Posted: May 16th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Inspiration, Technology | Tags: advice, conversation, do's and don'ts, energy, experience, guidelines, lessons, tips | 10 Comments »
Photo from the Flickr Commons (Field Museum Library)
I’m relatively new to museums. Apart from a short intermezzo in an ecomuseum, the last year has been my only year within the walls of a museum. I do new media and technology. We do a lot of innovation. This is what I learned last year.
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Posted: May 2nd, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Technology | Tags: advice, augmented reality, games, guidelines, mobile museum, mw2010, pilots, tips | 11 Comments »
How can we use mobile media to engage people in cultural and historical heritage? Last week I co-hosted a hands-on expert meeting dealing with this subject. Our objective: to find one or two pilot solutions that we can develop already.
The meeting followed on the post-MW2010 unconference about mobile games for museums I wrote about two weeks ago. Experts of DEN (Dutch Digital Heritage), the Dutch museum association (NMV), the Stedelijk Museum of Amsterdam and Beeld en Geluid together with host the Museum of National History, came up with a set of guidelines for pilot projects. We used user profiling and a tour through The Hague to develop these guidelines and a handful of ideas.
Our findings below represent what we think a mobile platform for cultural and historical heritage should look like, using contemporary technology.
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Posted: April 18th, 2010 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Inspiration, Technology | Tags: advice, building, do's and don'ts, experience, mw2010, practice, tips | 2 Comments »
A lot of great thing came out of Museum and the Web 2010. I’ll be blogging about some of them over the next week (as I’m stranded in Denver due to #ashtag). One of the best, without a doubt, was the Spinny Bars Historical Society, or SBHS.
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Posted: November 1st, 2009 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Buildings, Expositions, Inspiration | Tags: advice, amsterdam, building, do's and don'ts, lessons, practice, tips | 8 Comments »
Last week I had the honour of having Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney around. One of the things we did was drop by a number of museums in Amsterdam to see how they designed their audience experience, what was good about it, and what could have been better. This taught me a handful of useful things about audience engagement and interaction design I’d like to share.
Museums we visited were: the Tropenmuseum, the Amsterdam Historic Museum, NEMO, the public library, FOAM Fotography Museum, the Tassenmuseum. In addition I included the Hermitage which I visited alone.
1. Deliver what the visitor expects
Museums are basically boring. They’re not amusement parks and shouldn’t be. A lot of multimedia and interaction in museums does not convey the museum’s basic objective, which is to show beautiful artefacts. Therefore, as Seb noted, “most interaction in museums is like an action-packed trailer to a slow-moving French movie.”
The ‘Tassenmuseum’ (Bags Museum) is a small, privately held museum in Amsterdam with a predominantly elder female audience. They come to see beautiful bags and have tea. They come for the traditional museum experience. The Tassenmuseum delivers exactly this, with a very traditional exhibition approach and a comfortable café. The museum delivers what the visitor expects.
NEMO is a typical science centre. The second you walk into the museum, you hear and see kids running around. There’s lots of opportunity for them to engage with the installations and discover the fun side of science. That’s what parents expect when they take their kids to NEMO.
Interaction would be completely out of its place in the Tassenmuseum, whereas it’s a necessity in NEMO. The lesson: Use interaction only when the audience expects it.
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Posted: June 15th, 2009 | Author: Jasper Visser | Filed under: Technology | Tags: advice, community, do's and don'ts, practice, strategy, tips, twitter | 8 Comments »
One of my first jobs as a Community Manager for the Museum of National History was to build a presence on existing social media websites. There’s quite some literature available on social media strategy. That helps. I think I developed a strategy that could be the envy of all museums worldwide. (I’ll brag about that when it starts to pay off.)
However, what I noticed is that strategy is only one. There’s also the practical side of becoming active on social media websites. I didn’t read a word about that. I simply used my experience as a user and the small things I did in the past and thought this would work for a large ambitious museum as well.
That proved a learning experience. Looking back on the first month, I can already identify things that I could and should have done better. Therefore I’d like to share my practical experiences with developing a social media presence with you. Please share your experiences as well to avoid others to make our mistakes. Read the rest of this entry »
