Designing for Diverse Museum Visitors' Identity Exploration Around Inventiveness

• In Event: Unpacking Situated Perspectives on Identity, Engagement, and Motivation: Implications for Designing Equitable Learning Environments

Abstract

Purpose
Inventiveness—the capacity to generate creative solutions to complex problems—has been highlighted as central for personal and societal success in the 21st century (OECD, 2008). However, promoting people’s inventiveness is challenging (Sawyer, 2015). The Smithsonian Institution’s Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation (LC; https://invention.si.edu/) is currently designing a museum exhibition for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH) aiming to promote visitors’ inventiveness. The design aims to garner a broad appeal through a focus on inventions in sports, and prioritizes promoting inventiveness among visitors from groups underrepresented in the innovation ecosystem--adolescent girls, African American boys, and people with disabilities. In this presentation, we describe findings from a first set of focus groups conducted to inform the exhibition design.

Theoretical perspective
The LC has conceptualized inventiveness as an identity aspect; and, recently, according to the Dynamic Systems Model of Role Identity (Author, 2017; DSMRI). The DSMRI defines identity as a complex dynamic system (CDS) comprising the social-cultural roles a person occupies in life—their role identities. Each role identity is a CDS comprising a network of motivational constructs from four role-related components—beliefs about the world, self-perceptions, goals, and perceived action possibilities. These identity components continuously emerge, ebb, and flow in the situation through mutually informing participation in cultural activities and agentic identity exploration. From this perspective, inventiveness involves beliefs, goals, self-perceptions, and action possibilities oriented towards identifying creative solutions for complex problems within a person’s different role identities. Thus, the exhibition’s goal is to engage visitors in reformulating components of existing role identities as more inventive. The design principles include promoting visitors’ perceived self-relevance of the inventive content, triggering identity exploration, facilitating sense of safety to explore their identity, and scaffolding identity exploration actions (Author, 2016).

Methods
The four-person focus groups (FC) involved participants in a virtual tour of an initial rendering of central features of the exhibition, which highlights inventions by women and people of color. Participants were guided to adopt the role identity of a visitor, indicate decisions as visitor on Jamboard (jamboard.google.com), and respond to reflective prompts aiming to engage them in exploring their identity as inventive.

Data sources
Data included a partial rendering of the exhibition, the protocol, Jamboard responses, and the FC transcripts.

Results
Analysis is underway. Findings from two FCs with diverse adolescent girls highlight the situated production of participants’ responses within the role identities of “focus group participant”—who they constructed themselves to be in the focus group context—and how these role identities were framed by the protocol and the social positioning and interactions with the facilitator and other participants. In addition, the analysis highlighted shared and diverse conceptions of inventors and of being inventive, self-relevance of inventive content to different role identities, and developmental readiness for identity exploration.

Significance
The study has implications for a theory of inventiveness as an identity aspect, methodology for informing environmental design, and the design for engaging diverse museum visitors in identity exploration.

Authors

• Avi Kaplan, Temple University

• Joanna K. Garner, The Center for Educational Partnerships

• Amani Rush, Temple University

• Sharon Klotz, Smithsonian Instution - Lemelson Center

• Monica M Smith, Smithsonian's Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation