Museum Camp

Abbott Square (Team Labyrinth)

Team Members

Kim Cook, Megan DiRienzo, Mark Punzal, Rob Darrow

What was your hypothesis?

Novel alterations of pathways increase engagement between people and the place.

What indicator did you measure?

Shared positive experiences (interactions between people and with a place).

How did you measure it?

Self reported number of new interactions. Observation.

What did you learn?

• Adding alterations to an interstitial space increases people’s acknowledgement and awareness of that space as evidenced through researcher’s observations of engagement by passers-by with the novel pathway.
• Adding at least one novel change to an interstitial space can increase social engagement, but adding multiple alterations may actually decrease social engagement as evidenced by the respondents who indicated they did or did not interact with a new person within the studied space. (see graph #)
• Youth seem more inclined to interact with the novel pathway and often triggered adult participation. Young people also spent more extended periods of time finding alternative ways of interacting with the novel path.
• Adults unaccompanied by children, who did engage with the novel pathway, tended to pause, smile, and then choose to engage suggesting a possible impact with regard to state of mind.
• Other variables not factored for in research design are considerations that may have impacted the findings – but are not accounted for including: a) Volume of traffic flow; b) Timing of other events occurring nearby; c) Placement of data collection station;
In particular this is potentially meaningful when considering the variation in function for the environment between destination as opposed to a passage on the way to a destination such as a scheduled event in a neighboring environment i.e. MAH or Vino.
• Additional insight may have been gained if it were possible to compare total respondents and/or participants to total individuals and families that were in the space at the time of the study.
• Revelation that the survey activity – polling at end where participants placed a token in a bucket to indicate their answer – was a form of engagement in itself.
• Novel pathway was more engaged in than the selfie station (Hashtag was not used by any participants as tracked by keyhole.co).

Any surprises?

Flow of traffic in Abbott Square increased at 6:30.