Museum Techmuse

Visitor-created art: Young at Art

Finished the Storykiosk installation at Young At Art museum in Davie Florida last week. I'm delighted to see the variety of images created by visitors when given a palette of backgrounds and tools to create something with.

The interesting challenge: how do we build a structure to support visitors' creativity in a very short period of time (5-10 minutes) in a way that allows them to take ownership of their creation and make it an expression of themselves? Allowing them to talk about their creation (and record their statement about their art) is one of the key steps. Then, after recording their statement, visitors can print their art out in the gift shop for $5.

Microsoft Surface: Designing for social interaction

Enjoyed a personal tour of the new Microsoft Surface multi-touch table last weekend with Product Management Director Jeff Gattis. What is intriguing to me is that the platform was developed specifically to build on social interaction between users, who sit across from each other around a table, rather than gaze side by side at a touchscreen.  (I've long believed that the most interesting interaction isn't with the technology itself, but between visitors who are using the technology as they talk about the content and build their own connections to it).

So, what can users do while they sit around the table?  You can check out a few demos online: an official one, and a preview by Popular Mechanics.  The videos highlight key capabilities: sensing objects that are placed on the table (via an optical code), sharing pictures across the table, and enabling transactions such as debits and emails. The table is being marketed primarily to commercial venues such as hotels and casinos (because of larger market size presumably), but there is obvious crossover with public spaces in certain museum environments.

How might it be used by museums?:

• "Objects to talk about" placed on the table, with conversation starters appearing near them
• Collaborative games using real objects
• Pub environments that have begun appearing in science museums such as the Science Museum in London

In balance, a few more things to consider:

• How long would we want visitors to sit at the tables? I can imagine a pub-like interaction (such as a hotel pub) taking 20 minutes or longer to casually sit, converse, and peruse the technology. (Most museum exhibits would prefer to design for 5 minutes to keep people moving.)
• The authoring environment is based on Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), a new Vista based environment not currently in the repertoire of many exhibit programmers. Early adopters may face some growing pains.
• Cost for the hardware is in the $5k to $10K range; programming and production cost is additional

All in all, intriguing to see a technology designed specifically for social interaction in a public space...

NEMA Keynote: Museums as Communities of Choice

Harold Skramstad, President Emeritus of Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, gave a keynote address at the New England Museum Association annual meeting Wednesday that for me (and many in the audience) was quite energizing. Essentially, museums can no longer see their mission as the traditional "collect, preserve, interpret," but instead need to be founded on the question "what value do we add to society? And to our community?"

For people like me who grew as staff at visitor-centered museums such as children's museums, this isn't a new message, but for the museum field as a whole (including the majority of collections-based museums), it is a paradigm shift. It is a new vision of museums along the lines of what Elaine Gurian has called "the essential museum," where the museum becomes integrated into the daily life of visitors.

I was especially energized by the mechanisms Skramstad described to achieve this:  acknowledging the competence of visitors (what they bring to exhibits, including their stories), a return to storytelling and dialogue, becoming a place for celebration and inspiration. Given our work with visitors' stories in exhibits over the years, the message was totally in sync with my own experience.