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Post-Digital Museums

The post-digital museum is cognizant of what it needs to consider before committing to a project.When you enter the idea of what a museum is capable of accomplishing you are entering into the realm of the post digital museum. Technology allows museums to reach audiences once seemingly barred from entry. With the ever growing use of in gallery tech, the idea of digitization is something that is an ever growing concept.

This class brings up these concepts of what a digital museum is capable of. It explores the digital medium and how it can enhance the museum experience overall. Still museums struggle to grasp this perfect balance given the large barrier that digitization seems to hold over the smaller museum.

The blog format is an interesting way to do assignments, and though I might be paralyzed by anxiety over submitting stuff online, it is an overall enjoyable experience. Guest Lecturer-wise it’s interesting to see the behind the scenes look at the various peoples involved in the positions in the digital realm. Especially fascinating was learning how many had to start from scratch. In the ultimate post-digital museum, these positions would have standards to fill, but right now, its still relatively uncertain.

meghan1308

Experience in the Post-Digital Museum

For someone who’s focus is the digital aspect, a post-digital museum would have a seamless integration in its technology and visitor experience. Technology would be used to enhance the visitor experience and give them a new way to explore and interact with information. It would be important to have better access to the museum and its collection away from the actual institution through either an app or the website. This movement for seamless integration cannot stop at a single institution; it would have to show consistent connection between other museums. Currently each museum has it’s own website and way of showcasing what is in their collection to visitors. It would be better if the websites weren’t so jumbled and there was a consistent way of planning these websites for better access. One of the other most important aspects would be accessibility to others who may be disabled or speak other languages. Once we figure out how to make these improvements then we will be truly post-digital.

This class has taught me how digital takes on so many different forms for museums and that there isn’t currently a clear cut way for how to use it. It has also taught me that there are so many amazing museums with equally amazing individuals working for them who are trying to utilize technology to bring more information and better experiences to their visitors.

Post Ditigal Museum

Reading about the app, ASK at the Brooklyn Museum really helps to create a positive experience for the visitor. I specifically liked how the visitor is able to get a real life interactive experience with a staff member at the museum. I find it difficult at times to go to art museums because I do not know much about art and find it hard to have an enjoyable experience. As I went to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum this weekend, they also have an app to help explain the art work. Although not the same experience as the Brooklyn Museum, but the app at ISGM still has the same idea. Since there are not labels at ISGM or very few, the museum has made the point to leave out room guides to help the visitor understand what they are looking at. However, I found an app online that tracks your location within the museum. Once it finds your location, it selects a piece of art work and goes into detail about the artist, why it was painted, and the impression the art work is supposed to leave you with. One painting in particular, called Nocturne, Blue and Silver is a painting with dark blue waves and a ship with dark blue sails. With the audio tour, it tells the visitor where to look to find the painting. The audio goes into more detail about the controversy around the painting because it’s so simple that most people think there is nothing to the painting. However, the painting, although simple, is about slowly down in life and appreciating what is in front of you. The audio tour was very helpful throughout the tour and defiantly had given me the experience that one should want to have when visiting an art museum. These apps that museums are creating really helps the visitor become fully enaggaed with the art work, objects, etc. I am very lucky to be able to experience this post ditigal museum because it really is all about making the visitor have the best experience possible.

Here is the painting Nocturne. Sorry for the poor quality of the photo. Very happy I came across this app!!

Digital Necessity

The sources we’ve read for this class and our own experiences as visitors show that applications of advanced digital technology can be powerful assets for museums. They can supplement physical exhibition experiences, compose entire exhibition experiences in and of themselves, give access to information and objects for those who are physically unable to visit, and relieve the strain of displaying objects, among other things. However, for all its potential benefits, we must always keep in mind that digital technology is an option, not a necessity. Beyond logistical restraints such as time and money, for both initial implementation and future maintenance/updating, there’s also an ideological connection to the concept of a “post-digital” museum. The aim of the latter is to reach a state of being where digital technology is treated no different from older methods/materials in consideration for implementation. Therefore, in that view digital technology, like the established techniques, is not universally applicable. Expository object labels containing context and interpretation are generally natural companions for historic objects but not for modern art, for example. Physical applications of digital technology (like large touch-screens) work well in science and technology museums but ruin the atmosphere of historic/natural sites (like forts or wildlife refuges) unless placed in a separate area/addition like a visitor center. Accepting digital technology as equally valid methods as older media also means accepting digital technology as equally invalid when the circumstances make it so. A truly post-digital world treats digital technology as nothing particularly special--as merely some among many available options.

