Fast Museums or Slow Museums?

Do museums really want people to slow down enough to carefully observe and consider the wonders within?  Or are museums really designed (physically and financially) to keep people moving --- to increase "throughput" --- contemplation be damned?

I was thinking about this the other day inside an art museum that seemed to have an especially conspicuous lack of seating (like benches) available in the galleries. It made me wonder if the gallery designers and curators really care about the people viewing the art inside, trudging along on the hard floors, eyes glazing over as they move from one uniformly white-walled gallery to another.  Standing and concentrating for long periods of time is hard work!

But leaving aside obvious amenities like seating, what other messages do museums send that either invite folks to linger and contemplate as a valued guest, or to hurry them along as just another paying customer?  Timed tickets? Security guards? Audio tours? No stroller policies? No picture taking?

There may be lots of "practical" reasons for "moving people along" through the galleries, but museum visitors may perceive such practicalities differently than museum administrators.  And, if you rush them through your museum, they might not be in a big hurry to come back.

What do you think?  Are "slow museums" an unrealistic Victorian notion, or a better idea than the "Throughput Uber Alles" of "fast museums"?  Share your views in the "Comments Section" below.



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Teaching Hacking to Teach STEM?

Could giving people a chance to hack* their smartphones, remotes, and Wiis get them excited about science?  I've been working on a few museum projects recently that make me think so.

STEM is an acronym that stands for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.  STEM is all the rage in the Governmental, Education, and Museum communities as everyone wrings their hands over the (real or perceived) decline of science and math skills in the U.S. compared to other countries.

Everyone acknowledges the importance of STEM, but how do you actually get people excited enough about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics materials so that they can discover for themselves how interesting these areas of human knowledge can be?

In the spirit of Johnny Chung Lee and his Wii system hacks, letting people play around with and experiment with the familiar yet "magical" devices around us all the time (like remote controls or Wii controllers) can be a great way to find out about STEM topics as varied as liquid crystal technology, infrared signaling, and polarization.

I'll share the efficacy of this "demystifying familiar technology" approach through project progress reports and experiences in future posts, but in the meantime grab a remote control yourself and a digital camera (still or video) or the camera in your computer or smartphone to start finding out about the (normally) invisible lightsource that makes remotes tick.  (As in the photo at the top of this post.)  Feel free to use Google if you need some help answering some of your questions --- it's meant to be fun exploration using all the tools at your disposal, not a test!

Why does your digital camera "see" the remote's light that our eyes can't?  Can you figure out a way to "decode" the various light sequences that the remote sends as "commands" to the device it works with? Why doesn't your remote just use a "visible" light source to control its devices?

Thinking about, and experimenting with, familiar objects in unfamiliar ways can be a great way to unlock one part of the STEM learning puzzle. (To "hack" it open if you like...)   Try "hacking" some familiar technologies for yourself or in your museum, and let us know what you find out in the "Comments" section below!

* By the term "hack" I mean the original benevolent definition, not the malicious, harmful sense of the word.

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The Super Bowl vs. Your Museum

Super Bowl Sunday will be a great day to visit your local museum --- because it will be even quieter than usual.  This, despite the oft-repeated statistic that "140 million people will attend major league sporting events in a year, compared to 850 million museum visitations in the United States."

First off, in keeping with the Super Bowl theme of this posting, let me just ask whether you've ever seen someone outside a museum scalping tickets to get inside?  Leaving aside the fact that the comparative statistic above is misleading for a number of reasons, if not downright bogus --- but let's move on.

So why are so many people, even folks who don't normally follow football, more rabidly enthusiastic about watching the "Big Game" or attending a local Super Bowl event, than visiting your museum?

I'd say one possible answer lies in finding the difference between a "fan" and a "casual visitor."   Fans wear logo gear all year long, and have no compunction in excitedly telling total strangers how great their team is.  The National Football league is, as a recent New York Times Magazine article has detailed, even going after a traditionally neglected demographic, women 18 to 49, with great success.

Most museums, however, seem unable to expand beyond their traditional visitor demographic of older, white adults.

So how can museums create more "fans" and expand their demographic reach as well?  

One positive example is the Brooklyn Museum's 1stfans program which is billed as "a socially networked museum membership" that gives special benefits to anyone who becomes a 1stfan. Despite being in the shadow of their over-hyped museum brethren in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Museum has decided to deliberately and aggressively become more responsive to the various communities it serves --- and in the process has been creating Brooklyn Museum fans.

Similarly, places like The City Museum in St. Louis have set out to become a gathering spot for their local communities and have become open to all sorts of fun ideas that are edgy enough to attract a wide, and enthusiastic,  audience of repeat visitors who definitely become City Museum fans.


Of course all this talk of creating "museum fans" is pointless if your museum isn't really fan-worthy.  Is your admissions procedure torture?  Do your create core exhibits and attractions that are worth revisiting, or do you depend on the hucksterism of one-off events that only vaguely relate to your museum's mission and purpose?  What are the obstacles that prevent your visitors from becoming fans?


So, let's take a few lessons from the NFL and see if we can create more museum fans.   And if we can't beat them at the Super Bowl hoopla, maybe we can take a page from Tyler Greens's playbook by stirring up an Art Museum Super Bowl bet, and giving football fans another reason to be interested in what we do.


GO MUSEUMS!



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Exhibit Design Inspiration: Zimoun

The artist Zimoun uses a variety of familiar materials (primarily combinations of boxes, motors, and wire) to create sound sculptures and environments.  As you can see from the video above there is a very compelling, almost hypnotic effect to the sounds and motions the art pieces create.

