Response to Review

As Project Director for YOU! The Experience, I feel it’s important to respond to the review posted by Beverly Serrell. The goal of this posting is not to present an overview of YOU! The Experience or its objectives, but rather to respond to several statements in the review article; some of which are factually incorrect and others which reflect either the author’s bias or the superficiality of the conclusions.

To clarify specific points from Serrell’s article:

YOU! The Experience is located on the Museum’s north balcony; a U-shaped space that has 3 access points due to the configuration of the >100 year-old building. The 8 areas that comprise the exhibit are designed to be explored in any order. The 2 key entry points (used by the majority of guests) have entry panels that serve to orient guests and set the stage for what’s to come. Each area has its own theme, identified by a “signpost” graphic panel and unified by a concise color scheme; for example, the “Your Future” area mentioned in the review article. The author apparently came into the exhibit through the 3rd and lesser-used entry point and did not see the entry panels.

The plastinated specimens are indeed from Gunther von Hagens’ Institute for Plastination (IfP) and are presented in 9 display cases integrated throughout the exhibition. The author wondered why the plastinates are not identified as originating from von Hagens. In fact they are—on 2 graphic panels placed at either end of the overall collection. We chose not to incorporate the IfP or von Hagens’ information within each display case as the exhibition is not about Gunther von Hagens or Body Worlds. The exhibition is about personal health and wellbeing; your body, your mind, your choices, your environment and medicine. Museum volunteers are frequently stationed in the YOU! exhibition near the plastinates to answer questions. Through their feedback, we have discovered that many people do not realize the specimens are real and we plan to include labels that make this clear to all of our guests.

The Hamster Wheel (part of the area “Your Movement”) was indeed closed down for a period of time, due to a faulty bearing, not as the author stated to “kids puking in the wheel.”

The author complained of “pseudointeractivity and too much text.” In this 15,000 square foot exhibition with nearly 50 interactive experiences, there is ONE set of lift panels that interpret research data on the subject of happiness, grounding an obviously challenging area of study in academic research. There isn’t a single computer screen in the entire exhibit that is used to “get people to read more text.” Other statements reflect a superficiality of both observation and conclusion. For example a “push a button to look into a black box” refers to a series of view ports that illustrate the vast changes in portion size of 5 different common food items; comparing 35 years ago to today. Pushing the button illuminates the model inside the view port—representing the food item’s typical portion size from 1975. A brief moment later, the image of today’s portion size is superimposed, using a “pepper’s ghost” lighting trick—a comparison that doesn’t fail to catch people’s attention.

The Future Forum does not in fact have “sensors in the stools.” It is designed to tally votes through a series of questions throughout the activity, none of which require yes/no answers, so it’s unclear what the author was thinking from her remarks. As part of a remedial evaluation study, we discovered that all participants in the evaluation found the activity enjoyable and useful and would not change the length. Due to the statistical tallying and nested decisions inherent in the activity, visitors aren’t allowed to join in once the program has started. Instead, they are encouraged to join the next session in a few minutes.

We’re glad the author enjoyed 100 Things to Do. The idea of inviting visitors to think about their personal goals and to make selections proved to be immensely popular, even during early paper-based prototyping. We’ve observed families working together, very young children insisting that their parents read all the goals to them so they can make their own selections, and conversations among visitors during the activity. In the end, the goal of the exhibit is to inspire visitors to push the boundaries of their potential, not only inside the museum, but also at home and for a lifetime.

We’re also glad the author appreciated the display of prenatal development specimens. Accompanying this display are two other experiences; one is the small theater media piece, Fantastic Journey, a seven-minute computer-generated animation that immerses guests in the story of human prenatal development from conception to birth. The author commented “nothing real there.” The media piece is not “real” in the sense of actual intrauterine cinematography, but it illustrates real biological processes, spanning the scale of the microscopic beginnings to birth. The third piece in this gallery, Make Room For Baby was not mentioned, but has proven to be enormously impactful for our guests. This exhibit visually illustrates the effects of the developing fetus on the mother’s body. To present a perspective on prenatal development not often seen, guests control the progress of gestation, triggering a series of animations along with quotes from pregnant women.

While we anticipated Make Room for Baby would resonate most strongly with our adult female audience, we have also found that males, as well as younger visitors are remarkably impacted by it. A young girl (about 8 years old) was overheard by a staff member to say to her mother that she wanted to talk about what she’d seen on the way home in the car, while an adult male teacher who attended an educator’s open house was very impressed with the piece; making a point of telling us that he felt that while boys and men would perhaps be a bit nervous to approach it at first, he believed it was a great experience and felt that others would find it very powerful.