Post-Digital Museums

Over the course of the last few months we have heard about a variety of different digital projects, tools, and long-term strategies. Looking forward this week, we are discussing what it means to be “post digital” in the museum world. While many museums focus on digital projects for just one channel, like apps and interactives, being post digital calls for a “seamless integrated physical/digital journey; before, during and after the visit, that considers where visitors are, what they’re doing and considers digital channels and solutions designed to fit that need integrated over the end to end experience.”

One of the aspects of this is integrating the digital and physical worlds. Visitors do not see digital interactives, projects, etc. as separate from the museum; they see them as one entity, a part of the museum. This has a number of ramifications for museums, such as creating responsive websites and apps that can be used by visitors before, during, and after their visits or having chances to create personalized experiences.

One of my favorite digital projects integrated into a museum is the Roboguides, or screens mounted on poles with wheels used to video conference. These are placed in exhibits with experts from across the world videoconferencing and talking to visitors. The robot sits in the gallery and the expert is able to see the visitors, answer any questions, and even maneuver around the gallery. One my visit to AMNH last November, I came across a roboguide in the Northwest Coast Indians Hall, who was a curator and member of the Haida Gwaii community in Canada. While in his office in Canada, the expert was able to see me in the gallery, move the robot over, and introduce himself. This allowed me to have my questions about the exhibit answered from an expert miles and miles away, creating a more personalized and engaging experience. Here I didn’t count this interaction as separate to my museum visit, instead it was integrated into my experience as a whole.

“Post digital” may sound scary when we are just starting to learn and understand how to make digital technology work within a museum setting, but seeing projects as part of the museum experience (and often expected by visitor) can help improve visitor experience.

amuseumdays

Membership and Digital

I enjoyed learning about the Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) and its focus on active engagement and long-term relationships with visitors. For many years, the standard measure of a museum’s impact has been attendance, or the total number of participants in its programs. DMA’s focus on repeat participation, however, is a more useful measure of impact because it allows the museum to analyze its museum visitors in a more in-depth fashion.

I was wondering how the DMA friends program has progressed since it launched in January 2013. According to the press release from DMA in April 2015, in two years, “it has enrolled 100,000 Friends. This achievement now places the DMA as the fourth largest membership of any art museum in North America.” 2015 DMA visitor research also indicated that since 2008 there has been a 35% increase in first-time Museum visitors, and a 29% increase in minority audiences.

“Charting the Course: Using Data in the Museum to Explore, Innovate, and Reach New Audiences” presented at the We Are Museums Conference in May-June 2015 in Berlin, Germany.

I was particularly interested in the fact that the DMA’s free friends membership program redefined the museum’s existing paid membership program, DMA Partners. I was skeptical about whether the museum’s free admission and free membership program would benefit the museum in a sustainable way. But, after launching a free membership program, “the average gift of DMA Premier Partners, annual donors of $1,000–$25,000, has increased 19% since January 2013.” The DMA friends not only increased attendance, but also significantly expanded the museum’s potential donor platform.

What did you learn in school today?

We began this class discussing what a post-digital museum looks like, and read numerous articles of museum and digital professionals theorizing about how we will get to a point where digital is seamlessly integrated into the museum field. Coming from a place with little to no background in museum digital or technology, I had never thought about how it could be problematic to entirely separate digital into its own department with its own strategy in the museum. Before this class, I thought of digital as a department for the people skilled in working with technology and digital platforms (coding, building tools, games, exhibitions, etc.). While it is true that people who work with digital require specific skill sets to do their job well, through this class I have come to realize that digital is necessary throughout the museum- not just contained to its own department. One department can’t be responsible for everything that involves a screen or the internet; it’s not possible to handle that volume of work, and it doesn’t make sense. What does make sense is to have people with digital skill sets working throughout the museum on different teams and in different departments- because digital should be and will be a part of every area in the museum (in some form or another). As someone who wants to work in museum administration, it is important for me to have knowledge about why it is important to embrace digital in the museum, and incorporate this into as many aspects of the overall museum strategy as make sense. This class has made me feel a lot more comfortable talking about digital in the museum field; something I would have not discussed with colleagues before taking this class.

