Questioning the visitor

This weekend, I went to the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The geology/paleontology room features the skeleton of the most complete pygmy mammoth ever found. The skeleton was found on one of the local Channel Islands, and pygmy mammoths have only ever been found on islands. 

While circling the exhibit, I was faced with an unexpected question: 

Why do I think pygmy mammoths lived only on islands?

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Nina Simon talks a lot about the value of asking museum visitors question in the chapter on social objects of her Participatory Museum. The topic of reflection questions and social objects go hand in hand, as the object--whatever it may be in the museum--provides an opportune gateway for questioning. It's important to remember that in daily life questioning is often a contrary reaction or used as a method of testing. Reflection questions shouldn't attempt to yield a specific response, but should instead guide visitors to think.

While a museum shouldn't have a specific answer in mind for a reflection question, they should have a reason for asking a question. Simon says that a museum may ask questions because they want visitors to relate to the object, because they want visitors to interact with one another, or because they want visitors to provide the museum with information. I would add to the first point that one way visitors can relate to these objects is by drawing on their own well of knowledge.  While the "What's Your Theory" question didn't allow me to make a connection with my own life to the exhibit, it would have allowed me to draw on my own knowledge of animal migration and local geographic or geological history (if by chance I had any...). Instead, the theory it asked me to come up with limited me to draw only on what I had just learned from the exhibit. If a visitor hadn't been considering a theory already, they could easily walk by the question without giving it much thought. 

The question presented in the pygmy mammoth exhibit didn't seem to exist for any of the reasons Simon listed, but I would say that it did have a purpose. This question reinforces the fact that although there is currently a favored theory, the answer of how the pygmy mammoths ended up on the island is still debatable. It tells the visitor that what they are viewing is still an active point of research. In other words, this sign serves more to say something instead of to ask something. The question posed in this exhibit could, however, do both with a slight re-design of its presentation. 

 Simon says that the question should fit with the rest of the content presented with the exhibit so as to not look like it was haphazardly added as an afterthought. This exhibit achieves this quite well--the question display looks exactly like the other information stands. If a visitor hadn't been considering a theory already, they could easily walk by the prompt without giving it much thought. The exhibit could provide a way for the visitor to record their answer. Off the top of my head, I could see the stand having a chalkboard finish to allow visitors to fill in the blank using a colored stick of chalk. By having a space for answers to be recorded, it seems more likely that visitors (even the ones who don't share their answer) would consider the question more seriously than when only told to think of an answer.

The way a question is asked or presented is just as important as the question itself. That the question may be answered in some way is also integral to a complete experience involving questioning the visitor.