Jonathan Bowen

While James Gibson is often seen as rebelling against the Gestalt psychologists of the Berlin School, he shared their “phenomenological attitude”: the commitment to taking a rigorous description of direct experience as data for psychological theory to explain. This paper argues that while Gibson rejected the Gestalt school’s neurocentric explanatory theory of why things look as they do, he largely accepted their descriptive account of how things look. This suggests a path toward an ecological theory of insight in problem-solving. If Gibson could adopt the Gestalt descriptive account of perception to develop a theory of direct perception, an ecological psychologist can adopt their descriptive account of insight to develop a theory of direct insight. To this end, this paper reconstructs the rich descriptive account of insight from Wolfgang Köhler’s Mentality of Apes, focusing on the gradual, hard-won achievements of insight in problem situations marked by an impasse. From this account, it proposes general concepts—such as experienced structural troubles, gaps, and fittingness—that describe how the immediately experienced structure of a problem situation can guide and drive the process of discovering a solution. Finally, it defends the viability of this approach by arguing that the transformational aspects of insight can be reconciled with Gibsonian realism.

This richly illustrated book offers new perspectives and research on how digital culture is transforming museums in the 21st century, as they strive to keep pace with emerging technologies driving cultural and social change, played out not only in today’s pervasive networked environment of the Internet and Web, but in everyday life, from home to work and on city streets. In a world where digital culture has redefined human information behavior as life in code and digits, increasingly it dominates human activity and communication. These developments have radically changed the expectations of the museum visitor, real and virtual, the work of museum professionals and, most prominently, the nature of museum exhibitions, while digital art and life in a digitally saturated world is changing our ways of seeing, doing, our senses and aesthetics. Overall, this book creates a new picture of the 21st-century museum field. As museums become shared spaces with their communities, local, national and global and move from collection-centered to user-/visitor-centered institutions, they are assuming new roles and responsibilities tied to new goals for engaging their audience, conveying meaning through collections, creating learning experiences and importantly, connecting to daily digital life and culture integral to the museum ecosystem. Our studies of recent exhibitions at museums leading change are used to exemplify new directions, while they point to a reimagined vision for museums of the future at the heart of which is the integration of digital culture and visitor experience and participation in real and virtual space.