kthulgwumuse-blog

Museum Post-Digital

The post-digital movement for museum advocates for digital integration into the heart of museum operations, and stepping away from being a side venture. We have learned about its impact on the museum field. There has been notable increase in digital or “experience” leadership in museum over the last five years. Some museums are taking on digital projects, like the Brooklyn Museum’s ASKing About Art, that require full institutional investment to function. These are good signs for a future of more innovative, engaging museums. But, there is still a level of slow adaptation in the museum field. My final paper for the class is a look at the Cooper Hewitt, and “The Pen” project, something that surface level is a fantastic example of a post-digital, innovative museum and application. Through my reading, I learned more about their team structure. The museum definitely has championed strong digital and experience higher leadership, but also contracted out the work for the pen. They note the challenge of contracting includes being reliant on outside contractors to maintain something that is central to the museum’s experience, and it can cause a lack institutional knowledge on the mechanics of their projects. So there still is this tension of value in higher organization, but not neccesarily having the corresponding specialized work-force. So I see post-digital as there in thinking and leadership, but still struggling to fully flesh out in practice due to the nature of the field. This class on the whole has been a look at this tension, because museums do not have the same affordances as the private sector. They have specialized circumstances of resources and institutional culture that can make it difficult to reach the post-digital in actuality.

#museum technology #museum tech #digital #experience #post-digital

Visitor’s Journey

I really enjoyed Catherine Devine’s article which is really about this idea of a “post digital” museum that we’ve been talking about all semester. She says that there is no physical experience and digital experience, there is just an experience. And so this experience must stretch over multiple channels. I wondered how the Brooklyn Museum’s ASK mobile app fits in to this sort of seamless, multi-channel idea of digital integration. It’s an interesting idea and pretty personal with the goal of directly talking about art with the patrons. In a way, it is a sort of stand alone component of the museum, but it seems that they’ve really tried to integrate it into the museum experience as much as possible. Much of the interview with Shelley Bernstein and Sara Devine centered on the possibility of real-time interactions/conversations. This has been a challenge for them, and for me, I feel like it would really need to act in real time for me to really be about to integrate it into my museum visit.

There is another project at the Brooklyn Museum that seems to check more of Catherine Devine’s boxes. This is an attempt to integrate beacon/ibeacon/geolocating technology into the museum “journey.” They talk about using it for statistics and to know were patrons are to assist with the ASK app. But I could also see it providing patrons with running, real-time information that could ill in what’s missing from the ASK experience. This is alos something that could be referred to by the visitor later, or perhaps they could even program a tour for themselves before they get to the museum.

Connecting People Post-Digitally

This week’s reading about the post-digital museum, especially the Brooklyn Museum ASK app and the Dallas Museum of Art Friends platform, show just how integrated technology has become in museums, and how it is being used to make engagement with the collections fun and interesting. I especially like the idea behind the DMA Friends platform with free membership and rewards for participating with the museum.

The ability to get badges for visiting galleries or exploring the museum more fully or more often would probably be the most appealing aspect for me or my family. We love collecting (hence why I want to work with museum collections), so having badges as rewards would be something we would all get into. My dad and both of my brothers-in-law compete with badges on a beer app; everyone in my family competes for the most steps and badges through Fitbit. But it’s not outright competition, it’s a way for us to share experiences even at the cross-country distances we are set at now.

By including badges, small rewards, and a mild aspect of competition in the museum experience, DMA Friends creates a way for all museum visitors to once again feel a sort of community that was somewhat lost while the gaps between generations increased (the generation that saw the invention of the internet is only slightly older than the one that has always had that vast amount of information at their fingertips). It creates a simple, intuitive platform that enables everyone to enjoy the museum experience whether their focus is on getting to enough galleries to collect all the badges or on earning special tours to learn more about the works that interest them. The post-digital museum creates new and varied ways for everyone to enjoy museums (even if there are several hiccups along the way).

#mstdtech

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ASK Brooklyn Museum

ASK Brooklyn Museum is an innovate digital tool that not only encourages visitors to look closer at art and offers more personal interactions onsite, but it also provides the institution valuable data to further improve the visitor experience. In short, the app is truly a win-win.

Photo of Brooklyn Museum’s ASK app.

Beyond the smart, human-centered design of the app itself, I really appreciate the museum staff’s transparency. It seems the app’s developers have been very open about the iterative, challenging design process via interviews and blogs on the subject. They are also helping colleagues in the museum field by providing the source code on Github so others may emulate and draw inspiration from their innovation. They made a great digital product with the visitor in mind and shared their knowledge with others.

Museums & Participatory Incentives

The Dallas Museum of Art reading (http://mw2013.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/nurturing-engagement/) discussed the idea of having rewards for visitors who participate a large amount while visiting the museum. If visitors participate heavily, they can be rewarded with things like discounted gift shop purchases, free parking passes, etc.. When there are rewards for participating, I think visitors are more likely to make an effort to do so.

