What would happen if you knew where everything was? Or if even the most insignificant items were gifted with rudimentary communication skills? Or if the history of everything was logged and stored in a way you could access from anywhere in the world?

These were some of the questions that I’ve been pondering over the past week, ever since I found out that there are several projects out there that could help make these things happen. More about them in a second, but first, and explanation of how I got there.

It all started back at the Over the Air conference. Chatting to some of the other delegates, we were imagining what a ’smart’ name badge would do, and I envisioned it changing colour or displaying a message as you approached other delegates based on how your interests synced. As to how it would do it, I thought of using an embedded computing device such as the Arduino, plus wireless communication via Bluetooth.

Now this is all very plausible, but has the huge downside of cost: a setup like that would cost well over £50 per person, which, if you had hundreds of delegates, could get very very expensive. Then somebody told me about the OpenBeacon project, and I realised I’d got it all wrong.

OpenBeacon turns this idea on its head: the name badge itself does not do any computation: all it is is an RFID tag, with simple input and output (a button, a buzzer and an LED). Unlike your simple Oyster-card -style RFID, the OpenBeacon variety is ‘active’: this means that battery-power can boost the range at which it can be detected to tens of metres. Once this is coupled with lots of base-stations to detect the tags, you can use triangulation to pin-point the exact position of every person.

This has been used successfully at the Chaos Communication Congress as you can see from these videos.

So there you have it. The objects are still dumb, but they are no longer mute. You can then process and display the information on any device you like: consult your mobile phone or your laptop during an event to physically locate all the people with similar interests, for example.

If all of this sounds a bit Orwellian: you’re right. However, it all depends on who has access to the information, and how much you choose to disclose. If you yourself can get at the data, then I can imagine it being very useful. For example, you could ask the system ‘give me a list of all the people I talked to at that conference I went to two years ago’. (in practice, the exact query would have to be more like ‘get me a list of all the people who remained within a two metre radius of me for more than 5 consecutive minutes’, but you get the idea).

Equally, and potentially more relevant to the museum world, you could lend each visitor to your gallery an OpenBeacon badge, and then they could use their mobile to read extra information about the object they are standing next to without having to type in any IDs nor scan QR codes. You could also use their location data to build up a list of all the works they visited (which they could later see on a personalised website, for example), or even get them to ‘bookmark’ particular items by pressing a button when they are in front of them.

With large scale data like this, you also start entering the realm of scientists who look at bee pollination behaviour (or, more prosaically, marketers who look at web site usage statistics): individual events are not particularly significant, but when they are aggregated you can start to infer useful conclusions.

I also found some other projects with similar goals (mainly thanks to Tinker.it’s blog). The Roomware project includes open source code to track items using RFID or Bluetooth, and TimeLines is a company that specifically uses technology like this to allow participants to interact during and after events.

Meanwhile, the Pachube project takes things a whole step further, by aiming to monitor any type of object, in any location. Pachube (pronounced ‘patch bay’ apparently), is the brainchild of ambient artist Usman Haque, and allows objects to upload information about themselves to a central location using Extended Environments Markup Language (EEML). Read more about it at www.pachube.com.

Once you’ve got a client-server architecture like this, the sky’s the limit. You can have your house communicate with you via twitter, or check your energy usage from anywhere.

And so, finally, we get to the idea of a Spime, which is a neologism coined by Bruce Sterling. According to his speech at SIGGRAPH 2004:

The most important thing to know about Spimes is that they are precisely located in space and time. They have histories. They are recorded, tracked, inventoried, and always associated with a story.

Spimes have identities, they are protagonists of a documented process.

They are searchable, like Google. You can think of Spimes as being auto-Googling objects.

Sound familiar? All of the things mentioned above seem like proto-spimes to me. And monitoring and logging projects like Pachube, SENSEI and OpenSpime are taking us a step closer.

Bring it on.

P.S. If you’re interested in the technology to get up and running with your proto-spimes, there is a free RFID and Arduino workshop as part of the mini Takeaway Festival at the Science Museum’s Dana centre next Tuesday and Wednesday.

