When “Just Dance” Isn’t Enough
What an interactive museum installation taught me about designing for real people.
By Daniel K. Shub · Principal, DKS Design · Atlanta
I thought people would see themselves as silhouettes, hear the music, and start dancing. Or reach for the iPod at their hip and see what happened. It seemed obvious to me, which turned out to be an assumption worth questioning.
iPod Dance is an interactive museum installation developed for the Mimms Museum of Technology and Art in Roswell, Georgia, as part of iNSPIRE: 50 Years of Innovation from Apple. The museum wanted visitors to connect with that history through experiences as well as artifacts. Its vision, trust, and willingness to experiment gave us room to explore what that could look like.
This was my first professional museum digital project. I came to it with a background in branding, marketing, experiential design, and bringing technology into physical spaces. As consulting exhibit designer, my focus was how the story, the interaction, and the room would work together. Marcelo Padovani developed the installation, working through the technical challenges that made those ideas possible.
The starting point was Apple’s iPod silhouette advertising. Instead of looking at a familiar image from Apple’s visual history, visitors could step into it. Their silhouette appears against a brightly colored background, with an iPod at their hip and a white earbud wire following their movement.
They can reach for the iPod, grab it, and move it around. Clapping switches it between hands. The wire stretches and bounces as they move, and the music encourages them to dance. Several people can join in: when they move apart, the background can separate into different colors; when they stay together, the system can maintain a shared composition.
Video description: Visitors appear as silhouettes on colored backgrounds, moving a virtual iPod while the white earbud wire follows their motion.
Who is actually playing?
A museum is a difficult place to make assumptions about behavior. A parent might stand behind a child. Someone might stop to watch without joining in. Another visitor might walk straight through the camera’s view. The system can detect a person, but that doesn’t necessarily mean the person is participating.
That distinction affects more than what appears on the wall. It affects how the system allocates resources. The installation uses face counting as one signal to estimate potential participation and help manage those resources. Face counting is not facial recognition: it does not identify visitors.
Supporting more tracked faces and participants increased memory requirements. At the same time, the system had other work to do, including the wire physics. Marcelo worked through those competing demands, balancing resources around realistic museum usage to keep the experience responsive. The design had to account for the people watching and passing through, as well as the people dancing.
Why the wire mattered
A simple white line would have been easier. It would also have communicated the basic idea of earbuds. We wanted the wire to stretch and bounce because it gave visitors something else to discover and play with. They could explore the movement of the iPod and the way the wire responded, beyond seeing their own outline.
That choice came with a cost in processing and memory. It was a good example of a creative decision becoming a technical problem, then coming back to us as a design decision. How much complexity was useful? What did the detail add to the experience? What could the system support while responding to several people?
Marcelo did an excellent job working through that balance. The wire is a small part of the image, but it changes what visitors can do with it. For me, it made the discussion about technology much more concrete: we were deciding which behavior was worth supporting and what it would take to support it.
The room changed the design
Lighting, camera position, tracking range, and projection conditions all affected the experience. So did the way visitors moved through the space. Some decisions could only be refined in the museum, where the installation had to work alongside everything else happening around it. The museum’s collaboration mattered here just as much as its initial trust in the idea.
Then there was the question of instructions. I had assumed the silhouettes and music would explain enough. Not everyone responded that way. We had to think more carefully about what needed explaining and what visitors could enjoy discovering for themselves.
Explaining every interaction could take away some of that discovery. Explaining too little could leave someone standing there, unsure what was possible. Designing the instructions belonged in the same conversation as designing the interaction. If someone didn’t do what I expected, that was a reason to revisit the experience and my assumptions.
I explored these questions in my ICOM AVICOM presentation, “When ‘Just Dance’ Isn’t Enough.” They also describe the work I found myself doing throughout this project: connecting the museum’s story to a visitor’s actions, working with Marcelo on what those actions required, and revisiting decisions in the actual space.
The experience gave me a practical question to carry into the next project: what are we expecting people to understand, and what happens when they don’t? I’d want time to observe that, discuss it with the museum and developer, and make adjustments before calling the installation finished.
If you’re working through similar questions for an exhibition or interactive environment, let’s talk.