Interview with Toni Roberts, interpretation design expert
Dr. Toni Roberts is an interpretation design expert who teaches interpretation design at RMIT School of Media & Communication in Melbourne. Toni also runs her studio Hatchling Studio doing interpretation design projects for museums, zoos and cultural heritage sites.
This is one of Hatchling Studio's projects "Whittlesea Bushfire Memorial" in Victoria, Australia, opened in 2015
Interview with Dr. Toni Roberts
September 4, 2017
Daria Gradusova: Toni, could you tell a little bit about the scope of the interpretation design course that you are teaching?
Toni Roberts: OK, so it's not something that was really taught before I was there. It's not like I'm continuing a tradition of teaching but it does connect with some of the things that other people teach. It's really just been me bringing that from my practice into my teaching. And the studio model allows us to do that, gives us the scope to create studios that connect with our research and practice. And I sort of see it as an important thing within communication design in that that it sits - it's a good compliment to some of the other key things people are teaching. So there are traditional things like publication design and packaging, and then there's co-design, and systems thinking, and there is indigenous sovereignty and illustration. And I feel as though it relates to all of those in a way because it's sort of medium agnostic. It doesn't matter whether it's digital or print. And it covers a pretty diverse subject matter but it definitely sits within strategy because we have three streams for our studio: craft, strategy and futures.
Daria Gradusova: What is ‘strategy’?
Toni Roberts: So ‘strategy’ focuses more on your design intent than on a form. And so that's why I'm always also really emphasising whether it's for a specific site or a specific client as well as for a target audience and has particular communication objectives. They are things that I see as transferable whether they're doing interpretation based things that they might do in my studio or things in other studios. Those concerns will still be there or in their practice beyond - your context, your clients and your audience are still going to be really central.
Daria Gradusova: What is ‘futures’?
Toni Roberts: ‘Futures’ is emerging context for design, new practice so it's sort of things like co-design, service design and indigenous nation building, some of the digital ones go in there even though digital is not new.
Daria Gradusova: I am curious about the Site Specific course. Is it the first time you are teaching it?
Toni Roberts: No, I ran this last year just on my own without digital media.
Daria Gradusova: So how did you come up with the idea to merge together environmental graphics (physical) and digital?
Toni Roberts: I'm always keen on using proximity beacons and QR codes to embed content in the environment. So we don't have to run it with digital media to think about those things but I think communication designers also need to understand that often they'll be designing for those contexts or for those forms of media. I think we've got to embrace digital rather than avoid or completely separate from it.
Daria Gradusova: You've lead to the other question I had. How do you think the role of digital is changing in the museum context?
Toni Roberts: Well, it depends. You know you get clients who want digital more just because they think it makes them more relevant. To me one of the big strengths for digital is the 'before' and 'after' experience - being able to sustain your engagement with your audience before and after they're there. I mean, definitely in zoos, I don't think people should be looking at their phones. They should put their phones away and run around and be physical in that space. Museums sort of sit in a slightly different space because you have so much more control over the environment as well. I know these interactive tables are very popular. I watch how kids play with them, they are just bashing away, they're not really getting away very much out of it. But I think they have quite a bit of potential. I think it's really important that designers are at the beginning phase of a project, in the strategy phase of the project so that you can choose the appropriate medium for the people, for the context and for your messaging. So to me it's all about getting the right mix, the right sort of balance to suit who you are communicating with and what you're trying to say. I mean like the Canberra project has these amazing windows looking right over to Parliament House and the whole area that exhibition is about. At the moment there's no interpretation of that view, there's nothing so digital is the best way to do it. There's no way to put panels because it's all windows so it makes perfect sense to have touch screens that replicate the view and then you can interact with them. Because you don't want to put markers on the windows. It depends which direction you're looking from anyway, they get distorted. It was the same with the factory viewing gallery in the Mint [The Royal Australian Mint Factory Viewing Gallery]. There's a whole lot of stuff there that is invisible so a touch screen makes perfect sense - you click on it and it opens up and you can see inside. Same thing with the view at the Canberra project. So I think that's a no brainer. That's all because of its purpose not because digital is a thing.
Daria Gradusova: Do you ask the stakeholders of an exhibition design process to imagine visitor experience?
Toni Roberts: There's a lot of education and I wrote about that in my thesis too. There's a lot of educating the client which gets really tiring. And it's a difficult thing in the power relation between a consultant and a client, I think. When the consultant clearly knows more but the client wants to have authority so you are trying to educate them without attacking their authority. It's quite tricky, I find. And when I interviewed designers for my thesis that was a pretty common experience. You do it every time and you rarely work with the same client again. So there's this whole big chunk of work that's never costed into a project. And you just have to keep doing it every time you have a new client.
Daria Gradusova: I was wondering if there is something across the projects that continues to be a challenge for designers and interpreters? And, I guess, what you have just mentioned about client education is one of them.
Toni Roberts: That's definitely one of them. The shopping list mentality "Oh, I saw a thing that I saw somewhere else and we are going to squeeze it into this exhibit whether it fits or not". The general lack of understanding about not only how you shape an experience within a site but also the process of design concept development. What are the other challenges ... Some people are not good at visualising things. So you can extend the level of energy in over-designing or over-visualising things just to persuade people when it's not really needed at that stage of the project. And you can't tell everything, that's always one, people want to say so much. I did a project at South Australian Museum, and the scientists came to our meetings. They wanted to fit in the information about wildlife from the centre of Australia through to the deep ocean in one gallery.
Daria Gradusova: What do you think is the knowledge and skills that people who want to work in the museum field as interpreters or designers should have?
Toni Roberts: One thing I guess I've focused on a bit is quality of experience. Trying to really unpack what the elements of experience are. And also recognising that designers only have a certain degree of control over the outcome and being able to embrace that rather than trying to fully define the visitor experience. And curiosity, just have to have a real curiosity about anything and everything because you never know what subject matters are going to get thrown at you. I just did this talk for the first years and I realised I was going from wildlife in New Zealand to how coins are made to the history of Canberra to the bushfire in Victoria to community in Western Australia, it's just so diverse that you have to have that curiosity and be prepared to do the research, really get excited. You know, trying to see things from different people's perspectives. You are not designing for other designers and not designing for yourself. It's not about just looking cool. And also an idea of storytelling and what storytelling is. Designers should be strategists, storytellers and educators. So that's how those three things kind of come together.
List of Toni's publications can be found on her RMIT profile under the 'Publications' and some of the publications are available on Academia.
