File this under fairly obvious, but bears repeating…
Inside its walls, a museum is a place of projects: building projects, scholarly projects, educational projects, technology projects, public relations projects, fundraising projects, and often all of these combined. Even beyond budget, projects always come down to people getting the things done, and keeping them going.
For the people who come to the museum, through the door, or online, how the projects they experience actually work does not matter as much as having something happen to them that satisfies their curiosity.
To me, this seems to be particularly true with technology projects, and an ongoing challenge for all sorts of museums and museum-like places where people come because they are curious. My read of things is that the time of public gee-whiz over technology in museums (whatever its form) doing its gee-whiz thing is mostly past. It’s such a simple point, but it’s essential for the people working in the museum to remember: know what the project is trying to say, and if it’s something remotely long-term, be as realistic as you can about how it’s going to last, and who’s going to make that happen.
My anecdote in support, featuring old technology:
I remember as a kid running through a display full of antique steam engines, mashing every button in front of every wired-up engine so it would turn over for a few seconds, and trying to see if I could get them all going at the same time. When I took my son to the same exhibit decades later, all the buttons were long dead.
He was about two, toddling around. He wandered over to a freestanding turbine of some kind, just about his size. The turbine itself was within his reach, and he spun it. We stood there about 15 minutes, just watching it go. Even toddlers want something to work.
Then about six months later, we came back. As we neared the exhibit, we could hear clanking and chuffing sounds. We rounded the corner and were stunned to see the largest engine of them all running – for real. A man was there wiping it down with a cloth, fussing over the machinery.
“Hey! These things actually run?”
“Sure. There were all converted to compressed air when they went in.”
“I’ve been coming here my whole life – I’ve never seen this. This is amazing!”
“Well, we can’t really do this so much. People here can’t get it together.”
He went around with us and fired up as many engines as we liked. My son’s been building ever since. I’ve gone back many times and have never again seen the engines run. And the buttons are all still dead.
I leave this as an open-ended observation. As anyone who has worked in a museum knows, the institutional football certainly takes a funny bounce. Things that were temporary become long-term. Things that were permanent get replaced. The key seems, as always, to be in the shoes (real or virtual) of the visitor. They’re why we’re in business.
April 20th, 2006 08:54
In one of those odd coincidences, I had several people recommend Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built in the space of a few days.
Essentially, buildings are like onions. They have several different layers, each which changes at a different pace. The bones of a building change very slowly, while decorations, furnishings occupants can change very quickly.
Brand notes that some buildings enable rapid change because their basic structure allows change to happen. Think of an industrial loft that started as a workspace, became retail space, and later residential lofts. Other types of monumental architecture were built with an idea of permanence. Built to be unchanging, they easily become obsolete because they can’t change and adapt to new needs.
Clay Shirky pointed out that this model fits technology change as well. There are core protocols (e.g. TCP/IP) that change very slowly while other things (like HTML to Web 2.0) change rapidly.
I haven’t finished reading How Buildings Learn, but there is a chapter that discusses “time kindly” architecture. I’ll be interested to see if it’s possible to articulate a “time kindly” approach to technology. Can we build strong bones, while letting the outer layers change as needed?
April 25th, 2006 01:01
An observation made recently at two science museums:: Visitors — not only kids, but adults as well — invariably approach a display, push the button/s, and only then do they read the text, instructions, whatever they were supposed to have read before pushing the buttons. Usually they read the instructions in order to figure out why pushing the buttons didn’t make anything happen.
If I were asked to design an interactive display of this kind (God forbid), I would consider this psychologial phenomenon. If there’s a button, it becomes the subject of the display. You gotta push it. Whether the display is about air currents or mechanical gears is secondary. You want to push that button and see what happens. Information takes time and patience. Pushing buttons is visceral.
You either need to hide the buttons, making them available only after an introduction to the subject of the display and instructions about how to operate the button actions — or you need to make the button-pushing-caused actions serve as the introduction to the subject, not the other way around. But most importantly, THEY MUST ALWAYS WORK. Instead of docents, you need technicians in every room. If pushing a button doesn’t cause something to happen, the visitor walks away. Immediately. Without even a glance at the text, at the rest of the display. I stood there for a long time, observing this. Most of the visitors skipped most of the displays because buttons weren’t doing what the visitor needed.
In the gift shop, however, everything worked.