I love visiting Presidential Museums and have already been to seven of them. My goal is to visit every single one. One way the presidential library system encourages participation is by selling special passports that people can have stamped at each museum they visit. Once every presidential museum has been visited, that visitor gets a special prize. I do not have one of those passports and obviously care more about learning about every president than receiving a prize, I do think this is a great way for those a little less interested to get the motivation to learn more about presidents and see more presidential museums than they might have originally intended to. People seem to like rewards, and I think this example and the Dallas Museum of Art example are two examples of that.

Creating a participatory culture using digital

Looking at the reading this week, the most interesting readings for me were the ASKing about art at the Brooklyn Museum (ASK) and the reading about Dallas Museum of Art (DMA) visitor participation program. Both reading discussed specific cases of digital being used in museum to increase visitor participation with the museum. The ASK app was an excellent example of how digital should be used in the modern age. The app allows visitors to ask questions about artworks in the Brooklyn Museum. The creators want to create an informative app, that drove institutional improvement, encourage visitors’ interaction with artwork, and created a personal relationship with the visitors and the Brooklyn Museum. I am someone who rarely visits art museums because I am not good at understanding the complexities of the art world. I know art is subjective, but I just do get it. Having this app would make the Brooklyn Museum (or any museum for that matter) more accessible for someone like me. Instead of google searching, I can have an interaction with someone knowledgeable the subject. I like that educational aspect. The DMA visitor participation is very cool. I like the interactive aspect of the badges, activities, and rewards. I think a significant factor in their success was making the admission and membership free. It probably opened a new group of visitors, visitors who probably could not afford membership or admissions before, a more diverse population, a younger audience who would be more interested in these types of benefits. The most important thing about these efforts made by the Brooklyn Museum and DMA is that the apps were created with the visitor in mind. They weren’t created to add some digital aspect to the museum to stay on trend. The creators really focused integrating the museum and its visitors with the digital experiences.

My kind of art:

Watanabe Shiko

Design and Usability

When a product is over-designed, it becomes less usable. Usability is measured by how as easy and pleasant a feature is to use. The IDEO team designed a new form of shopping cart meant to better address customers’ needs. Their brainstorming process was interesting to see. It follows the basic rules:

One conversation at a time

Stay focused

Encourage wild idea

Defer judgement

Build on the ideas of others

For the shopping cart example, more ideas for functionality meant that the final design contained many components. The product has to be maintained, and the multiple removable baskets and hardware makes that necessity more complex.

Too many ideas create barriers to use. If users have to spend too much time figuring out how to use a new product, they may opt out of the experience. This is not a reason to avoid innovative products, but users’ previous knowledge and experiences and their expectations should be considered in the design process.

As an IDEO employee states in the video hyper linked above, they are not experts in a given area, they are experts in the design process. Generating ideas is an important part of the process, but representatives from the GLAM site should have continuous input as well. In the 2013 Museums and the Web presentation, “Design Thinking for Visitor Engagement: Tackling One Museum’s Big Challenge through Human-centered Design,” Dana Mitroff Silvers, Molly Wilson, and Maryanna Rogers show how design thinking practices can be adapted to GLAM settings. Their method is:

Empathize: understand your user

Define: clarify user needs and barriers

Ideate: come up with ideas to address the problems you’ve identified

Prototype and Test: gather feedback and tweak ideas before releasing final product

This more careful and deliberate process sees the product up to implementation whereas IDEO process seems more a frenzy focused on the “ideate” component of the design process.

kthulgwumuse-blog

Audio and Story-Telling

Museums often work in tangible means of story-telling (based in objects), but as pointed out in this weeks readings on usability and user experience, other tools like audio can create impactful museum experiences. I was particularly interested in Tiffanie Wen’s article in The Atlantic on empathy and story craft. Museums, cultural museums in particular, do collect oral histories and stories of their subjects, which can effectively allow for this empathy that transports a visitor into the world of the storyteller. There are a variety of tools at the storyteller’s disposal, like distinctive character voice, personal perspective, and sound effects.

One example of an exhibition that uses audio to highlight the power of a good story is in Objects of Wonder at the National Museum of Natural History. The exhibition highlights distinctive objects from the museum’s collection (these are varied from insect specimens, to gems, to cultural objects). In this exhibition, there is the 1875 Tsimshian House Front that comes alive through audio story-telling. The voice of David A. Boxley, a member of the Tsimshian tribe, tells the story of Northwest Coast formline design artwork and the culture that created it. He tells the story of the mythical Undersea Chief Nagunaks, which is painted on the house-front and as he tells the story, characters on the house-front are spotlighted, so listeners to can connect Boxley’s story to the object infront of them. Noticeably in this case, audio is used to help visitors interpret an object in detail, hear a representative of the culture the object came from, and perhaps feel immersed in the story. Storytelling and audio experience like this can really enliven a museum’s collection.

