ArtLinks: Fostering Social Awareness and Reflection in Museums

Technologies in museums often support learning goals, providing information about exhibits. However, museum visitors also desire meaningful experiences and enjoy the social aspects of museum-going, values ignored by most museum technologies. We present ArtLinks, a visualization with three goals: helping visitors make connections to exhibits and other visitors by highlighting those visitors who share their thoughts; encouraging visitors' reflection on the social and liminal aspects of museum-going and their expectations of technology in museums; and doing this with transparency, aligning aesthetically pleasing elements of the design with the goals of connection and reflection. Deploying ArtLinks revealed that people have strong expectations of technology as an information appliance. Despite these expectations, people valued connections to other people, both for their own sake and as a way to support meaningful experience. We also found several of our design choices in the name of transparency led to unforeseen tradeoffs between the social and the liminal.