitors are active part of the exhibits. Nina takes her examples from the social web (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, etc.) where the 3 core challenges are (1) participation inequality, (2) amateur content, and (3) limited tool for social interaction.

The Art of Participation exhibition at the SFMOMA (photo from SFMOMA website)

Social participation in a museum context refers to the use of the exhibited objects to facilitate interaction between the visitors. One simple example was The Art of Participation exhibition in the SFMOMA that opened in Winter 2008. What it did was to provide a social proxy (i.e., the use of different random objects) that allowed interaction. The key concept here is ‘scaffolding‘ or making the visitors feel safe about whatever they’re planning to do. Nina met a stranger at this exhibit, George, who went so far with participatory interaction that he took off his shirts for a photo (see half naked guy on her lecture slides with oranges in his hat).

Visitor feedback is another issue in museum spaces. A simple notebook where people can write their amateur thoughts is often turned into meaningless. The way to look at this problem for Nina is to take the Web 2.0 approach and allow the concept (i.e., notebook) to evolve into something better. In Worcester City Gallery and Museum, UK the weekly order of painting exhibits were determined by the votes of the visitors. It became so popular that people of the town queued every Saturday evening to see what the new order was. This is a great example of how to change ‘feedback 1.0′ into ‘feedback 2.0′

Turnstile entrance at the Facing Mars exhibit at the Ontario Science Centre (photo from Museum 2.0 blog)

Asking a good question is another key to interaction. At the Ontario Science Centre, the turnstile was a voting mechanism to answer the simple question: “Would you go to Mars?” Needless to say, at the entrance, 2/3 of the visitors answer yes. It’s a personal (i.e., you), social (i.e., counting #) and fully participatory spatial design. As people learnt about the harsh physical conditions on Mars, and re-answered the question when exited the exhibition, 2/3 of the visitors didn’t anymore want to go to Mars. This is an objective and interactive way to assess visitors’ knowledge increase.

Exhibited objects themselves are perfect transitional spaces even for complete strangers to meet. Museum design needs to provide a scaffolding space that encourages social engagements. On the web, social profiling is a way to go about this. By giving visitors ’social objects’ (e.g., a personality character badge — see Athena on Nina’s slide), it becomes acceptable to share experiences even if they don’t know each other. In social psychology, this is explained by the social identity theory (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). The key is giving social scaffolding to people that makes them feel comfortable. Human-Library.org project is another great example of how this can happen in a very simple but powerful way.

An audience question targeted the actionable implications of Nina’s work. She said that when she teams up with architects to design social museum spaces, she talks about how to create an exhibit space where people feel good together. Museums are just not optimal when there’s nobody inside, but they get better when a good deal of visitors are there. She paraphrased a quote by Tim O’Reilly saying that “web 2.0 is a software that gets better the more people use it.”

A very exciting new spatial research project is on the horizon. I’ve got connected to an open-minded and research oriented architect at a firm in South San Francisco, who are just about to begin a public library redesigning project in early 2010. After initial talks, we agreed that I will assist in their assessment of the existing and desired spatial layout and research into identifying user (’patron’ in library language) wayfinding needs. I’m very excited for some of my navigation analysis methods to be applied to this particular real world design project, and I anticipate to gain insightful results from this research.

The literature for library spatial research is surprisingly enormous (ACRL/LLAMA Guide; Crumpton & Crowe, 2008; Saanwald, 2008; WBDG Guide). More specifically to public library designs, I found academic works that explain in great depth how important appropriate spatial cognition and wayfinding planning would be (Beecher, 2004; Jones, 2000; Galan-Diaz, in press).

Interestingly though, previous real world architectural projects involving public library design have seldom mention any systematic attempt to empirically understand how patrons use the space. They are focused on the details of the physical properties (i.e., colour, shape, configuration) and mission statements of the library or the assumed (not actually measured) interest of the patrons.

Although my research has just began, I’m already seeing important research leads and potentially crucial questions:

1. How/why/when do patrons use the space of existing library?
2. What areas (and why) have higher visitation frequencies than others? Why?
3. What are the problematic spatial areas (ie., high need with low visitation)? (And what areas don’t need re-design!)
4. How to install/reinforce new and desired services for patrons?

More to come soon…