Interactive Challenges 3: Relevance

- relevance; how do you ensure that the interactions are relevant to the institution's mission. For example, a museum, as a "center of culture" or an institution of learning, would likely want any interactions to increase the body of knowledge around any particular item, either by fostering richer subjective discussions or improving the body of factual knowledge.

This is fairly difficult to get around; we're open to ideas, but as of right now we'll be encouraging institutions to develop prompts and questions for guests to respond to in three ways
- by requesting that guests help enhance objective and factual data (in a wiki-style format)
- questions that prompt subjective responses which can then be displayed at random or tailored to a particular user's demographic profile, or
- an enhanced display format such as a word cloud, which emphasizes no particular response or comment, but enables users to see the aggregate reaction, and then respond to that.
Second, the nature of a product that flexibly delivers educational content to any user with an enabled device, means that other educational organizations may also have a need for it. In her words: "a product that serves an organizational or grassroots need...what if there's something that helps kids learn cool stuff about Cambridge, and maybe the schools create it. It still may be a valuable enterprise” This suggestion helped deepen our drive to look beyond the art community and museum community. As a result, we've spent some time speaking with various self-guided walking tour publishers, and trying to see if they would interested in using the tools we develop as a channel to sell and market their content.

Third and finally, the need for a product that allows institutions link their works to other, already existing, bodies of knowledge. This would allow institutions to partner with other content providers and facilitate access to these other sources for guests who want to follow up.

This adds on the second point; by content creators to connect disparate bodies of knowledge; guests get the benefit of learning from several sources, many with different perspectives and goals, and institutions benefit by building a greater body of knowlege around their collections and exhibits than would otherwise exist.

These various solutions will be built into our tools, and I'll provide greater detail (as well as screenshots) as they come ready.

Thanks for reading
Ayo