Museum Interaction Geography | Interaction Geography

Animating a child's 1 hour museum visit. This animation video shows the movement of a six year old boy named Blake across an approximately 1 hour museum visit. Movement is shown across a floorplan and as it unfolds upwards in a space-time view. In this space-time view, the z-axis encodes time, and the x/y axes correspond to the floor plan. Thicker lines in the space-time view indicate periods of time when Blake is not moving. Blake's movement is shown as a red path where blue segments of Blake's path indicate gallery spaces where he is running.

Animating Blake's Tour. This video animation shows the movement of a six year old boy named Blake (blue path) and Adhir (25 years old, orange path) during their approximately 9 minute visit to a museum gallery space together — one of the gallery spaces where Blake is running as identified in the previous figure. Once again, movement is shown across a floorplan and as it unfolds upwards in a space-time view. In this space-time view, the z-axis encodes time, and the x/y axes correspond to the floor plan. Thicker lines in the space-time view indicate periods of time when they are not moving. A key insight visible and experienced through this visualization is Blake's several attempts to run back and forth across the gallery space trying to move Adhir away from an exhibit focusing on Hank Williams. Blake is finally successful on leading Adhir on a 'tour' of the gallery when their paths intertwine mid-way through their visit.

Animating the Bluegrass Family's visit to this gallery space. This video animation shows the movement of all five family members of this family (called the Bluegrass Family) during their approximately 9 minute visit to this gallery space.

Related Publications

Shapiro, B.R., Hall, R., & Owens, D. (2017). Developing & Using Interaction Geography in a Museum. International Journal of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning, 12(4), 377-399.

Shapiro, B.R., & Hall, R. (2018). Personal Curation in a Museum. In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, CSCW, Article 158. ACM, New York, NY.

Shapiro, B.R., & Silvis, D. (2025). Animated Movements, Animating Methods: An Interaction Geography Approach to Space and Affect in Early Childhood Education. Journal of Early Childhood Literacy.