Supporting the learner's playfulness and creativity as learning mechanisms: design specifications for interactive interfaces in arts museums.

Abstract

The goal of this research is to present design specifications for (digital) interfaces that intend to teach artistic concepts to learners through their playful and creative engagement, and are intended to be situated in arts museums. The aim of such an interface is that learners can develop insights in regard to presented artistic concepts through their playful or creative engagement. The proposed benefit of insight development as a mechanism for learning about the creative arts is that it allows the learner to discover uses of the presented materials that are self-relevant, therefore demonstrating utility in regard to their subjective cognitive style. Artistic concepts are defined as a subjective idea for art creation that an artist has developed through the qualitative and subjective attention to his environment, which he then expresses using his creative process into an artefact. This dissertation presents a "Cognitive Model for Learning through Creative Engagement with Artefacts" that delineates how perception and interaction mediates learning during creative activities. This process operates on two principles that describe how a learner’s perception of, and, interaction with, man-made objects are processed in the human brain, namely as action representations, or as intentional agents. The way that a learner’s playful and creative engagement operates as a mode of learning is explained on the basis of the available literature in the cognitive and neurosciences. Learning is understood in this explanation as a process of formation and consolidation of insights in Long-Term Memory, which in turn informs the changes in the behaviour of the learner. In order to further clarify how play and creativity activities facilitate learning, children’s museums that are specialized in the arts have been inquired about their education practices. They produce theme-based play exhibitions, and have developed an expertise in conveying an exhibition’s theme through active, experiential and playful means. For the purpose of demonstrating how installations can be designed that teach an artistic concept by means of a learner‘s creative engagement, two conceptual interfaces have been designed and discussed. One teaches “Len Lye’s Discovery Process for Novel Figures of Motion“, and the other teaches the “Matisse’s Composition Process behind his Paper Cut-Outs“.