The ACMI Lens at six weeks: “you’ve collected half a million objects”
By: Seb Chan
Tags: Nfc, Design, Musetech, Museums, Interaction Design

Image courtesy ACMI 2021

Since we opened on February 11, the ACMI Lens has been used by visitors to collect just over half a million objects. Moving through the galleries visitors use the Lens to collect what they are interested in to take home and, if they are interested, look at later. The Lens is free, it doesn’t run out of batteries, it doesn’t interrupt your flow with all your social media notifications, and it doubles as a nice souvenir.

We knew people love collecting things. And we also knew that as a museum of screen culture — a culture that is all around us shaping our politics, cultural discourse, our society, even more so after a year of COVID-19 — that it was vital to connect the time and interest people spend inside ACMI to affect their screen choices after they’ve left. But I don’t think we expected this velocity of use.

Also, for ACMI, irrespective of whether a visitor logs in to see what they collected, an anonymous data trail is left behind. The insights from this data trail will help us continue to design better exhibitions, understand changing visitor interests and behaviour, and figure out what the real questions a museum needs to ask of its visitors.

Like all technologies, the Lens and the data it generates is not neutral. We are aware of how it potentially instrumentalizes the idea of a ‘museum visit’, and the way that the data it generates could be used to further instrumentalize the museum and its contents. A society that needs and only values its cultural institutions and their contents when they ‘prove their value’ in quantitative ways is not a progressive society. Our awareness of this ‘data politics’ is why visitors can delete their visits from our database, and can also choose not to use a Lens. There is nothing at ACMI that cannot be accessed only with a Lens — all the ‘bonus content’ is online on the ACMI website, the Lens is a utility for filtering that web content by what you have collected on your day out.

The Lens is ‘scaffolding’ for connecting a physical experience in out galleries to outside the museum experience afterwards. It is part of, not the entirety of, a way of impacting a visitor’s media choices after they have visited ACMI.

In the museum

We expected that peak Lens collecting would occur in the jam-packed first section of the Story of the Moving Image — which is also when the Lens is a new and novel part of a visit. It is also when the Lens is most likely to be in a visitor’s hand, and least likely to be in their pocket.

We are reassured by the data that as the exhibition spreads out, and routes through the rest of galleries diverge, that collecting continues even in the deepest more hidden corners. Even the 50th most collected item is still being collected by 1 in 8 visitors.

Interestingly, there is a fair bit of correlation between the most-Instagrammed and the most collected at the top of the list. Here are some selected highlights.

Pepper’s ghost effect, triangles, cyan and red, Taree Mackenzie, 2018, photography Egmont Conteras, ACMI

At the beginning of the exhibition:

42.5% collect Taree Mackenzie’s photogenic Peppers Ghost

40% collect the Cuphead zoetrope

30.9% collect Vicki Couzens’ Yanmeeyarr, the first object and the first label in the exhibition

Deeper in the exhibition:

30.9% collect the group of objects related to The Piano

24.4% collect the costumes from The Last Emperor

21.6% collect the character designs from The Lego Movie

21% collect the Mad Max film series associated with the V8 Interceptor

14.5% collect set designs from Australian animated series Little J & Big Cuz

13.1% collect set design details from Sweet Country

Towards the end of the exhibition:

20.9% collect Daniel Crooks’ Phantom Ride

15.6% collect the home videos of the Memory Garden

15.2% collect Oskar Fishinger’s Raumlichtkunst

12.2% collect Sari Braithwaite, Conor Bateman, & Field Carr’s You Will See Me

The least collected items are those on our playlist labels — items that are only collectible when they are on screen such as music videos. Slightly more popular than these are those on interactive labels that let visitors select what they want to collect from larger groups of items. If we think of these as being on-display only when they are also on-screen, then their lower collection rates make sense — and, of course, for the interactive labels we continue to make interface tweaks to encourage more interaction. This early data confirms some of our earlier design research that suggested that simplifying visitor choices would greatly increase engagement with specific objects and experiences — in other words, yes, ‘less is more’.

We also know that visitors have been loving our interactive experiences. So far they have saved 11,169 flip books, 6,009 Edit Line collages, and 4,504 Foley scenes.

We’re still working through the data on the Constellation experience where visitors can explore the connections between what they have collected and films, TV shows, artworks and videogames in the wider universe of screen content. We know visitors are collecting even more items there! We will report on that when we cross the 1 million mark.

The post-visit

It is quite a different picture that emerges when we look at what visitors look at online after their visit. Again from our design research and our experience with ACMI’s Wonderland exhibition and other similar projects, we knew that in a group of visitors — a family of four, for example — that the likelihood of all visitors logging in afterwards was extremely low. Instead a group would more likely log into a single Lens even if they had all used one individually.

With visitors collecting an average of 18 items in a single visit, we are seeing a different pattern of online behaviour. Those who login — 1 in 5 — are looking at two or three items per visit. This makes sense when we think about the choice paralysis faced by people with a scrolling list of 18-ish items each competing for their web browser attention.

Unlike the most-collected in-gallery which have a curve of popularity, online the most-visited are much flatter and spread. The most visited is only a few percentage greater than the least visited which is an indication of the diversity of interest in the flatter, interchangeable, landscape of an online database in contrast to the highly ‘designed’ exhibition gallery full of different cadences.

Looking at the post-visit on a smartphone, ACMI 2021

Online the most re-visited items are:

5% look at the pages associated with the Cuphead zoetrope

3% look at the pages associated with the Taree Mackenzie’s Peppers Ghost

3% look at the pages associated with the Dreamworks animation pitch

2% look at the pages associated with the Daniel Crooks’ Phantom Ride

2% look at the pages associated with the Memory Garden

Next steps

The next step are looking for patterns in this morass of data — and then talking to visitors about what and why they are collecting, and what they hope to see online. For museologists, there are many other potential research questions such as ‘does the presence of the Lens reduce the in-gallery reading of labels whilst collecting goes up?’, ‘how does the physical action of collecting affect experiential memory?’. And for interaction designers, ‘does the physicality of the Lens as a souvenir — more than what is being collected — influence post-visit use?’, ‘how might different ways of ordering and displaying the post-visit online experience affect behaviour?’.

Onwards.