For my first Impulse-Post I have chosen my visit to the Children’s Museum FRida & FreD in Graz. One of the topics I am considering for my masters thesis is tangible interfaces and embodied interaction. I already looked into this topic last semester and have considered children and the setting of learning and (STEM Education) as an interesting target group and subject. Tangible Interfaces allows for a many different approaches, angles which I have been finding hard to narrow down. I visited the museum with two friends of mine that had come to visit. Both of them worked on the exhibition as interaction and graphic designers so it was really interesting to get their perspective on the production and development of such an installation. The Exhibition was about Data Security and designed in a medieval aesthetic. This setting created many fun metaphors for otherwise abstract and (especially for children) hard-to-grasp topics. Choosing a medieval theme for a modern issue is a really interesting approach in my opinion but although I was skeptical at first and wasn’t sure if it would translate well, I really liked the outcome. I found the analogies surprisingly clear, the only thing I can’t say for sure is that kids fully understood the meaning, as I wasn’t able to talk to any (we went just before closing hours). I was however able to ask the staff and they had mostly positive feedback!
I think „play“, learning through making and exploration/curiosity are additional interesting keywords here, and have prompted me to look into this a bit further. What I will say is that in some parts the exhibition did rely on screens, which is something I would consider removing, if possible as I felt this sometimes took away from the immersive „magical“ feeling that was created. Another interesting part that sparked my interest was the storytelling. While the different stations alone were interesting I really liked the fact that there was an overall „quest“ and a companion that appeared at every station. This gave the whole experience a slightly more structured and guided feeling.
The biggest take-away for me (apart from the inspiring and creative interactions I got to try out), is that I have two options on how to approach this topic. I either need to pin down a very specific topic to explore in this thesis or I could go in a more general direction with an explorative thesis-approach where I ask a research question that is something along the lines of „how can interactive installations be designed to be more tangible for children?“. From there I could experiment with creating design guidelines or principles that can be generally applied to tangible interfaces/interaction. With the other option would have to pick a really specific topic and focus on making this tangible through existing methods. So I could either focus on the system and methods themselves or on the topic (like Data Security in the case of the exhibition).
Exhibition PDF: https://fridaundfred.at/wp-content/uploads/Ff_Damals-1410_Paedagogisches-Handbuch.pdf
tangible interfaces (a cool example): https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3490149.3502252
learning through making: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11528-017-0172-6
