We’ve recently been involved in in a proposal for a brand new museum, putting together ideas for a large number of different interactives which address a number of gallery needs and look at a wide range of content.

We always hit the same problem with these projects: that the ambition of the work far outstrips the available budgets. And one of the reasons for this is that we seem to re-invent the wheel for each new interactive.

I can’t talk about the museum in question for obvious reasons, so let’s invent one for a thought experiment. Let’s call it The Ian Museum.

It opens next year and has four main galleries - Piano Heroes, Tea,  Why Football is Dull - and Ian: the Man, the Myth. So that’s a wide range of topics that will typically require a wide range of interactives.

In the traditional model we look at each of the galleries, identify the gaps that could be filled with digital content and then try to come up a wide variety of interesting routes through that content. Let’s have some games, some digital microscopes, a huge electronic encylopedia, a virtual film studio, a massive interactive timeline, a live ‘Video Nation’ style board, a large image of me… the list can go on and on.

Here’s the thing. Why should we re-invent digital content delivery from gallery to gallery? We don’t re-invent the signage or images, beyond gallery or thematic styling, so why do it when bits and bytes are involved.  ‘Hey, we used English in the last Gallery, that’s old hat - let’s write these signs backwards!’

Maybe a better way forward is to create a more standard set of interactives for a museum, the ‘bread and butter’ digital access points to more content. And maybe we shouldn’t give users access to vast swathes of content, maybe we should concentrate on smaller areas and really do them justice in terms of storytelling, design and on-screen/on-wall/on-PDA/on-whatever interaction. Maybe less is more.

Let’s be clear here. I am not advocating a reduction in digital content in museums. For one thing, I’d be doing myself out of a job. There is still room for ‘big ticket’ items in each gallery (that Big Experience thing I’m always going on about) but if we can streamline a large chunk of digital delivery and exploit the efficiencies inherent in this approach then there is more budget left in the pot for the ‘wow! factor’ installations we all love and want.

With that in mind, here’s my Less Is More Manifesto (drum roll…)

We should spend more time doing a smaller number of things really, really well

We should not provide endless amounts of information that the general public don’t want.

Let’s not provide high production value study areas for students and academics. Give them the content they need but deliver it in a more straightforward (i.e. cheaper) manner.

The average museum visitor (and yes I know there probably isn’t one but I never said my manifesto was perfect)  does not expect to come out of a gallery suddenly raised to the level of subject expert, so there’s no need to bombard them with too much information.

The onus is on museums and companies like Cogapp to provide simple and compelling digital experiences that concentrate on the key information, the most relevant stories.

Digital storytelling is a fabulous and flexible way to impart information and just because it can show a million pictures, doesn’t mean it has to.

Finding common ways to distribute information around a gallery or museum frees up budget and time for The Big Experiences. And every gallery needs some of those!

Finally, free 3G iPhones for all museum developers would be nice. But I might be out of luck with that one.

Of course this approach doesn’t work for every gallery and there is always a place for digital collections (at which Cogapp are notable practioners cough cough) but perhaps if we can find some simple but engaging ways of delivering smaller amounts of premium content, which can be duplicated and distributed around a gallery/museum (with due reference to gallery styling etc.) we can free up limited budgets for fewer, but perhaps more successful, big installations. It won’t work all the time, but it might work for some of it.

Right. I need a cup of tea. Now which museum would tell me about that..?

Welcome once again to another spirited read-through of the screenplay that is the Cogapp internal blog. Let’s kick off scene one with a mash-up.

These boots were made for walking
Spotted by Ian.

A fabulous Google Maps mash-up (what, another one?) which lets you plan and calculate a route on foot. Simple, useful and nifty.

Get your pedestrian jollies at: http://www.gmap-pedometer.com/

Shiny image fun in your very own browser
Spotted by Sam

Now a lot of us at Cogapp Towers are generally suspicious of super-flashy-yet-purportedly-useful browser plugins, but this one is pretty cool.

PicLens lets you zoom around a wall of photos pulled from sites like Flickr, Google Images or Facebook. It’s slick, and actually quite useful for image searching - we’re not just gimmick-mongering here.

Try it and you’ll see - flying around endless panels of images and videos is really quite addictive. You can even navigate through Amazon this way, which is quite an eye opener…

Oodles of Doodles
Spotted by Gavin

Always trying to organise meetings with people and can’t find a time that works for all of you? Then maybe you should Doodle it!

Doodle is a simple and easy to use online group calendar - think Google Calendars but without the fuss. For example:  if you’re trying to arrange a meeting with a lot of people, you send them a link to a calendar you have set up (which takes 5 minutes), and they tick the days/times they can attend.  When everyone has done this you can see which times everyone can make it and arrange your meeting. Particularly useful if you’ve got people from multiple organisations or departments.

Again it’s a simple but powerful idea, well executed. Doodle doesn’t do much, but what Doodle does do  Doodle does do well. Try saying that ten times quickly on a late Friday afternoon.

