Recognizing the Relationships between Interactivity, Story, and Message: Lessons Learned from the Summative Evaluation of the Human Plus Exhibition

Abstract

Abstract Interactivity, message, and story are critical, interrelated components of most educational exhibition designs. In this article, we introduce an Interactivity Design Framework for guiding exhibition designers’ intentional inclusion of interactivity, story, and message in exhibition components. This framework emerges from selected findings from summative evaluation of the Human Plus exhibition, which took place at the New York Hall of Science in late 2013. The exhibition was designed to generate interest in engineering among pre‐adolescent girls. Recognizing the target group's interest in human relationships and narrative, the exhibition was designed to be engaging and interactive, driven by compelling narratives of how engineering had enhanced the lives of people with disabilities. Exhibits interwove interactivity and story to convey messages related to both engineering itself and how engineering can meet the needs of people with disabilities. Because of this dual focus, the exhibition evaluation revealed important findings about how, and under what conditions, story and interactivity function to convey message: they can work together or compete.

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