Museum Techmuse

Boston Stories meeting

Just got out of the Boston Stories luncheon meeting -- culmination of years of work by Mike Spock and team distilling the essence of how they managed to change the nature of museum exhibits in the 1960s and beyond at Boston's Children's Museum.

I was fortunate to tap into this work while I was Technology Developer at the Museum from 1988 to 1998. Great to reconnect with friends and colleagues whose work has deeply changed the experience of visitors.

The project site is at: http://bcmstories.com. Special thanks to Nina Simon and Gabriella Marks for taking the site to the next level. And it's still evolving. To my friends in the museum community: how might this site be made even more relevant to you? What features would you like to see?

ACM Conference: Pecha Kucha Night

Gave my first Pecha Kucha presentation a couple nights ago at the Association of Children's Museums annual conference in Philly. The session, organized by the ever savvy duo Paul Orselli and Peter Exley, allowed half a dozen or so of us to show 20 slides for 20 seconds each. And that's it.

I talked about (or tried to talk about in that time) how physical movement -- in particular Shintaido -- has influenced my work in exhibit media design. How a good exhibit is like an effective cut with a sword, expressive and connected with our partner/audience. To illustrate, I included this shot of me cutting my friend Mary with a wooden sword (which earned me a certain reputation later in the exhibit hall).

Still musing...

Things have been pretty busy the last several months with installations at Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, ECHO Lake Science Center, Levine Museum of the New South, Illinois Holocaust Museum, and others in the works. A blessing in this economy. But I've let a lot of thoughts slip by that I wanted to share. Here are a few thoughts -- more detail sometime soon:

• Post visit audience: it may be more effective to design for specific groups (after school groups, moms clubs, etc) than generalized visitors. Need to tap into pre-motivated learners.
• What's after Web 2.0?  Now that social media has arrived, what's next?  We need to provide visitors a big picture mission (solving some local community issue) that raises the level of communication.
• iPhone: the power of place.  If we're looking to change visitor behavior, we need to be in the right place at the right time. iPhone apps have potential to do that.
• YouTube stories: the emerging trend of including visitor voices on museum YouTube channels

Text messaging for museums: lessons from Obama

I've long been interested in how museums can use technology to encourage new behaviors among visitors after their visit. One of the remarkable things from this past election here in the U.S. is the way the Obama team used text messaging (and other technologies) to motivate supporters with the right message at the right time. Here are a few principles that can be translated to museum projects:

• Heighten interest (and opt-in participation) by releasing specific intriguing information first via text messaging. (Say, for example, a VP pick, or the answer to a mystery posed in an exhibit).
• Scaffold resources into the message: a phone number or URL to get more info about a program the visitor has already expressed interest in.
• Be clear about the specific action step the visitor should take: vote, or attend tomorrows' harvest festival with a friend.
• Provide the message at just the right time: the day before elections, or two days before festival registration deadlines.
• Be judicious about the number of messages sent: just when they are needed, no more, no less...

NPR Series: Museums and the 21st Century

NPR is doing a series over the next month or so on museums in the 21st century. I had the pleasure of participating yesterday in an interview that will probably air sometime around Dec 22nd. The focus was on childrens' museums and technology, and we talked about topics like parent/child interaction with technologies (what role do parents have in an interactive?), and the special focus on visitors that childrens museums have. This focus on visitor experience is something that shapes everything childrens' musems do, including the use of interactive technologies.

The first part of the series aired a few days ago, you can find it here (thanks to Jenifer Trant for scouting this out).

Twitter Experiment, Pt 2.

Some time ago I posted thoughts about potential use of Twitter in cultural exhibits (and had some good conversations with Shelley Mannion about her very interesting work with the Tibetan teens in Switzerland). The ability to quickly compare experiences among cultural groups seemed promising.

I've continued to play with Twitter, and had an interesting experience this morning when I was in Harvard Square. I posted an entry about looking at sunlight on the bricks in Harvard Square. Within an hour, I received a notice that my postings were compiled ("followed") by another user, "Harvard Square Now!". And this seemed to be a compilation of all the postings containing "Harvard Square" in the text.

That kind of automatic compilation is pretty amazing. A shared experience in a public space. I'm thinking of implications for other major cultural venues, like Ellis Island, or the Holocaust Museum, where it's likely people will be posting about their experiences regularly...

Falling for Science: Sherry Turkle's new book

Attended a lunch meeting at the MIT Media Lab last week in which Sherry Turkle talked about the new book she's edited: "Falling for Science: Objects in Mind." One of the basic premises of the book is that kids' love for science often grows out of a special relationship with a particular object such as sandcastles, crystal radios, mud, and even My Little  Pony (whose braided tail played a special role in the formation of mathematical thought for one student.)

One of the key steps in the process is to guide children toward objects they love -- and she places a good deal of attention on the role of affect and love (thus the title "Falling for Science"...)

This reminds me of the close connection to pioneering exhibit developer Bernie Zubrowski's early work at Boston's Children's Museum focusing on everyday materials such as soap bubbles in exhibits. Bernie emphasizes materials that kids can easily get their hands on at home.

Where is this all leading us in museums? It's a reminder that one of the best things we can do is point visitors toward extended exploration with materials at home, using technology to provide the right message at the right time to facilitate this...

Play in exhibits: major design theme

Attended an event tonight at the Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester NY. Interesting to note that the museum has done a major refocusing of exhibits -- and rebranding of itself -- so that the focus is specifically on "play".  The museum has emerged as a national leader on this topic, reflected in its research and exhibits.

I especially appreciated that the museum included direct connections to nature in this mix. At the entrance, a gorgeous nature trail, and embedded deeper in exhibits, a butterfly garden.

The theme at the annual Association of Children's Museums conference this year also focused specifically on play.  It feels like the right time to take a closer look at play in exhibits -- play is something we often take for granted, assuming that we've incorporated it in exhibits. But we can push it further. I noted that the President of the Museum, G. Rollie Adams, mentioned not just "play," but "joyful play."
 

ARTISANworks: Art incubator in Rochester NY

Here's another museum-like space to add to my favorites: ARTISANworks in Rochester NY. In my books, it's on par with other extraordinary spaces I've seen over the years, including the City Museum in St. Louis and the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. It is simply a flabbergasting visual environment that reaches beyond traditional display and pulls you into a social, physical exploration of a unique space.

You walk in and are inundated with layer upon layer of art housed in an array of unique rooms in an old artillery factory covering a city block. Look left, right, up, around, and there are intriguing objects and works for you to visually engage with.  And it is designed to be a social space, earning much of its income from functions in rooms designed to add a pleasantly mind-bending twist to events. (The rooms include a firehouse with fire engine and pool tables, and a new rooftop garden which will eventually be year round).

Described as an "art incubator," ARTISANworks supports a wide community of artists whose works fill the space, including a dozen artists in residence. It is a delight to explore.
 

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...