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..?

To celebrate its 90-year history, BMW has recently opened a Museum in Munich, showcasing 125 exhibits of BMW at its finest. One that certainly caught my eye was the fascinating kinetic sculpture made up of 714 metal spheres. Suspended from the ceiling by string, the spheres dance in a hypnotic fashion to create stunningly satisfying waves and curves. The mechatronic structure is a perfect example of abstract art, which is successful at engaging with its audience. Watch the video carefully for the finale, as the structure arranges itself into a silhouette of a classic BMW:

My attention was also drawn to other creative structures in public spaces such as BA’s Troika installation in Heathrow’s Terminal 5. Taking inspiration from train station departure boards in the 70s and 80s, the sculpture comprises of 4638 flip-dots, which interchange between black and silver to create beautiful ripples. A great concept, which relieves the stresses of an airport, well that combined with the therapy of the retail kind! View the interactive:

Not only are these installations a creative use of technology; they capture the audience’s attention and complement the environments in which they are installed.

Ever find yourself standing at a bus stop, starring at a poster for the latest Hollywood Blockbuster, and wondering “well, looks exciting, but what’s it all about?!“? ViPR Visual Search, developed by Evolutionary Robotics, promises an answer. Snap the cover of a CD, DVD or book with your camera phone, and it will analyse it and return a description, YouTube link and iTunes store link. Presumably it could recognise (or be programmed to recognise) the film poster too, saving you the trouble of such hassles as typing the film title into a search engine and selecting a suitable result.

It’s already on 3 million phones, and is soon coming as an app for the iPhone
through the App Store, which is fast looking set to be an important way of popularising such innovations.

See demo above

Cogapp was recently accepted onto Apple’s official iPhone Developer Program, so we’ve been thinking a lot about the potential for the device, and technology like ViPR, in our field. This got me wondering….

How about implementing this in a museum, so information, visitor reviews
and audio guides can be activated just by pointing and snapping? How about a
children’s version with alternative, child-friendly content? It would be an easy, playful and really rather useful way of accessing information when and where curiosity arises.

Thinking bigger - what if major art galleries could collaborate on a database, so that when you come across famous works of art you can find out where they are currently on display? It would keep up to date with the movements of famous pieces from one gallery to another, and as you leaf through that book in school or on someone’s coffee table, you immediately know where you might have to go to see the piece in the flesh.

As technology like this improves, and more and more people start to own capable devices, the possibilities continue to multiply. It’s going to be exciting to see how and where such things start appearing. Snap snap!

A few weeks ago the Victoria & Albert Museum opened the doors to its new Jewellery Gallery. The impressive William and Judith Bollinger Jewellery Gallery boasts 3500 jewels from the V&As collection, focussed principally on the last 800 years of European jewellery. The opening night attracted around 1500 people. Not surpising when you see some of the amazing objects out on display (behind heavily fortified glass of course).

The opening night was also a big moment for Cogapp, as we had designed and built three interactive kiosks to allow visitors to search the large collection and find out more about the objects. The ‘Search the Jewellery Gallery’ kiosks let visitors find specific jewels, or explore the collection by applying interchangeable filters such as ‘Material’ or ‘Location’ to pull together custom user-specified groups of objects.

The software also features a deeply zoomable interface that allows the very close inspection of each object’s detail. Given the small scale of some of the pieces, and the fact they must be placed behind glass, this function plays an important part in allowing visitors to really inspect and examine the exquisite detail many of the jewels feature.

We made a video of the interactive in action, as the screenshots can’t quite convey everything. Do follow the link and take a look….

On the way back from Museums and the Web in Montreal, Ben and myself stopped off in Manhattan, to visit MoMA. This was under the guise of doing work (seeing the finished MoMA.guide installation in the flesh) but in reality was an excuse to go to the Design and the Elastic Mind exhibition. MoMA’s site goes some way to capturing just how many cool things were crammed into the space, you are left physically exhausted with the sheer amount of information and ideas bombarding you. Highlights included:

Philip Worthington: Shadow Monsters

Julius Popp: bit.fall

Noam Toran: Accessories for Lonely Men

Jonathon Harris, Sep Kamvar: I Want You To Want Me

Graffiti Research Lab: L.A.S.E.R Tag

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/