I’ve just come back from a two-day stint at the Tate Modern attending a Handheld Conference: From Audiotours to iPhones. The format was a one-day workshop of invitees (lah di dah) followed by a one-day syposium open to all. From the promotional blurb: Are museums ready to play in the digital age? Rapid advances in technology are making the traditional audiotour increasingly redundant, and visitors are now offered sophisticated multimedia tours on PDAs, iPods and even mobile phones.

The conference was aimed at museum workers who want to know more about how the new generation of mobile devices can benefit their institutions and the workshop was used to craft the following day’s symposium – that’s right, we made it up the day before.

Aside from being back in Merry England, where it rained constantly, and meeting some old muckers, it was a great chance to meet up with some people whose name and work I’m familiar with, but whom I’ve never met. Jane Burton (Tate) and Nancy Procter (ex-Antenna, now Smithsonian) organised the event and set up a wiki – if you’re a museum professional and interested in handheld technology and implementation, you should join the wiki – its moderated so you’ll need to request a sign-up. All the conference presentations, information and resources are there: Tate Handheld Conference

Day one: the workshop involved a 5-minute distillation from each of the presenters on what they would be presenting the following day, which was then discussed by the group to come up with some essentials to inform the delegates the next day. One compelling thing about the workshop was the work of a couple of mind mapping guys, who distilled the discussions into some cartoon-like posters. They were awesome and are posted to the wiki but here’s a sample:

Day two: the symposium was split into 4 sessions: Handheld Basics, Choosing the Platform, Getting it done and Next Generation Handhelds. The format of each session was two 10-minute presentations, followed by a panel discussion, followed by a Q&A session.

Yours truly, presented during the first session on the GettyGuide Handheld, a complex PDA device that the Getty launched in October 2005 but pulled from operation a couple of months later due to technical and operational challenges. I presented some lessons-learned from this experience at AAM Denver but this time I went into some specifics of the flaws of the system – things that in hindsight seem obvious but at the time were overlooked in the frenzy of a highly-complex technology project.

One component of this installation was location-sensing, whereby the system knew which gallery you were in and downloaded content accordingly. We found this to be unsettling to the visitor who preferred, as subsequent evaluations have shown, to have more control and not have things change unrequested.

In conservations after my presentation it was clear that others had tried similar technology projects over the last couple of years with equal “success”, actually there were more projects than I was aware of – there were a few “Dr. Phil” moments. More worryingly, at least one institution is trying almost exactly the same thing. I tried to offer cautionary advice, but the technology force was strong with this individual and my Jedi mind-control was weak with the 8-hour time difference. I have actually seen one location-sensing system that was extremely elegant – rather than push unrequested content it would offer up a default selection of the current gallery or work of art, the handheld equivalent of Amazon’s one-click purchase.

The symposium confirmed something for me. The museum profession is a very collaborative environment in most things except technology. We attend these events and talk about our successes (mostly) and failures (rarely) and the ways we’re thinking of using existing or emerging technology to engage our visitors, and then we go back to our institutions and re-invent the wheel. Curiously, we seem to think we are all different and have completely different requirements. Among other things, I think the problem is one of compromise. The rigorous discipline of critique and assessing perfection that forms a key part of curatorial study, makes us unwilling to compromise on our byzantine methods and workflow. This in turn makes our software overly complex. We also seem to think that we each have different audiences.

Ain’t true. There was a fair amount of discussion on audiences including how we should be accounting for them on a role basis – student, museum professional, educator, etc. I think this is another example of us trying to be too clever and overly complex. The business world have it right, they want everyone on their website to be one thing: a purchaser. They want to give you all the information you need to make a purchase or they want you to make a purchase. Similarly, all the people on our website are researchers, from researching visiting hours, to food options, to events, to a picture for their desktop background, to professional scholarly research – all we need to do is make it easy for them to find things.

Well that makes things much simpler…

True to form, Peter Samis gave a great presentation, although he struggled a bit with the ten-minute allotment… He reminded delegates that we needed to talk about the white elephant in the room: The small percentage of visitors that actually use our devices. We claim these great percentages of user satisfaction but its 80% satisfaction of 5% of our visitors, which is not very much. Even if its 100% satisfaction, its still only five percent. I love the way we cherry-pick our evaluation results to confirm what we think about our audiences – one comment in our comment book does not a successful project make. I got the impression that the assembled audience really didn’t want to ponder that.

The symposium presented an opportunity to do some vendor-bashing on the subject of content ownership, particularly audioguide content. There seemed to be unanimous agreement that not owning your own content and restricting it to a single device is a model that does not work today, given all the channels that exist for dissemination. Vendors themselves, seemed reluctant to identify themselves by raising their hand – they even refused to identify themselves when I asked them to identify themselves by clearing their throat…

In defense of the vendor (I used to be one) and on the subject of collaboration, it would behoove us to provide a consistent technology experience for our visiting public. The ubiquity of audioguides from vendors like Antenna Audio and AcoustiGuide is actually a good thing because it provides that consistency. Imagine if the banking industry had not collaborated on their customer technology? Imagine if the ATM in every branch of every bank was different? The amazing thing about ATMs (or “Magic Money Machines” as my daughters refer to them) is that you can go to any one in the world and have the exact same interface and experience: select language, insert card, type pin, type amount, get money. Imagine if you could go into any museum in the world and have the exact same technology experience: select language, type number, get info. Now that’s collaboration.

The final session was about the future of handhelds. There was a lot of discussion about whether it would be possible for us to rely on visitor’s bringing in their own device and for us to get out of the hardware support or rental business. The jury’s still out but at some point our visitors will have a much more powerful handheld device in their pocket and will question why they can’t access the museum’s content on their own device and as Kovan Smith pointed out, visitors might start to find it disappointing that the museum’s device is much less functional than their own.

A number of delegates confessed that they were really unsure what to do with regard to this kind of technology, but in the meantime were interpreting their collection and disseminating it in as many ways as they could. Hmmm… actually that’s not a bad plan.

The conference ended, as most do in my experience, in the bar with plans to change the world. Tatetastic.

Checkout the wiki and contribute if you can.