On a long haul flight recently, I at last got some time to take a look at the shiny new iPhone SDK, released by Apple last month. We do a lot of Cocoa development at Cogapp, having just shipped MoMA.Guide and the Prudential Eye, both of which use Cocoa extensively. (I was put through my paces at the legendary Cocoa Boot Camp, by the mighty Aaron Hillegass himself). And the good news is, development on the iPhone is pretty much exactly the same.

We’re very excited about the possibilities this offers to our clients, and already have some internal demos running. Our new kiosk development framework is specifically designed to allow publishing to multiple platforms. The demos we have in-house involve the exact same content being published to a kiosk, a website, a mobile web version, and a native iPhone version, all from the same publishing mechanism, and all optimised to the strengths of the target platform.

Be sure to check back for further updates.

This is the second part of an article looking at the authorial voice and what we can and can’t do with it.

Okay, deep breath…

So you’re a major cultural institution; you’ve got fantastic content and you’re an authority on it (well, as much as you can be these days). What happens when your most precious commodity leaks out online and starts appearing all over the place? What happens when the general public start to - gulp - edit it?

What can you do? Luckily there’s a simple answer to this one: nothing. You can’t do anything at all. Once it’s out there, it’s out there.

We can’t control the content other people generate, even if it borrows heavily on our own work (although certain ultra-rich authors might disagree with that). The cost involved in having staff trawl the web for doctored content and then try to fix it would be enormous - and pointless.

So if we accept that we have no control over this unauthorised content, we must ensure that there exists a definitive set of our ‘official’ content. If a Wikipedia article on a famous painting in your collection is wrong, that’s clearly not great. You can try policing all of those articles wherever they crop up but it’s probably easier to paint numbers onto waves. Better to provide tools that enable wikis and others to link back to your site - where you can provide your definitive guide to the work. You can’t really do much more than tell users where your opinion is held - and protect that site like a fortress!

Case in point - on a previous blog I wanted to include an image from a major institution’s collection, clearly mark it as their copyright and provide a link back into their online collection. But it turns out I can’t do that without emailing them, waiting for a response and possibly even paying them. I simply don’t have time for that, and of course there are lots of similar (free) images around. Result: they lost a link and free publicity.

We can’t stop people taking our content and doing what they want with it. And so the easier we make it for users to legitimately use or reference our content - in a way that you can control e.g. an object widget that users can embed in their own pages - the more likely they are to do so. A great commercial example of this is the iTunes Music Store. Why pay for a song that is wrapped up in DRM when you can ‘borrow’ one from peer-to-peer networks? Well, using those networks can be difficult (I am told) you have no guarantees as to the quality of the content you are accessing, download times vary, connections often drop… and the result is that Apple sell billions of songs a year. In this case - for the majority of users - it’s more work to break the law than to follow it.

So be as open as you can with your content but know where to draw the line. And User Generated Content? Well it has a place - although personally I’m not that interested in what Bernard from Skipton-Under-Lyme thinks of Marriage a la Mode - provided there is no confusion between users’ opinions and the curatorial one.

Rather than harvesting individual opinions it is perhaps more interesting to find out what society in general thinks of art - or as large a section of it as you can canvas. With that in mind do have a look at Brooklyn Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, Click! in which they are creating a public-curated gallery based on online submissions and voting. Anyone can vote; the process is simple, effective and quite eye opening. It could be a triumph, it could be a disaster - but it’s a fascinating experiment and one which I will watch with interest.

And he takes another breath at last!

Something that keeps cropping up whenever I meet with museum and gallery professionals is the tricky issue of Authorial Voice (caps added to make it sound more… er… authoritative).

The traditional model has of course always been: we tell you what we believe… and you (the public) believe us. The explosion of online content sources such as Wikipedia has put a rather large dent in this model; users have access to so much information (and not all of it good) that they are perhaps less likely to accept what institutions tell them at face value. Or, to put it another way, a dialogue is beginning to happen between institutions and users. And that’s a good thing.

