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When Shelley and David brought up the idea of 3D printing, my not-so-inner tech geek and my really-blatantly-outer education geek got pretty excited. As Shelley mentioned in herprevious post, 3D printing is a hot topic in the museum world right now, with some exciting experimentation happening around the world. Just this week I was at a meeting at the American Museum of Natural History, hearing about some of the exciting 3D printing projects they’re working on with some of their teen programs.
In our use it made sense to start with the Sensory Tour, our monthly tour for visitors with visual impairments as well as anyone who wants to experience art using more than just their sense of sight. We continually had great success using raised line drawings (they’re just what they sound like; the lines are literally raised from the surface of the paper) to help people feel contours of two-dimensional art. Why not try the same thing with one more dimension in the mix?
Via samuel bausson, Ana Maria
Did having these touchable models deepen participants’ engagement with the artwork ? Did people walk away feeling like they’d had a satisfying tactile experience with this sculpture ?
Visitors (...) paid careful, detailed attention to the surface of the sculpture and all of its contours. They held up the 3D models and compared them to the original sculpture in front of them.
(...) but the stone and scarves seemed to spark a wider variety of conversation and brought people’s focus back to the sculpture more quickly.
The 3D prints are new tools for us to play with, and we need to work with them more to get more comfortable. What are the best kinds of questions to ask people when we put these into their hands?