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.

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

Time for a nice cool cocktail, mixed from the finest liqueurs of our internal blog. Here are a few of the things we’ve been drinking, I mean thinking, about recently:

Biggest drawing in the world
Spotted by Tristan

Makes our Journey On GPS drawing look tiny, but then we’re a bit suspicious of all the curls in this one…

White glove tracking
Spotted by Joe

http://www.whiteglovetracking.com/

Internet users collaboratively helped isolate Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of his nationally televised landmark performance of Billy Jean. This took 72 hours. The data was then released into the digital wild for people to play with. The results were great.

Got to love the Giant White Glove idea:

Human Brain Cloud
Spotted by Gavin

The Human Brain Cloud is a massively multiplayer word association “game”. A kind of  cross between a tag cloud, the Dictionary and Mallett’s Mallet. Badombom…ping!

It’s interesting because it might help us think about the links users see between different words, plus it’s funny because it asks you to say the first thing that comes in your head when someone says “BLABBY” to you.

iPhone as remote trackpad
Spotted by Joe

http://www.touchpadpro.com

Inflatable New York street art
Spotted by Joe

That’s all for now, we hope you found it refreshing. More coming very soon.

Last week I attended a half-day workshop on using RFID readers with Arduino boards, organised by Tinker. The workshop was part of a two day focus on ‘do it yourself media’ created by the Takeaway Festival, and hosted at the Science Museum’s Dana Centre.

After an introductory talk, we divided into small groups, and had four hours to create a project. I was all set to create an RFID theremin, but it turned out that the MIFARE boards we were using didn’t provide signal strength information (unlike those used in the active RFID projects I mentioned in my last post).

Instead, our group settled on the plan of creating a sound recording system: users would place different RFID-tagged objects on the reader, and if it was the first time it had seen it, it would record a sound clip through the computer’s microphone. The second time you presented the object, it would play back the sound (with a bit of serendipitous echoing feedback, to create that big stadium feel). So, by constantly swapping objects, you can create your own sound effects library and make up songs as you go along. A bit like a cobbled-together version of Zoundz.

Technically, we achieved this by a very simple bit of Arduino code, coupled with a Processing script (with the Ess library) to handle recording and playback. If you’d like a copy of the source code, get in touch.

Once the 4 hours were up, it was time to present to the other groups, and to see what everyone else had done. There were lots of inventive projects, such as:

• ‘oyster spy‘
  you’d swipe your oyster card to see a pretty animation, but then the moment you turned the corner, you’d be presented with a photo of yourself that you had unwittingly triggered
• ‘body explorer‘
  this group turned the card and reader idea on its head, by concealing cards in their clothes, and having you scan them using the reader to reveal photos of various parts of their body
• ‘distorted photo booth‘
  poke your head through the hole, then swipe cards to transform your image using hall-of-mirror style effects
  ‘cheating computer‘
  roll an (RFID-tagged) dice and play against the computer, which strangely seems to win every time…

Finally, we all went down to the bar area to present our projects to a wider audience, and to watch a great performance by Sputniko and her wiimote-enabled armpit monster. All in all, it was a great day - with lots of interesting tech and lots of interesting people.

Also see:

• Takeaway Festival site
• Example code and datasheets from Tinker
• Photos on flickr

Journey On is a fantastic local transport website for Brighton and Hove. The site has been around for a year, and last week relaunched with a raft of new features and a new look.

To celebrate the launch of the new website Cogapp created a ‘dynamic doodle’ stretching between the east and west extremes of the city. Two cyclists spelled out the letters J O U R N E Y O N in real time by travelling a carefully mapped route, with their progress tracked by GPS and visualised at a special launch event at Brighton Station.

Tristan wrote a small application in Python to run on a Nokia Series 60 mobile phone, which communicated with an external bluetooth GPS device to find out the exact position of the cyclist. The application then relayed this position every 4 seconds to a webserver, which in turn plotted the phone position onto Google Earth in the form of a line and a giant yellow pencil. To see a video of the doodle click here or here.

To give the launch some visual impact a large pencil was transported across the city by one of the cyclists.

Cogapp also helped promote the event by coming up with some exciting designs for the event and by running a competition to encourage people to walk parts of the route and text in.

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.

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.