Event12: been there, done that...

By Harry van Vliet on 5 April 2012

Since we are finalizing our current research on festivals and working towards a publication in September, we are coming out of our research closet! Last week a ‘snippet’ of our research was presented at the international ASCA meeting in Amsterdam by Jelke de Boer en Michiel Rovers. This concerned the somewhat surprising result of social media users having lower scores on motivation question, before as well as during the festival. Could it be that social media users are less intrinsically motivated and more ‘instrumental’, scanning what leisure opportunities are available and choosing which one fits most conveniently? And are social media users during a festival more pre-occupied with showing they are ‘there’ at the festival (‘look at me!’) instead of being in the moment of experiencing the festival? Putting a mobile phone between you and the performing artist is a physical act of distancing yourself from what is happening around you by literally putting media between you and your surroundings. Adformatie also picked up these surprising results, and although being wrongly quoted on it, was further evidence for us that people are interested in our research.

tagged with: media strategy game, festivals, experience

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De-Gamification

By Harry van Vliet on 16 February 2012

Although gamification is so 2011, I bet we will be seeing it cropping up here and there in 2012 and beyond. Why? Because it is such a simple and yet powerful concept: we all know our 'games' and we all can come up with examples how certain incentives helped us achieve our goals, whether it was money, game points or esteem. So why not incorporate 'gamification' into more (social) activities such as health, education, environmental issues and make the world a better place? There’s nothing to loose, is there? Yes there is, gamification can crowd out intrinsic pleasure or moral motives. In other words, there is potential harm in gamification…

tagged with: telos, gamification, psychology

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A satisfying Christmas dinner?

By Harry van Vliet on 23 December 2011

As a follow up to my last blog on the measurement of quality, experience, satisfaction & loyalty, let’s take a closer look at satisfaction, as we did in the context of our festival research program. Satisfaction is characterised by most researchers as an ‘emotional response’, a response to a certain service; or as an ‘emotional state’, an affective psychological outcome of visitors’ experience. What this experience includes stays mostly unclear. In contrast to explanations how satisfaction comes about, no less than four models are usually presented to assess consumer satisfaction (taken from: Yoon & Uysal - An examination of the effects of motivation and satisfaction on destination loyalty: a structural model. Tourism Management 2005, 26, pp. 45-56).

tagged with: satisfaction, festivals, christmas

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Can you measure quality, experience, satisfaction & loyalty?

By Harry van Vliet on 14 November 2011

To give away the happy ending: yes you can. Was there ever any doubt? Well, yes actually. Quite recently a book was published that discusses the ‘sense and nonsense’ of performance indicators for cultural institutions such as museums (Bunnik & Van Huis, 2011). The book is highly enjoyable as a solid overview of how performance indicators entered the discussion between museums and (municipal) government, and gives some highly welcome advice on how to structure the ‘conversation’. It is also a good starting point for our own investigation in ‘Museumkompas’ into performance indicators of new cross media services for museums. But there are two issues in the book that trigger me to comment on it.

tagged with: measurement, museumkompas, quality

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Ipadification

By Harry van Vliet on 13 September 2011

With the Museumbattle just a few days behind us, it is a personal relief that the solutions students presented for several museums were not all technology driven. I think we heard the words 'QR code' only once or twice. Of course there was technology involved, such as interactive screens in the museums as a solution for explaining the development of innovative products, and, no small matter, for world peace. But these technology solutions were kept nicely in balance with solutions that focused on the museum visitors. Better still they let the museum be the museum and set out to actively engage potential visitor by visiting their neighbourhood. A bus taking 'Klokhuis' and 'Beeld en Geluid' on tour, visiting schools, and the winner of the Mediabattle actually put people together in each others living room to share experiences on favourite personal cultural objects…

tagged with: tablet, art, museum, ipad

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Longue Duree

By Harry van Vliet on 22 July 2011

There is a dominant tendency in historical, literary and theatre research to focus on ‘highlights’, be it ‘important’ events, writers, actors, plays or theatre patrons. History in ten chapters (or 10 ½ as Julian Barnes did), the fifty most important plays, or the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, are just a few examples. The current trend of making a canon on every possible topic is just one expression of this more general infectious. After the beta and gamma canon, the canon of journalism has already seen the daylight, and we must seriously consider the possibility of someone pencilling down a canon of crossmedia, oh horror....

tagged with: braudel, patterns, theatre

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DeBeschaving

By Harry van Vliet on 18 June 2011

Today, at the festival DeBeschaving members of the Crossmedialab were present to promote their concepts (among them BandSpot). Also a survey was held among the festival visitors, a survey (the 'eventmonitor') that is being developed by researchers of the Crossmedialab. A publication on the experience of festivals, with data from this survey will be published shortly. Furthermore, we also had fun watching DazzledKid, Kensington and so many other acts (a snail race, and of course Elvis lives....)

tagged with: festivals, debeschaving, experience

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Our man in Africa

By Harry van Vliet on 5 June 2011

One of our team members is on a mission...in Africa. Dennis Ringersma travels through Africa the coming three months, researching a new educational method on HIV/Aids. He will blog on his journey and experiences on edutoy.wordpress.com. As a simple way to do some ethnographic research I asked Dennis to take a picture each day of his journey of his ‘confrontation’ with (new) media. His first observation is from Malawi.

tagged with: ethnographic, africa, media

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House of Alijn

By Harry van Vliet on 2 May 2011

At the expert meeting of the CVN - Commission Cultural Treaty Vlaanderen – Nederland – (www.cvn.be) last week in Antwerpen I participated in a breakout session lead by Sylvie Dhaene of ‘Het Huis van Alijn’ (House of Alijn; www.huisvanalijn.be). This former museum of folklore has set out to tell a timeless story about the culture of everyday life. In the museum ordinary objects and curiosities offer an introduction to the common inheritance of the time periods of the fifties, sixties, seventies and so on, up till now. Digital media is used to let you zap through photo albums, listen to sound recordings and plunge into film excerpts.

tagged with: participation, vlaanderen, cultural heritage, pace

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Jason returns

By Harry van Vliet on 30 March 2011

Last week I read two PhD proposals on how ‘smart’ agents and microsystems can do their work more ‘intelligently’ if they become ‘aware’ of their surroundings. This is not an uncommon way of putting things: we have ‘smart’ phones, ‘intelligent’ video recorders, and security systems that are ‘aware’ of a possible breaking and entering. But there is a difference between using these words in everyday life as a shortcut to express ourselves and using these words in a scientific context. In the latter you commit yourself to explain what exactly you mean by it. Mostly this boils down to references to ‘schemata’: knowledge structures that are used to infer what the situation is and how to behave in it. The ‘restaurant’-schemata of Schank & Abelson is one of the most famous.

tagged with: artificial intelligence, frame problem, schemata, smart

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