Wild interactive is the culmination of Manchester Museum’s Wild exhibition. It uses a personality-test style quiz to help visitors explore how personal values shape perceptions of nature and wildness.

Image credit: Fast Familiar

Research + Public Engagement.

Wild Interactive

Wild interactive is the culmination of Manchester Museum’s Wild exhibition. It uses a personality-test style quiz to help visitors explore how personal values shape perceptions of nature and wildness. People see their unique ‘profile’ through a data visualisation in the gallery, and can compare their responses to past visitors on the Manchester Museum website.

Manchester Museum had just opened a new exhibition called Wild that aimed to prompt visitors to consider different approaches to creating, rebuilding and repairing connections with nature. In the final section of the exhibition, Wild Futures, they wanted to help visitors to think about what matters to them and how their own relationship with the natural world relates to their values. And they wanted something with a dwell time of around 5 minutes.

We drew on the Nature Futures Framework (NFF), developed by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services. Within this framework there are three perspectives: Nature for Nature (valuing nature for what it is), Nature for Culture (valuing people and nature existing happily together) and Nature for Society (valuing nature for all the benefits it provides us).

An interactive with a 5 minute dwell time necessitates using a format where visitors will intuitively understand their role: there is no time to explain rules or unfamiliar game mechanics. We settled on a quiz - the kind that seeks opinions and then gives some kind of ‘diagnosis’. Many people have encountered these online or in magazines - along the lines of ‘What kind of biscuit would you be? Mostly As: custard cream; mostly Bs: chocolate digestive etc etc’. They have a playful and light-hearted feel, which was part of what we wanted to send people back out into the world with. We analysed each NFF perspective for its core elements and created statements from them that people could agree or disagree with on a scale of one to ten to avoid reductive binaries and provide more nuanced data.

But how to present people’s ‘diagnosis’ back to them? The NFF aims to bridge divisions on the best approach to climate action, and indeed, people rarely only agree with one perspective. Yet for a satisfying narrative experience, we needed to give people their results. We hit upon the idea of using a spider’s web visual, with each spoke of the web representing one of the statements in the quiz. The more strongly someone agreed with the statement, the further from the centre the spider would draw that part of the web. Statements corresponding to each perspective were positioned next to each other, so the general shape of the web showed how aligned the answerer was to each perspective. Visitors can print a ticket to take their results home and see them projected in the gallery; a comparison tool on Manchester Museum’s website allows people to see how their unique web relates to an average web that updates in real time.

The interactive is fun and popular with visitors and also allows Manchester Museum to collect a valuable data-set about where visitors position themselves in relation to nature, how they value the natural world and what it means to them. This can be used to inform future programming.

You can read more about the process of collaborating with Manchester Museum here.

Documentation film

Credits

WRITER Rachel Briscoe | COMPUTATIONAL DESIGN Joe McAlister + Mirko Febbo | FOR MANCHESTER MUSEUM Alexandra Alberda, Hannah-Lee Chalk.