Animation and Museums

“Museums are boring.” That’s the reason I usually hear in some form or another when I chat with friends and family who aren’t big museum fans. “Museums are tiring,” and “there’s so much to read.” “They have so many rooms,” and yes, “they’re boring.” And if a museum isn’t boring, that’s usually because it’s a hyperenganging one bursting with activities designed just for children.

As a writer and information designer, I get where they’re coming from. In some cases, it’s true. Museums can be boring. When their exhibits are designed with only the artifacts and not the visitors in mind, it takes extra effort for people to engage with the material. Although every museum’s collection is more than likely bursting with interesting objects, they aren’t always presented in ways that highlight those qualities.

But maybe being boring isn’t the museums’ fault. When you look at the trajectory of their development as a whole, the story of why so many seem to share this trait becomes a bit clearer. Modern museums are a blend of older institutions, some of which prioritized visitors, but the majority of which did not. Take a look a this video. It goes over some of that history.

Like the difference between the exclusiveness of curiosity cabinets and the showmanship of Barnum’s American Museum, museums have historically danced on the line between public and private. When material was presented in these more recent iterations of the idea, it was often inherently shocking or mesmerizing, which naturally drew the interest of its viewers. When it wasn’t so naturally engaging, that was often because items were curated with highbrow intellectual engagement in mind. I have found that this latter thinking still carries on to this day. Many people who avoid museums do so because a visit to a museum seems to float on a different plane than other activities do. It’s like going to school, but there is no teacher around to explain the material.

Although the Babylonian princess Ennigaldi founded her museum some 2500 years ago, her labeling methods are still being used today in museums throughout the world. A label with basic information, often in phrases, is engaging to a scholar who already knows the context of an object, but for most of the everyday public, labels like this alone alienate rather than interest them. Why go to a museum if rather than helping you learn, it reminds you of what you don’t know? 

Additional tools like diagrams and longer text descriptions can be helpful, and since collections range in content type, so can the tools used to communicate information about them. Enter animation. Research has shown that animation is more effective in teaching material to people with all levels of background in the material than static content alone (Dasu, Ma, Ma, & Frazier, 2019). Besides, since it’s such an adaptable medium, it’s flexible enough to fit the many subjects museums cover.

More than likely, if you’ve been to a relatively well-funded museum within the past few years, you probably came across some form of animation while you were there. Some are large, attention-grabbing installations, and others are smaller ones that are easier to miss, but all play a role in helping museums share information with visitors.

What you might not have realized, however, is that museums are using animation well beyond the examples you may have seen in person. There are three main categories that cover these uses.

Although these categories are not universally used in the field of museum studies, I’ve divided some examples of animation between them because each of the three categories tends to use animation for similar purposes.

“[Augmented reality] installations transform today’s commonplace big screen documentary into kinesthetic and phenomenological encounters with the places they depict”

– Kenderdine, 2013

“When the first museum apps were introduced a few years ago, they were mostly guides to a physical location, including directions, admission fees, and calendars of events. Today museums are producing a wide range of content for all ages.”

– Lamb & Johnson, 2015

Although not every museum is able to afford the investment of costly multimedia experiences, any casual museum visitor will see that they are sprouting up in more and more institutions. After all, an engaging use of animation can take many forms. Not every exhibit would benefit from an expensive 4D film, and smaller, less costly experiences, like, for example, a looping video on a comfortably-sized TV screen, can be made with fairly pedestrian software. Nearly every museum has the budget for some animation.

That being said, there is also the issue of whether or not animation is necessary or even possible for some material. Animated maps, a common interactive table subject, are wonderful for a history museum, but they wouldn’t necessarily translate as well to an airy,  minimalist art gallery. When researchers attempted to visualize metagenomics for a science museum, they found that even though visualizations are becoming more and more common in science, they were entering new territory by bringing metagenomics to a museum audience (Dasu et al., 2019). Some information just lends itself to animation more readily. Besides, there is still debate in the field among museum educators as to whether new media is the right way to go. (Kraemer, 2014)

Overall, the use of animation in museums has been proven to be popular enough to generate  plenty of forms of it, and more than likely, these will continue to shift and grow as technology develops, bringing museums themselves along with them.