Looking Outside the Museum Field for Inspiration

The first thing that comes to my mind when thinking of non-museum context that encourages active engagement and audience participation is the TV show Dora the Explorer. This came to mind because my little sister is always watching it. The engagement structure is really simple. Dora or the host ask a question and gives the audience a little time to answer the question. Then later praised the audience for doing a great job. I think this is a poor design for the contributor because the contributor doesn’t really know if the audience is really participating. But on the other hand, it’s more for the audience so it works out. Like children TV shows, talks show also encourages audience participation. For example like Jimmy Kimmel Live talk show. One of the engagement is usually they ask the audience to video tape them doing something “horrible” to their love ones and then post it up on YouTube. Unlike the children’s TV show they actually get to see the engagement and then analyze the engagement for entertainment. I don’t see any principles here that applies to my partner and my work but the contextual of our class room could. In our class room we are encourages to participate with each other and then the whole class. How the class room is set up is we usually work together in a small group or by ourselves and then as one big group and go over the context we were assign. Then at the end of class we should have fully understood the context we were assign. This is kind of like our exhibit because we don’t have a rule that the participants can’t work together. After the audience analyze our exhibit they can flip up the sign and see the truth behind the image. This is kind of like our class room engagement because they work together if they chose to and then find out the true importance at the end.