10 things I learned about new media, technology and innovation in museums in the last year

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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Mobile media for cultural and historical heritage, guidelines and pilot projects

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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Building a community in 11 steps – Stranded Europeans

Everybody’s talking about community building these days. Often we forget how easy it is (can be) and how frequently it happens. A volcano, some stranded Europeans and Denver. This is how you build a community:

1. Get a bunch of people together with more or less similar values.
   E.g. museum professionals working on participation.
2. Urge them to do something, change their status quo.
   E.g. by having a volcano erupt and cause huge ash clouds.
3. Make them understand that they’re involved in the new situation.
   E.g. by cancelling their flights home.
4. Have a community leader/manager take the lead in collaborative action.
   E.g. Jennifer Trant who starts a system to find those stranded lodging and something to do.
5. Find some early adopters and encourage them to participate and take group action.
   E.g. by setting the example yourself and offering your lodging.
6. Give the community the freedom to develop by offering tools, not rules.
   E.g. pen and paper, a common media channel and enthusiasm.
7. Put emphasis on the positive behaviour of individuals in the community.
   E.g. by talking to them or retweeting their initiatives.
8. Think beyond social media.
   E.g. by hosting unconference sessions, meetups and drinks. Or by putting up a pen and paper registration system (see photos).
9. Have an open attitude to newcomers.
   E.g. by stressing how everybody is in the same situation.
10. Ensure and celebrate tangible outcomes within the community.
    E.g. by blogging about their events and applauding the success of individuals reaching home.
11. Take action over time to reinforce the community.
    E.g. by hosting a little event at next year’s conference for those affected by the volcano.

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Spinny Bars Historical Society – new media with a twist

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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Testing Amsterdam museums with Seb Chan

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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