A Monologue About Dialogue
Steve Dietz
in Expanding the Center
Walker Art Center and Herzog & de Meuron
Andrew Blauvelt, ed.
October 2005
A table means does it not my dear it means a whole steadiness.
--Gertrude Stein
There are some famous tables, such as the round table of Arthurian legend, but mostly tables are sites of or for some transaction, whether it is breaking bread at the Last Supper or breaking rules and taking bribes under the table. In parliament, to table a motion is to delay its consideration. In common parlance, to put something on the table is to make it part of a negotiation. Table manners are societal mores, which may or may not be observed while indulging in neighborly table talk. Some tables are functionally specific, like coffee tables and pool tables. Sometimes the table signifies distance in a relationship, like Orson Welles sitting across a gulf of table from Ruth Warrick in Citizen Kane, while at other times there is a forced intimacy as when Sidney Poitier comes to dinner. Judy Chicago'sDinner Table brought to the table silenced and neglected historical figures for public attention. Even in the symbolic world of the periodic table, conversion tables, and database tables, the table's function is explicit, to create a relationship: 1 euro = $1.25, etc.
Tables have the property of what the psychologist James Gibson called an affordance. That is, to a large degree, the functions of a table are self-explanatory from its form. Even without the cloth napkins, fine china, and multiple utensils, we almost intuitively know what a banquet table is for, while the tête-à-tête of a small table for two seems equally natural, even without the mood lighting. Tables also have an accretion of meanings based on a long history of actual, linguistic, and symbolic uses. For ubiquitous computing researcher Rich Gold, because objects have affordances and meanings, they are ideal sites to embed computation. You don't have to read a manual to know how a table works, so if you have a need that can take advantage of this embedded knowledge, you are that much closer to a solution.
For a decade or more, museums and other cultural institutions have increasingly focused on two key ideas in relation to educating their audiences, which is one of their core functions. Visiting a museum is often if not predominantly social. We attend with our families and friends or even with other strangers as part of a docent tour, for example. And different people learn in different ways. Some learn best by looking; some prefer reading labels; while others learn better by doing. This is admittedly a simplification, but the idea of what is now called the Dialog Table is to use the affordances and meanings associated with tables in conjunction with the flexibility and responsiveness of computer-based information systems to "deliver" rewarding and compelling experiences in a manner that is easily graspable, responsive to personal learning styles, and which encourages social interactions in the process.
This is the brief the Walker Art Center used to approach approximately 30 artists, designers, and architects for what was then called the "telematic table."
We are envisioning a human-scaled interface that is neither a standard desktop computer nor a public kiosk, but which viscerally engages the user; encourages social interaction among groups of people, can be networked and adapt to a variety of situations and museum spaces. Like an ordinary table, the telematic table is a space of gathering and exchange. It will give its users access to the Walker's multidisciplinary collections and resources, foster curiosity and inquiry into the museum's information assets, and create a setting for social interaction and dialogue among groups of visitors.
The response was invigoratingly varied and ranged from proposals that went "beyond the reading table" to a future in which book icons would contain entire libraries and users would wave wand scanners to turn blank books into "Magritte books" to an interactive glass wall with holographic AI characters "smartalec" and "Skinnymalink" to cocktail glasses - an extension of the bar "table"? - to "order" information about an artwork of interest and toast someone else's glass to exchange that information.
To ensure a range of perspectives in reviewing the proposals, Andrew Blauvelt, Design Director, Steve Dietz, Curator of New Media, Sarah Schultz, Director of Education, and Philippe Vergne, Visual Arts Curator reviewed all of the proposals submitted judging them according to the following criteria:
Customization - how much of the project involved customized software and/or hardware? We wanted off-the-shelf components and open access to the software as much as possible to make maintenance and updating as efficient and economical as possible. Sociable Learning - to what extent did the table's properties encourage learning that was social and/or collaborative? Network - could the tables be networked and what was the interaction like between remote locations? Initially, due to cost considerations, remotely connected. Practical - this covered both how realistic was it to implement the technology and functionality being proposed and also how realistic was it that users would easily "get it." Rewarding - How compelling was the experience itself and would the payoff in terms of information delivered and interactions encouraged be worth it for the user?
Five projects were chosen to further develop.
Sawad Brooks and Goil Amornvivat
Brooks and Amornvivat focused on the mutability of the table created a modular system from off-the-shelf parts, including plastic rollerblade wheels, so the table modules would be movable, that would, essentially, encourage different types of learning in different configurations. They named the configurations:
Sum Tryst - Kiss - Banquet
Sum Rendezvous - Buffet - Pool
Sum Dim Sum - Automat - Story time
Their idea was that the tables would be available in different configurations, so that visitors would have a choice of more intimate or more public versions to use. Like many of the proposals, Brooks and Amornvivat included a wall projection of what was happening on the tables at any given time. In general, the projection functions as both public spectacle but also a kind of primer on how to use the table for those waiting--or screwing up their courage - for a turn.
Interestingly, well before the current popularity of "locative media," the table modules had embedded GPS devices, so that the system would "know" where a table was at any given time, which would enable users to ask questions from one remote table to another - "what's happening over in the Hennepin Lounge."
