Kiask stories in a museum are an example of “interpretive writing” that is used today for museum labels and brochures.
The most important medium for interpretive writing today is the museum label which accompanies an exhibit. The label should tell a short story to engage a passing visitor. Here are a few resources to help you write these kinds of labels:
Telling a Story in 100 Words: Effective Label Copy, by Larry Borowsky, AASLH technical leaflet, Sep 2012: A concise essay on how to write a good label by freelance writer Larry Borowsky. He provides a few principles and techniques to make your story engaging.
The Smithsonian’s Guide to Interpretive Writing for Exhibitions: If you’re not familiar with the unique needs of museum visitors and techniques to address those needs, the Smithsonian Institution has a handy guide to interpretive writing. It introduces the IPOP model (Ideas, People, Objects, Physical) that describes how different visitors approach the world, and how these aspects can be addressed in designing the space.
Exhibit Labels: An Interpretive Approach, by Beverly Serrell and Katherine Whitney: Published by Rowman and Littlefield, this comprehensive reference on interpretive writing is now in its third edition.
Modern museums have more options than fixed labels of text to engage visitors. Serrell says you should ask yourself:
What is the best way to tell this story: a photograph, a video, an interactive device, an object, a group of artifacts, or a re-creation of an environment? (Chap. 6)Kiask terminals fill the need for interactive storytelling.
A story on a Kiask terminal is an immersive experience for the visitor, quite different from reading paragraphs of text on a museum label. The terminal, which can be as big as a television screen, shows high-resolution, full-color graphics, with big button-shaped controls that respond immediately to touch.
The touchscreen gives the visitor a dynamic sensory physical experience, the second “P” in IPOP. This medium offers a new tool in your arsenal; used correctly, it can greatly enhance your visitor's experience.
Kiask stories are a series of panels, sort of like business presentations, except that the audience can navigate through the story at their own pace without the need for a presenter. Kiask stories incorporate navigation controls for the visitor to touch, which make them akin to interactive computer games. They present the visitor with a linear storyline with optional side quests for more detail or an interesting tidbit.
Your story should make full use of the medium.
The Kiask Studio cloud portal application offers you an easy way to build a story that includes touch-based interaction. It lets you build a series of panels that include built-in navigation and animation features. Kiask Studio automatically provides the layout, the fonts, and design elements. You just supply photos and text, and you decide how to connect the panels of the story so that the visitor can navigate through it.
If you have access to graphics designers, either professionals or enthusiasts, you can let them design the graphics and the text layout for individual panels.
The designers can use their own tools to produce JPEG or PNG images conforming to the dimensions of Kiask terminal panels. You can directly include their images in your Kiask terminal story, mixing and matching them with panels that you compose with the built-in Kiask Studio fonts and layout. You can specify the navigation for all the panels to create a single, seamless story.
Kiask terminals support the following kinds of JPG or PNG images:
Just like for any other medium, the author is responsible for complying with copyright law for any images and text that you might use in your story.
When you hand over your story to a curator to deploy to a Kiask terminal, you are effectively declaring that you have done the following:
It's not always obvious whether you need permission, and if you do, then who owns the copyright and how to contact them.
In the United States, Section 107 of the Copyright Act provides some guidelines on fair use. It depends on whether your use is commercial or for educational or non-profit use, the nature of the copyrighted work, how much of the copyrighted work you are reproducing, and the effect of your use on the potential market of the original work.
There are many sample permission request letters available at university web sites, and sometimes, the copyright holder has their own form to fill out.
Can Kiask terminals show videos?
Yes, but Beverly Serrell cautions you against videos, which she says have low attracting power (percentage of visitors viewing it) and low holding times (how much of the video a visitor finishes watching). See: Are They Watching? Visitors and Videos in Exhibitions, article in Curator the Museum Journal, January 2010.