“How the heck do you leave a building?”

Photo by Grant Hutchinson on Flickr.

At last week’s Ecsite conference Steven Snyder of the Franklin Institute posed a rather interesting dilemma: If the Franklin Institute wants to achieve its mission of inspiring a passion for learning about technology and science, they need to leave their building. Yet, at the same time they’ve just invested millions in a redevelopment, are seen as a building by their audience and get in most of their revenue because of the building. “How the heck,” to use Steven’s words, in such a case, “do you leave a building?”

In other words: Can outside become your primary side, even if you’ve had a roof over your head for the last n years?

Leaving a building, like leaving anything stable and safe, is all about opening up.

Once there are no more walls to hide behind, you’re really vulnerable and naked. That is incredibly scary and – to most of us – immediately blocks out the potential positive side effects of being in such a position: the need to work together, the renewed curiosity, the increase in serendipity…

A great example of an institution that has managed to leave their building and revived because of it, I think, is the Museum Rotterdam. I’ve written about their The City as Muse project before. The project searches for inspirational developments and initiatives among the people of Rotterdam and tries to connect this with the museum. At the moment they’re working with care givers, doing pop up events around town and (still) involving an audience otherwise alien to the institution. Read the rest of this entry »

Charming tour guide versus mobile 3D AR app

Boris Micka advocates the use of technology to make it feel as if it were human. His most innovative tech projects cannot beat the experience of Russian babushkas who know everything about a museum. So what happens when ceteris paribus a charming tour guide and one of the coolest museum apps in the world compete?

The Netherlands Architecture Institute in Rotterdam

The playground for this epic museum battle is Rotterdam. This harbour town hosts so much great architecture and stories about it, past, present and future, that it really helps if someone or something tells you where to look. Last week I went on a tour through the city called Metropolder organised by the Netherlands Architecture Institute, NAi. The exact same tour is available in NAi’s UAR app, which uses (3D) augmented reality and Layar technology to tell stories about the buildings in the city.

UAR lets you experience the history and future of architecture with photos, audio and additional information. It also contains 3D models of some future buildings, so you can get an amazing feel of what the city will look like in the future. Sometimes with dramatic consequences, but I’ll get back to that later.

The tour I did was hosted by two guides and had some 10 participants. It focused on Rotterdam’s relation with water. Polders, harbours and dikes played a central role in most of the stories. The day was cold and a bit rainy. During the tour I tried to use UAR to find additional information to the stories told by its competitor: the real-life tour guide.

Read the rest of this entry »