Project Title: "Shop Life" Interactive Shop Counter    

Museum/ Institution: Lower East Side Tenement Museum 

Media Category:  Interactive Surfaces

Program Created: 2012 

Program URL: http://www.tenement.org/shoplife.html 

Project Image(s) and/or Video

Media Source(s)/Credit(s):

Photograph by Keiko Niwa, courtesy Lower East Side Tenement Museum.

Video courtesy of East Side Tenement Museum http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFEQ76XF0DM

Program Description: (150-250 words)

The Tenement Museum’s “Shop Life” exhibit takes visitors on an immersive tour of the businesses formerly located within the 97 Orchard Street building, providing further immersion through touch screens and interactive surfaces. The Tenement Museum’s first foray into digital media featured a user-directed interactive designed by the firm Potion. This large interactive shop counter encourages visitors to place artifacts from the exhibit onto the counter, thereby triggering RFID (radio-frequency identification) tags to retrieve images, audio, and primary documents related the artifacts selected by the visitor

[1]. A nineteenth century telephone is also available for visitor use, providing an additional physical and audio access point. Touch screen capability allows visitors to design their own experience, enlarging and minimizing images and selecting highlighted text for more information. Behind the interactive counter, videos of today’s East Side store owners are projected onto the wall to encourage visitors to make contemporary connections to the exhibit content.[1] Shop Life. Potion. Retrieved from http://www.potiondesign.com/project/shop-life/.

Firsthand or secondary review/critique: (150-250 words) 

When I visited the exhibit shortly after its opening, I was impressed by its accessibility and commitment to meeting the needs of all types of visitors. More than just being physically accessible (unlike most other Tenement Museum tours and exhibits), Shop Life provided multiple access points to the exhibit content through its interactive counter installation. Visitors could physically handle artifacts, listen to audio clips, and watch videos—and thereby were presented with more opportunities to engage with the exhibit. Despite the dominance of this interactive in both size and in appropriation of visitor attention, the counter was obviously designed to encourage—and not replace—human interaction and discussion, evidenced primarily by the active presence of a tour guide. The educator leading my tour encouraged us to explore independently, and then reconvene to share our experiences and favorite artifacts.

The exhibit covers over 100 years of content, featuring a breadth of material that was presented seamlessly by the interactive counter; as it allowed for the stories of several extremely diverse families separated by time to be told within one small space, the exhibit would have been much less impactful without this interactive.

Technologies incorporated: Video projection, touch screen, audio 

Internally or externally produced: Project was externally designed by Potion with content created by museum staff.

Entry Contributor and Date: Claire Berge, 1/29/14   

Related projects: none known