Museum Techmuse

ASTC Notes: Visitor Voices

Just returned from the ASTC conference in LA, and this year's conference was a turning point for me. There is a convergence: while I was in the exhibit hall recording video of visitors with StoryKiosk and automatically uploading visitor's images to Flickr (see image below), the book "Visitor Voices" edited by Kathy McLean and Wendy Pollock made its debut. And the session "Visitor Visions, Shared Realities" (which Kathy participated in) focused on implementations of visitor-created content in a number of museums.  In the big picture, the wave of user-created content on YouTube, Flickr, and other sites continues to grow by leaps and bounds.

I highly recommend getting a copy of "Visitor Voices" to tune into this conceptual shift in museums' relationship with visitors. (Our project with the Museum of Science Boston and InquiryLearn was featured in Barbara Costa's chapter "Asynchronous Conversation").  As of this moment, the book isn't yet posted in ASTC's store, but I'm sure it will be within a few days.

(Attendees using StoryKiosk in our booth at ASTC. Click to enlarge)

ASTC Flickr experiment

I'm in our exhibit hall booth now on the second day of the ASTC conference. We've had one day of visitors stopping by our booth and recording their answer to the question "What invention would improve your life here at the conference?"  In addition to sending visitors an email of their recorded story, we're also uploading a picture they create of themselves to a Flickr set, which you can view here. Fun to see the variety of images.

Quite exciting to see this evolve. It is pointing toward using Web 2.0 technologies in a way that can build extended post-visit community. More on this later...

Austin: Technology design for girls as well as boys

A few months ago I mentioned we are designing an installation for the Austin Children's Museum, and that we wanted the interface to appeal to girls as well as boys. (The program gathers visitors stories about their creations in "Tinkerer's Workshop" and is running in conjunction with the upcoming Maker Faire). You  might want to take a look at some of the design considerations that arose as we pondered this.

Here was our first draft of the recording screen:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

An attractive screen, but in view of the considerations above, we wanted to show girls (and boys) enjoying making things, so included a slide show of about 5 images that appears before the video window. This is the first of those slides:

"CSI: The Experience" opens in Boston

Here are a few photos from the CSI exhibit, now at its second venue at the Museum of Science in Boston following it's debut at the Museum of Science and Industry a few months ago.  As I noted in my blog entry back then, it was a pleasure to install the StoryKiosks in the exhibit. The overall goal: encourage visitors to make and share their observations in exhibits. Visitors record their observations and email those recordings home to build a post-visit connection, which includes a greeting by a CSI cast member.

(click on photo to enlarge)