Museum Techmuse

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.

 

Local History and Storytelling: Oklahoma Heritage Center

Stories are an essential part of the fabric of content for local history museums. Not just well-documented stories from renowned residents -- also stories and snippets of "this is what life was like" from everyday visitors. This was our goal at the Oklahoma Heritage Center, to help draw out from visitors these quick portraits of life in Oklahoma. We ask visitors questions such as "How has Oklahoma changed in your lifetime?" and "Tell us about a place in Oklahoma that is especially important to you." Visitors record their stories, and play back those from other visitors, developing an evolving base of stories connected to the community. The StoryKiosk is part of a building-wide exhibit development led by Northern Light Productions.

Visitors record and browse other visitors' stories and can email their story home. (Click to enlarge)

National Archives Project: visitors as participants

Our new installation, developed in collaboration with Northern Light Productions and National Archives staff, places schoolgroup visitors directly in the role of participants in the research process. During the process, students record their findings about primary source documents from the Archives. Unbeknownst to them, their audio recordings are incorporated on the fly into a video "press conference" that they participate in at the conclusion of the experience (see photo).

According to staff, the middle school participants (and teacher workshops) love it -- they are "amazed" to be drawn into the process and have their own voices incorporated in the high end production. My own favorite moment: when students who are role-playing archivists (wearing National Archives research jackets with white gloves on hand) dramatically wheel in on carts the primary source documents. National Archives staff (including Marvin Pinkert, LeeAnn Potter, and Will Sandoval) have created a memorable experience for visitors, one that merges the drama of novel experience with the media we developed.

Participants at a "press conference", in which their own voices are inserted into the high-end video. (Click to enlarge)

Skirball Cultural Center: Build a Better World

This week the Noah's Ark exhibit opens at the Skirball Cultural Center in LA. And at the end of this exhibit, visitors work with staff to describe ways they can help create a better world. We used a variation of our StoryKiosk software to project the visitor's image and commitment on the wall, floating up into the sky, creating a gallery of visitor visions floating in the space. Visitors can choose to email their vision home to encourage post-visit activity related to this vision.

The exhibit as a whole is about meeting challenges (storms), finding community (arks), and creating a more hopeful world (rainbows). The Skirball Center has an extraordinary roster of programs lined up for visitors, and the hope is to use the email feature of the program to remind visitors throughout the year of programs that might help them achieve their visions. (In my mind, this comes close to what Elaine Gurian has called "the essential museum", in which the museum becomes an essential resource for visitors creating meaning in their daily lives).

Visitors' images and commitments are projected on the wall and then emailed home as a post-visit reminder. (click to enlarge).

CBS News Link: CSI Exhibit

The opening of the CSI exhibit last week was one of those "once in a lifetime" events. The cast of CSI made it to the event. Reportedly the cast was delighted to participate in this unique merging of popular culture and science exhibit learning (and as developers, we felt likewise). Here's a news link about the exhibit opening:

http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/i_video/main500251.shtml?id=2845561n

The report shows people crowded around the StoryKiosk -- for about 2 seconds! (around 2:40). The development team was a dream team from around the country led by Charlie Walter and Brandi West at Fort Worth Musesum of Science and History, Nancy Seruto and Michael Kelley in LA, OMSI, Bob Weis Design Island and Juicy Temples in Florida.

Visitors record their testimony on the crime scene, and can email this statement home along with greeting from CSI cast member Paul Guilfoyle (Capt. Jim Brass). click to enlarge