"It Seems Like Such a Simple Thing": Challenges and Opportunities for Giving Credit in Science Museums
Kate Blomgren (Linköping University ), Derya Akbaba (KTH Royal Institute of Technology), Ryan Wyatt (California Academy of Sciences), Miriah Meyer (Linköping University)
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Presentation
- Session
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- Time
- Thursday, Nov 12, 11:12 – 11:24 (US/Eastern) · session 10:00 – 11:30
- Room
- Hall America center
- Presenting from
- Boston
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Abstract
Science museums are a rich environment for visualization research where researchers have designed new visualizations, interaction modalities, and educational approaches. But they are also socio-technical places where power, context, and organizational structures influence how science communication is produced and perceived. In this paper, we draw on our collaboration with a local science museum, where we worked on creating a new interactive digital exhibit. Through this process, we encountered a socio-technical phenomenon: these exhibits rarely acknowledge the work or people behind them. We explored the reasons for this invisibility through an interview study with science museum staff and leadership. Our results reveal crediting of interactive exhibits to be a complex, situated challenge. This challenge, however, offers visualization research more than a practical problem to solve — it is an opportunity to reframe credit as a socio-technical design space, one where visualization can make visible not only the outcomes of science, but the processes and people that produce it. A free copy of this paper and all supplemental materials are available at https://osf.io/9vyu3
For Practitioners
This paper is relevant to practitioners who design, manage, and produce interactive museum exhibits, including exhibit designers, developers, project managers, museum leaders, and science communicators. The findings can help organizations identify barriers to contributor recognition and develop more transparent crediting practices for collaborative exhibit production. Beyond museums, the paper's framing of credit as a socio-technical practice is relevant to other collaborative production contexts, such as science centers and informal learning environments. Practitioners can use the identified challenges and opportunities to evaluate and improve how contributions are documented, recognized, and communicated.