My naughty link to the questionable content at the Creationist Museum leads to an important point. Some institutions in America are now adding ‘we believe’ to long-held absolute positions, like evolution. There is an opposing belief - and if cultural institutions scoff and ignore they will only help to legitimise it. We need to engage with the argument and prove our point.

Users have access to unparalleled amounts of content; this is a new thing, it’s a good thing but it’s never happened on anything like this scale before. The more viewpoints we can access, the more complicated the cultural landscape becomes - and therefore it is all the more important that museums and galleries are seen to take a firm but well-reasoned - and appropriately open - position.

But what happens when the content leaves the institution and Joe Public gets their hands on it? I’ll look at that in my next post, You’re wrong and I’ll write (clever, eh?)

I’ve just got back from the Future Trends: Innovative and Interactive Museums conference held by Heritage365 at the Wellcome Collection yesterday. Colin, Joe and I had a great day, full of insightful talks and a great selection of interesting and interested delegates.

Due to a last-minute change, I was asked to give a presentation and then participate in the end of conference panel, along with Ailsa Barry from the Natural History Museum, Dave Patten from The Science Museum and Robert Simpson from Electrosonic. You can find a copy of my presentation here: Making the most of it - pdf file (1MB).

I think a few themes emerged from the talks and panel session and I’ll try and summarise them here.

Technology enables visitors

Well, duh. But after a talk from Jane Burton at Tate Media a delegate asked whether providing a PDA with built in drawing tools was fundamentally any better than visitors bringing their own paper and pen. The response from another delegate was intriguing: she would never think to take paper and pen to a gallery but when presented with them in electronic form she was delighted to start drawing what she saw. In other words, the technology provided her with a new way to interact with exhibits that she would never have considered, an experience she would otherwise never have had. And that must be a very good thing indeed.

The more of these tools we can develop for users, the wider the range of experiences we can provide. After all, The Big Experience is surely a key element of the museum visit. Visitors might not use all of these tools - they might not use any of them in a lot of cases - but if the tools are there, the potential is too.

Content is still King

Again, this sounds like a no-brainer but it’s easy to get blinded by the headlights of new technology (lovely image, that) and try to build exhibits around cool gadgets. Multi-touch is a classic example of this; everyone seems to want it but no-one has yet figured out what to do with it. As the screenwriter William Goldman once said, ‘the script’s the thing.’ Start with the idea, build from the content - then add the technology.

Our industry is full of great stories and storytellers; museums, galleries and agencies must remember to make the most of them.

Thanks to Ben Gammon for hosting the panel session - and many thanks to the lovely Dave Patten for bigging up this here blog in his fascinating presentation. Cheers!

Ben, Rachael, Colin and myself hopped over to Montreal last week to Museums and the Web 2008. Here are a couple of the sessions I found the most interesting.

Peter Samis of SFMOMA gave a session called [deep breath], “Who Has The Responsibility For Saying What We See? Mashing up Museum, Artist, and Visitor Voices, On-site and On-line.” He talked about the museum’s experience in creating a microsite for Scandinavian artist Olafur Eliasson (best known over here as ‘that bloke wot did the sun in the Tate‘). Eliasson’s latest works are concerned less with the actual objects or installations the artist creates, and more to do with the way the viewer experiences his works. He ruffles curators feathers everywhere by saying things like: “Objecthood doesn’t have a place in the world if there’s not an individual person making use of that object…” and declares to the visitor, “I don’t think my work is about my work. I think my work is about you.”

From the paper Abstract: “the SFMOMA Interactive Educational Technologies (IET) team produced an interactive kiosk / Web site that offered background commentary and footage of the artist discussing his philosophy and studio practice, but stopped short of describing individual works in detail”. This took the form of blog comments. Visitors were encouraged to describe their experiences and opinions on the works, and in effect extend the scope of the installations in the virtual world. Peter talked of the process of setting up such a ‘hands off’ forum, and gave examples of the range of comments they received.

