Non-needy smartness
If you don't currently read Dan Hon's daily newsletter, you should probably be doing that. With all of the fallout and follow-up from my "Becoming Authentically Digital" talk at MuseumNext (excerpted here and here) swimming in my head, Dan said something in today's newsletter that really resonated with me. In talking about the relative crappitude of wearable tech, he said this:
I love the idea of non-needy smartness. Smartness just in every day things, without the lure of a screen. And also, because screens are *lazy*. You put a screen in something and suddenly, hey, now you have 24 bit problems with an alpha channel at a 200dpi+ resolution. Congratulations.
This is just so perfect, and so completely encapsulates what is often wrong with public implementation of technology in museums. There's an assumption that a flashy display automatically makes something awesome, and that is so rarely actually true.