The author felt no personal connection with the faces in Laugh Garden. This piece was designed as a social experience— guests engage with each other as well as move vigorously to get the faces to laugh harder. And that is precisely what happens. Groups of kids and families are frequently observed laughing together and interacting with each other as they experience Laugh Garden. We could have taken a very literal approach and presented information about laughter’s positive effect on health, but here and in many other places throughout YOU!, we chose not to do so.

The Giant Heart is actually not (as stated in the review) a “giant flat screen video” and the off-hand mention of the >13 ft heart beating in time with your own heart rate is curious as this feature, and the fact that guests can control views of the heart, from the exterior to various interior views have made a huge impact on our audiences. The Giant Heart is actually a 3-dimensional sculpture made of a perforated material that allows for views of both the exterior and the interior, projected from both the front and the rear of the structure. Highly realistic CG animation (produced by XVIVO; creator of some of the most highly regarded medical and biological animation) presents authentic views of the heart and various aspects of its function. Accompanying the heart are two multi-user interactive table experiences that explore the biology of blood and the heart as a metaphorical symbol of love and attachment. Once again, our aim here was to move beyond traditional didactic methods to shed light on the multilayered structure, function and nature of the heart, while connecting to each visitor’s pulse.

While we expected children to enjoy making the Giant Heart beat with in time with their own, we’ve been surprised by the way adults have also been drawn to this opportunity—and have drawn conclusions from it. During installation, construction workers frequently took breaks from their work to check their pulse on the Giant Heart. Similarly, during a meeting with the press, a reporter who was winded from climbing MSI’s stairs noted his racing heartbeat and began musing on the importance of exercise. After opening day, a cardiologist spent 40 minutes at the Giant Heart talking with the facilitator and checking out the interactives, which he then pronounced “amazing". Other users have been overheard pointing out which valve they or their family members have had replaced or urging one another to get their cholesterol checked. In short, the Giant Heart serves as a de facto personal health assessment tool that people enjoy using.

As hoped, the two accompanying media tables (What’s In Your Blood? and The Chemistry Between Us) serve as informative, experiential complements to the Giant Heart. Children in the Museum’s target age range (ages 8-14) are enthusiastic about the tables and readily express biological processes they’ve observed in their own words—e.g. “Red blood cells carry oxygen to the body!” or “Platelets fix holes in your skin.”—to Museum floor staff. Equally important the tables’ playful non-linear interactivity sparks conversations among visitors as they collectively guide the action in the virtual worlds at their fingertips.

A few unsolicited comments from guests:
“…knocked one out of the park with the new You! exhibit. Very, very well done and as an educator, native of the Chicago area, parent (and grandparent), and medical visualizer, I commend the tremendous effort. The beauty and tastefulness is extraordinary, and as a kid who grew up in the museum (my favorite), this is the brightest and best."

Two gentlemen approached a facilitator to ask about the “giant, walk-through heart.” The facilitator explained that it had been replaced with the new interactive heart. The facilitator showed them all the cool things it could do. Later the guests came back to the facilitator to say “this new heart is my favorite heart.”

YOU! The Experience, benefited greatly from extensive front end and formative research conducted throughout the project. We worked with advisory committees of more than 30 respected experts, educators and community leaders, a youth advisory group of 10-14 year-olds, focus groups and conducted in-depth prototyping of many of the exhibition’s components with museum visitors, to provide a solid grounding and mechanism for ongoing feedback. While we have not completed summative evaluation as yet, we have amassed considerable feedback from museum members, educators and the general public through a combination of surveys, feedback from floorstaff working in the space and anecdotal remarks and emailed comments from museum guests. The overwhelming majority of guests, whether from the general public or our school audiences have been extraordinarily enthusiastic about YOU! The Experience. Guests have commented frequently how comfortable they feel in the space, the very high degree of interactivity, the uniqueness of the experiences and from our educator’s audiences, how valuable it is as a teaching tool. We look forward to sharing the results of summative evaluation with the community in the coming months. We consider YOU! to be an ongoing, organic exhibition in which we continue to seek and act upon constructive feedback as well as provide updates on content and experience delivery in years to come.

We applaud Denver’s new health exhibition and wish them much success. We are also very pleased with the outcome of YOU! for MSI’s audiences. YOU! acknowledges that everything in our lives shapes our health—from our biology and personal behavior to our environment and our medical care. Living well and enhancing our personal wellbeing requires reaching further into ourselves, and recognizing that we each make our own unique pathway toward living better. Our goal was to create meaningful, memorable experiences that appeal to and resonate with a very wide variety of visitors and across age groups; a goal that our guests say has been realized even beyond our expectations.