Museum Techmuse

From Museum to YouTube to PBS

We had the pleasure of doing a StoryKiosk installation at the Levine Museum of the New South, an innovative IMLS funded museum in Charlotte focused on recent cultural history in Charlotte and the South. A central goal of the installation was to provide a place at the end of the exhibit where visitors could contribute their own stories to questions like "Which part of the exhibit did you find especially moving? Why?", and "What advice would you give to someone moving to this region?"

Select stories are displayed in a large screen animation outside the booth. But the visitor stories get high visibility playback outside the exhibit as well. The Museum is uploading compiled stories to their YouTube Channel. And, in a unique relationship with their local PBS station WTVI, select stories gathered in the exhibit booth are broadcast in a special series WTVI is doing throughout the year on cultural change in the Charlotte area.

The installation points to the potential for extending the reach of visitor-created media, from exhibit to social sites like YouTube, to local PBS stations.

CSI installation: Dublin

I'm back, with jet lag, from the StoryKiosk installation in "CSI: The Experience" in Dublin. The installation is part of the popular exhibit developed by the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History a couple years ago, now on its parallel tour through Europe.

Very interesting to see how museum exhibits can fan their way out into other public venues beyond museum walls. In Dublin, the exhibit is running at the Ambassador Theatre, a historic building tracing its roots back to 1764, now a venue for special events. And soon it will open at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas. Very interesting indeed, as we think about new types of venues for popular exhibits.

For me, the project was a dream come true -- I started in the museum field a couple decades ago with a special interest in uses of technology that encourage communication across cultures.  Now I've got my radar set on projects that include international teams focusing these topics...

Health Education: post-visit behavior change

Gave a presentation at the annual National Association of Health Education Centers (NAHEC) conference recently, and it struck me that few groups are as focused on the mission to encourage long-term behavior change among visitors as health education centers. By it's very nature, "health education" depends on behavior change.

I had three main points to my presentation:

• We need to design with post-visit behavior change in mind. (This built off the paper Paula Sincero and I presented at Museums and the Web a few years ago).
• We need to plant a seed for later followup during the visitor's museum experience. Based on our work with StoryKiosk where visitors create stories, art works, and videos for upload, visitor creativity is that seed.
• We can tap into existing online community structures to nurture that seed. Visitor postings to Flickr for example can help maintain involvement, with a few caveats about the signup process...

Refugee Life Exhibit

"Torn From Home," the exhibit on refugee life developed at the Lied Discovery Children's Museum, opened last week, and I'm pleased to have developed a StoryKiosk installation for this groundbreaking exhibit. Visitors experience walking through a refugee camp, and at the end they record their reflections on the experience.

It is a challenging topic: visitors generally come to museums to learn and enjoy their time together in exhibits, so an exhibit on refugee life would seem from the start to be at odds with that experience. But the exhibit manages to strike a masterful balance between providing a novel experience and introducing a topic of international concern. Families can create a shelter together: an intriguing challenge that is engaging, and at the same unsettling as you imagine families living in this structure. The display of toys created by kids in refugee camps is inspiring as you see the creativity that went into their creation and disturbing as you imagine the circumstance of the child who created the toy.

Thanks and appreciation to Stacey Mann, Elaine Bole, and the team at Lied who helped create the exhibit. More info here, and at the Website we developed for the exhibit.

 

the Boston Museum: Choosing to Participate

Last night was the debut of our latest StoryKiosk booth, installed in the "Choosing to Participate" exhibit at the Boston Public Library. The installation provided an interesting first for me: it exists and is running even before the museum itself (the Boston Museum) has been built. It is up and running and gathering stories about choosing to engage in the community based on powerful examples in the rest of the exhibit, which was developed by the acclaimed Facing History and Ourselves educational organization.

It's an interesting use of a media installation: to use it to as part of a way to demonstrate the type of engagement an upcoming museum will have with its community. My appreciation to Katy Abel at the Boston Museum, David Michaud who designed the booth, and the team at Facing History.

(click to enlarge images)

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.

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)

Wild Music Exhibit: Science Museum of Minnesota

The Science Museum of Minnesota's richly textured and evocative "Wild Music" exhibit is traveling now, focusing on the "sounds and songs of life", exploring biological origins of music.  I was pleased to develop a StoryKiosk for the exhibit focusing on visitors' strong memories of music in their own lives. We ask visitors: "Listen to a song and describe the memories it evokes for you" and "Describe an intense musical experience you've had."

I was especially interested to see if we could encourage visitors to sing a song in the exhibit, because the act of singing itself I think evokes memories, and provides a nice fit with Howard Gardner's multiple intelligences approach to exhibit development.