Aaron Straup Cope from Flickr, (whose job title is Hackr) gave a session where he talked about the importance of computer programming in the medium of online artworks and ideas. He made the comparison between printmaking and the Internet, arguing that just as printmakers embraced the “craft” of chemical engineering in order to create their plates, so people wishing to create online need to recognise the necessity of programming.

He made the point that it is essential for large cultural organisations to have coders on their in-house teams, and for them to be involved in the creative process from the very beginning. Which is a sentiment we at Cogapp would wholeheartedly agree with.

For me, Shelley Bernstein from the Brooklyn Museum was a highlight speaker in this early session.

Shelley spoke about the agile and creative online projects that the small team at the Brooklyn Museum are creating to attract new audiences.

Cutting through some of the user research demographics, she simply stated that the Brooklyn Museum treats their online audience as a “single, credible group that has value in it’s own right”.

This was supported by the quality of projects they were producing such as the Facebook app Artshare: a new way for users to share their collection and display their favourite art works in their Facebook profile.

She went on to present the results from their youtube competition launched in October last year. The quality of the content was superb, fresh and low-fi. Shelley noted a good point about the importance of clear rules for their online competitions and the importance of letting the user know what the brief is and what they are being asked to do.

The Brooklyn Museum seems to be a small, confident leader in this field, where larger museums find it harder to be reactive and agile in such a high octane web 2 environment, Shelley and her team seem happy with the model of “begging for forgiveness when the project has launched” rather than “pleading for permission to go ahead”…

A refreshing and confident attitude that is attracting a credible, sustainable and engaged fanbase.

http://www.brooklynmuseum.org/exhibitions/click/

photo by thornj

I’ve just returned from MIPTV the AV and digital content market held each year in Cannes. It’s a vast event – over 13,000 delegates attend – and the buzz of trade inside the Palais des Festivals is matched, if not outstripped, by that of the deals being struck and contacts made in the many coffee shops, bars and hotels along the Croisette.

While there to build on Cogapp’s links with TV indies and broadcasters - and to explore the creative opportunities of convergence and multi-platform - I made sure I found the time to attend a number of conferences. The MIPTV programme gives a useful insight into what are currently felt by the industry to be some of its most pressing challenges and opportunities – and so I’d thought I’d pick up on and summarise a few themes that kept cropping up: the growth of online video, monetisation and how to measure engagement. Or, media, money and metrics…
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Last week, I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at the Over The Air conference at Imperial College. Organised by Mobile Monday London, it was focussed on mobile phone development, and had a great lineup of speakers as well as lots of techy fun including an all-night hackathon.

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This weekend I took my family to Portsmouth and up to the top of the Spinnaker Tower. On the first viewing level, some 100 metres above the harbour, is probably the simplest and most effective interactive exhibit in the UK. It’s a hole in the floor, covered in glass - and you walk on it. That’s it.

It is straightforward. You can’t get much more straightforward than a hole in the floor.

It is easy to understand. The only instructions are ‘please take off your shoes’.

There is no unnecessary information. It would have been tempting to place a touchscreen nearby but that would have ruined the simplicity of the experience.

It is absolutely thrilling. Your brain tells you the glass must be safe. Every other part of you screams ‘get off it now!’

It is interactive at a fundamental level. You don’t change it, it changes you (see the screaming above).

Visitors use and enjoy it their own way. My toddler ran happily over it, blissfully unaware of the massive drop below him; a young boy lay on it, drawing the view below; teenagers dared each other to stand on it and jump up and down; and adults tried very hard not to be too chicken about the whole thing.

The view from the tower is astounding. There is a nifty interactive map on the second viewing level and there are all sorts of readouts and videos as you wait to ascend. But the thing everyone talks about is the hole in the floor. It is simple and brilliant.

It takes full advantage of the single most thrilling aspect of the Tower - that you are a very very long way up.

It gives users a unique and dramatic experience that cannot be replicated anywhere else. And that must be a good thing.