Interaction With Exhibits: The Significance of Instrumentalization

ABSTRACT How is it that the millions of visitors who flock to science centers each year are able to make use of the exhibits there? How do they discover the properties of previously unknown machines? How much time does it take? What is the significance of the process? An issue of particular interest to us is how visitors figure out what they can do with an exhibit and how they can do it. We interpret this as a process of instrumentalization, transforming an object into an instrument of human activity. Drawing on the Instrumented Activity Situations Model, this paper focuses on the instrumentalization of exhibits and the sense‐making process within the visitor–exhibit physical interaction. After discussing two empirical cases of children (9 and 11 years old) interacting with an open‐ended dynamical exhibit, we claim that by instrumenting an exhibit under a set of inherent constraints, visitors develop new enactive competence (coordinated motor action tethered to new perceptual orientation), just as one would learn to ride a bicycle or to work with a lathe machine. We argue that the attention of researchers, hitherto focused primarily on content‐based knowledge development, should be equally focused on the kind of procedural knowledge development evident in “making a machine one's own.”