Like most of the final proposals, Brooks and Amornvivat used a keyboard, a trackball, a drawing pad, and a microphone as input devices, so that there was a multi-modal capability that would allow different users to interact with the system differently.
Lot-ek Ada Tolla and Giuseppe Lignano, the principal partners of Lot-ek, created a modular system of units based on 4 seats. When a visitor sat down, it would automatically trigger a "how to" module on the screen embedded below the glass table surface. The distinctive feature of the Lot-ek proposal was an "image stream" running in a stripe down the middle of the table. This highways was fed by users "pushing" images from what they were looking at into the slipstream of the images flowing by. They could also "pull" images from the stream into their personal spaces for further investigation. The images on the table stream would also be streaming on the website, creating a virtual connection between what was being viewed in the building and online. To complete the media saturation, along the perimeter of the table, an LED strip could display messages from excerpts of what people were reading to announcements of upcoming events to poetic interventions. A highlight of the Lot-ek proposal was a movie clip showing a wedding feast with a woman laughing uncontrollably and neatly underlining the sociability of their table configuration and feast of information.
David Small Design
David Small Design has a strong predilection for tactile interfaces - "informative objects," as they refer to them. In their scenario, there is something that looks like a vertical light box. It is touch sensitive, so the visitor can select keywords, for instance, and the corresponding image on the panel would light up. Once an artwork of interest has been identified, the visitor places a blank token over the image of the artwork, which is then transferred to the token. The visitor can then take that token to other tables, each of which provides a specific kind of information--verbal-visual, audio, and video. By placing the token on the table, information about the artwork it represents is presented. Imagine placing chips on a roulette table, except instead of the table having a fixed grid of numbers, it responded to whatever type of chip was placed on the felt. Users who might normally flee from a keyboard are often very comfortable using "informative objects."
Julie Snow Architects and Post Tool Design
Julie Snow Architects' proposal focused on a kind of automated personalization of information retrieval. During a visit through the galleries, the visitor's ticket would have an embedded RFID tag that monitored which artworks the visitor spent more time in front of. Over the course of the visit, the system reading the RFID tag would create a data profile of the visitor's interests based on keywording and other factors related to the items of interest. So, for instance, a visitor's profile, to pick a mundane example, might emphasize sculpture from the 80s. Then, when the visitor approached the table, it would automatically display information not only about the works the visitor had spent the most time with but also other works in the collection that had a similar profile.
In an extension of this data profiling, Julie Snow Architects proposed that, if a visitor wanted, his or her interests could be displayed dynamically, while walking around, as a kind of aura. People with similar auras - the 80s sculpture aura, for instance - might be encouraged to interact about their mutual interests.
Marek Walczak, Jakub Segen, Michael McAllister, Peter Kennard
Walczak's team in some ways proposed the simplest form of the table. It is two semi-circles that people can stand or sit around and literally rub shoulders. One of the innovations of the table, developed by Segen, a former Bell Labs researcher, was a touch screen that multiple people - multiple hands - could use at the same time. Displayed - projected from below - in the center of the table, is a swarm of images of works in the collection. Visitors virtually grasp an image they're interested in and drag it in front of them, where it expands and displays further information. To heighten the sociability of the interface, similar to the Julie Snow Architects proposal, when people around the table are looking at work that have some kind of relationship, then Walczak's team proposed that a "fishing line" would connect the two works with the basis of the relationship displayed along the line. Again, the idea was that mutual interest in work might lead to further conversation.
Two other features of the Dialog Table, as they called it, were intended to memorialize and extend the visit. Visitors could make a virtual postcard of their favorite images. When they were done, a movie theater type ticket would print out with a unique ID and a website address. Later, visitors could log onto the website with the ID and view their postcard, as well as much deeper resources about the works they were interested in.
Making a Selection
Perhaps the most common response from the evaluation team was that we wished we could commission all of the tables - including some of the ones that hadn't made it as finalists. The process was truly a promise of what kind of experiences might be possible for museum audiences, once we could begin to think beyond the beige box on a table - even when tastefully encased in a walnut trim or stainless steel kiosk. We chose only one project, of course, but as a nfational leadership project funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, we hoped that it would inspire other museums, including the Walker in the future, to take other approaches that were glimpsed in the proposals we reviewed.
In the end, some of the projects did not seem possible on a budget of $60,000, but conceptually the choice was more or less between more spectacle-like information delivery systems, such as Lot-ek's or David Small Design's, which we have no doubt would have been very popular and effective, and the simplicity of the project we did chose, Walczak et al.'s Dialog Table. While not as spectacular, everyone liked very much the fundamental idea of sidling up to the inviting curved perimeter of the table, leaning on the padded edge, and literally rubbing shoulders with others while watching or "playing" the table from any direction. Sort of like a roulette table. There was also a critical technical innovation, which was to allow multiple people to touch the tabletop / screen at the same time, further enhancing the sense of sharing a communal space. To our knowledge this had never been implemented outside of the research lab. And the functions encouraged social interaction with the fishing lines of associations as well as post-visit involvement with access to a personalized website based on a visitor's self-identified interests through creating a virtual postcard.