#museum tech #museum technology #audio #museum audio

Atmospheric/Supplementary Museum Sound

Stimulating different senses can have much greater impacts if they deviate from “normal” conditions--for example, a recording of somebody reading a written work, a visual aid in a written work that was up to that point entirely textual, or an interactive activity in an otherwise lecture-based class. Some of the impact that audio has on certain museum visitors can be attributed to this; because museums are predominantly visual and textual, a well-done auditory element may be more noticeable than a well-done installation. Auditory primary sources are especially prone to this, as they’re much less common than secondary audio sources (commentary from museum academics, lectures by educators, etc.). They also have value outside the grounds of the museum.

However, this doesn’t devalue older applications of audio in museum settings, which usually fall into the categories of supplementary information and atmospheric effects. The former is most likely to take the form of an audio tour (either self-guided or led by a docent) or commentary from museum personnel. While they may not have universal appeal, as they’re so heavily tied to the objects, they can provide valuable context that otherwise would not be conveyed through labels (which more often than not are abridged) or personal analysis on the visitors’ part. It can also help to work around physical limitations in a museum--the (apparently now defunct) museum where I had my first internship is a historic school building with classrooms converted into exhibition space and an equally limited budget due to being run by the county public school system. Having audio play in the exhibition about the local Native American tribes that were wiped out by disease before the Spanish colonization of Florida began in earnest helped get around the fact that the rest of the exhibition was little more than an empty classroom with a wall-to-wall painting of a Native American village scene, a facsimile of part of a longhouse roof (that extended out from the painting), and a selection of prop implements like a mortar & pestle made out of plastic logs.

I argue that atmospheric sound qualifies as “experiential”, as it’s essentially background noise in an exhibition. Despite the stigma of annoyance and meaninglessness attached to the term “background noise”, it plays a pivotal role in selling a museum “experience” depending on application and context. The Imperial War Museum’s London location has an exhibition on World War I with a segment constructed to make visitors wind through a facsimile of a trench with objects in display cases embedded in the walls. To sell the experience, the lights were extraordinarily dim except for flashes that corresponded with recordings of artillery bombardments and machine gun fire, along with the sounds of a biplane flying overhead, an idling tank, and shouting soldiers, almost all of which are also represented in physical form above the trench walls. It may not convey direct academic knowledge nor be especially technologically-advanced, but that audio, when combined with the physical installation and lighting, provides what may be the closest experience to trench warfare possible in a museum without compromising the safety of visitors and objects.

meghan1308

Experience Design

One of the biggest questions, not only for museums but for people in general, is how do we form connections? With our increasingly digital lifestyles influencing how we spend our time innovations in user interface and user experience are often what drives the sites we visit and how engaged we are. Design structure has been a big part of my education over the last decade, and anyone who knows me well can attest to the fact that poor design always rubs me the wrong way. But that begs the question, what is good design? How do we identify it? For me good design is clean and easy to navigate, it is stylistic but not distracting, it must have a purpose and be accessible to others. Even through all this for me one other important aspect is that it is designed with group input. Through all of the projects I’ve worked on in all different environments we have had a think tank where everyone contributed, and regardless of their rank in the office we were all on equal footing. Between graphic design, product design, illustration, and video game development this has been the norm for me as a designer and project leader. We work in limited time frames to produce a product that has a purpose and engages with it’s audience. I haven’t had much project experience in museums as of yet, but I am hoping that this remains true when designing experiences for our audiences. I feel this will be the best way to ensure we meet the museum’s mission going forward.

As for including audio in experiences at museums and on the web in general; I find that it can be a great way to help form connections on a deeper level. Podcasts and radio shows are seeing a surge in popularity and I believe it is because of the way it engages our creativity. I often find myself listening to stories through podcasts, YouTube, or audio books because of how they allow my mind to interact with what I’m being told. Take for example the audiobook version of “The Martian” by Andy Weir, it was a pretty good movie, but try listening to it while on a plane and picturing yourself in space with the main character, the experience for me was far better that the big screen. Or try listening to the podcast Lore by Aaron Mahnke in the dark with just a candle burning, is it creeper that watching the show? Why do you think audio experiences are different? I believe it is because they allow the image to form in our mind, and even when audio is used to enhance an exhibit and add layers of immersion it brings us into a new space and makes us a more active participant.

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