And finally…

Let’s be honest. We have lots of ‘and finally’ candidates on our internal blog. Too many to mention here, but here are a few tantalising whistle wetters…

Making movement complexity visible, spotted by Tristan - http://www.moframes.net/

An oldie but a goodie, spotted by Tristan - if Microsoft designed the iPod packaging.
Ah it gets better every time I watch it.

The legendary Johnny Lee returns with intriguing thoughts on flexible display surfaces, spotted by Joe - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhSR_6-Y5Kg

And if you’ve really not got enough things to do today, spotted by Joe - 65 things that look like Pac-Man

And that’s a wrap, people. We’ll be back soon with more somethings from the Cogapp something (it’s late on a Friday, can you tell?)

Yes, it’s that time once again when we roll up our sleeves, plunge our hands expectantly into the digital tombola that is the Cogapp internal blog and pull out exciting prizes for all…

Social networking for your Gran
Spotted by Gavin

This is from a research project created by Middlesex University. In their words the project - known as Jive - is ‘a range of devices that you buy your grandparents. To let them keep up to date and stay in touch with you.’

An intriguing idea linking physical objects and digital communication and one that could clearly be adapted for museums and galleries. One to watch!

‘I’m looking for the mouse’
Spotted by Tristan

According to the always interesting Clay Shirky, that’s what one little girl said when asked by her father what she was doing rooting around behind the telly while watching Dora the Explorer.

Listen to this heartwarming - and thought provoking - story of a digital native, and other thoughts on the ‘cognitive surplus’ in this video from Web 2.0 Expo 08:

Web apps make anarchy easier
Spotted by Gavin

With the current petrol shortage (see how up to date we are?) what better way to find out where the juice is running low than this nifty Google Maps mash-up:

Social hysteria aside, it’s a good example of audience engagement and collaboration and at a very low cost.

And finally…

From Gizmodo, a good example of why you should always take your digital camera with you, spotted by Ian. It’s a twister!

http://gizmodo.com/5016814/why-you-should-carry-a-digital-camera-at-all-times

That’s it for this time. We’ll be back soon with more winning tickets from the Cogapp raffle.

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!

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.

On Monday, Joe and I attended the Museum Association’s event, Senses Working Overtime: Optimising interactive exhibits, which was held at the Churchill Museum in London.

It was a great day; we both met and talked to lots of interesting people. And of the many issues that came out of the various lectures and discussions my top two were:
Read the rest of this entry »

The BBC’s new home page has recently come out of beta and is available for all to see. It’s great to see an organisation like the BBC moving forward with this approach but I think it raises some questions:

1. It’s interesting to note which elements are customisable and which are not, most notably the large banner area near the top right hand corner of the page.

2. Whilst you can choose which news feeds you view, you can’t sort them in any meaningful way - I’d like to see this in a future release.

3. The BBC iPlayer widget seems redundant (on my poor Mac at any rate)

4. It is good to see search so prominently placed in the middle of the top navigation bar.

5. As potential downside to this approach: does it set users’ expectations too high about the rest of the site? Click on any link and you leave the whizzy customisable home page for a distinctly non-customisable destination.

Updating a site of this size is like painting the Forth Bridge (using old-fashioned paint) and it will never be completely uniform in terms of features and design, but I think it raises an interesting question of how much a home page should set the tone of all following pages.

Finally, as an old person I welcome the 1970s clock in the right hand corner. Completely unnecessary, a whimsical indulgence - but let’s hope the web always has room for these. I’m now waiting for the test card girl to make another appearance - as long as it’s not the scary one from Life on Mars…

No, it’s not something your stomach does - it’s a round-up of interesting posts from our internal blog.

We use our internal blog to communicate everything online that we find thought-provoking, surprising - or hilarious - and we thought it was time we shared some of the more juicy titbits with the rest of the world.
 

Instapaper
Spotted by Ian.
A neat little personal news/article aggregator which lets you bookmark articles online, then retrieve them at your leisure, via any browsable device. Not the most earth-shattering idea, but a neat execution and simple interface - which is all you need.

http://www.instapaper.com/

Interactive travel maps and more
Spotted by Pete.
MySociety have been doing some really interesting things with heatmaps of various things. These are now interactive, and well worth a look.

http://www.mysociety.org/2007/more-travel-maps/

You might also be interested in FixMyStreet and theyworkforyou, which are both extending the ideas of social networking by trying to give users a voice in the real world. A worthy cause and definitely something worth investigating.

Videotrace
Spotted by Joe.
Videotrace uses a combination of a Sketchup-a-like tool and computer vision techniques. Users can outine objects in video frames, correct their shape over a number of frames, and generate texture mapped 3d objects from the sketched wireframes.

There’s some work still to do, but the demonstration on YouTube is pretty persuasive:

And finally…
Games in which you can draw your own environment are very big at the moment. Here are a few of Tim’s favourites for you to try in your lunch hour.

Line golfer
Tower of goo

That’s all for this round-up; we’ll be back soon with more shoals of online fun trawled from the Cogapp nets.