In the words of the artist: "My audio compositions are less focused on getting from A to B but rather to create static sound architectures and spaces. They should be entered and explored acoustically like a building."

 

Find out more about the artist, and see more examples of Zimoun's work by clicking over to the Zimoun website.


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Guest Post from Jim Spadaccini on Computer-Based Exhibits

Jim Spadaccini is the Director of Ideum and Principal Investigator for the NSF-funded Open Exhibits initiative.  In the last century, he was Director of Interactive Media at the Exploratorium.  Jim was kind enough to share some thoughts about computers and exhibits with ExhibiTricks readers:

Computer-Based Exhibits: Challenges and Changes

Having been in the field for nearly 20 years, I have to admit many of the computer-based exhibits developed by and for museums have fallen short of expectations.

Most computer interactives found in museums are isolating, information-heavy experiences: single-user kiosks with layers of text, images, and the occasional video. 

Most exhibit developers would agree that good exhibits, generally, are ones that encourage visitor engagement and social interaction. These exhibits tend to be more experiential than informational.   

While I believe computer-based exhibits have not lived up to their promise, I also believe that is beginning to change.

Multitouch screens, gestural interfaces, and intuitive multiuser interactions are emerging. Multiple screens, spherical displays, networked exhibits, and other more compelling computer-based installations are becoming more common. 

 ( A group of visitors to Adventure Science Center in Nashville Tennessee, gather around 100” multitouch, multiuser exhibit exploring the EM Spectrum.)

These more complex installations don’t ensure that an exhibit is more engaging, but many of these technologies simply weren’t available or were prohibitively expensive back in the ‘90s.  It’s great to have new options .

While these changes are very positive, a number of challenges still remain when it comes to computer-based exhibits.

Computer-based exhibits are expensive to develop; they quickly go out of date and are rarely updated. Also, the software is almost never shared between museums.  (There isn’t really a software equivalent of the Exploratorium Cookbooks or the ASTC Cheapbooks.)

Like other types of exhibits, computer-based ones are also rarely evaluated. Since by their nature they use new technology, it can be especially hard to try to anticipate and shape the visitor experience.

While these issues are deeply rooted in the field, the open source software movement has provided a model that can help with some of these challenges. Last fall, Ideum and several museum partners were awarded a National Science Foundation grant for an open source software initiative called Open Exhibits . I’m hoping that this initiative can make a significant contribution to the field.

Open Exhibits provides free software modules, templates and eventually whole exhibits to museums and other educational organizations. The project focuses on mostly multitouch and multiuser software. Right now there are software modules that handle images and video and connect with sites like YouTube and Flickr. These modules are multitouch- and multiuser-enabled.

We are also developing other types of software, such as an innovative way to connect with databases (OpenAPI) and this week we are going to release a module that allows easy offering for Microsoft’s gesture-based Kinect camera system.  (Check out this Ideum blog post for more info.) 

(The author tries out the new Open Exhibits module for Microsoft Kinect motion controller system. This free module will allow the $150 Kinect device to connect to virtually any Open Exhibit software module.)

We are focusing on emerging technology with an emphasis on physical computing. We are looking to help build a platform that will allow museum professionals to create the next generation of computer-based interactives. For now, we are doing most of the development, but we are nurturing a community site that will hopefully empower others to develop their own computer-based exhibits.

The Open Exhibits project was funded in September 2010 and within 45 days we launched the community website.  Now, just 63 days later, we have over 400 members, have had over 1,000 software downloads, and we are beginning to get contributions from other Open Exhibits members.  (You can see these numbers change in real time on our website, which has a dashboard design.)

Along with software, the site contains research and survey results and other practical information for designers and developers.   We will be publishing many of the findings from the research and evaluation components of the project.

Open Exhibits is a three-year project, so we have nearly 1,000 days left to continue to grow and facilitate the community and to hopefully make an impact. 

Please check out Open Exhibits at: www.openexhibits.org, and join us!

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The Myth of Multitasking: Museum Media Messages

The weakest possible argument for layers of excessive multimedia mayhem in a museum environment?  Here it comes: "Just look at young people texting, listening to music, and doing their homework all at once.  The current generation is just more media savvy, and better equipped to multitask than previous generations, so we need to design our exhibition environments accordingly ..."

BULL!

This rationalization (or slight variations) continually shows up in museum listservs, conference sessions, and even professional books when media dense projects are presented. 

This despite the fact that research continually shows that multitasking and distracting environments actually decrease people's ability to concentrate and learn.  Even if you conducted formative evaluation to find out whether people want such dense environments, many multitaskers feel that they are actually much better at handling multiple tasks than they really are.  "Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities," says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. "But there's evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people."   Perhaps a better term would be "multiswitching"  than "multitasking" because it better encompasses the rapid changes of orientation and focus that occur in the brain.

If museums would like visitors to learn about a few things (hopefully!) as they wander the galleries, then why are they often deploying design and technology strategies that actually work against such educationally-minded goals?  That I think is an emotional rather than a rational question.  Even the most hidebound Museum Director seems only too willing to invest in "shiny new toys" (4D Theaters!) with the hope of creating a technological siren song designed to lure visitors in.  Unfortunately, forcing museum visitors to try to attend to multiple information streams at once often leaves only a hazy memory of sensory effects behind, rather than clear messages that remain after the museum visit is over.

Before I'm accused  of being a Luddite, let me say, with apologies to Marshall McLuhan, the medium is not the message --- the message is the message.  I certainly think media-rich museum environments employing digital technologies can be compelling and wonderful.  But before you get hung up on how many touch screens you can fit into your new visitor center, think first about the messages you want to send, and the range of options for sending those messages.


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