The Museum of the Future | Culture in times of social and technological change

1 Nov, 2009 • Buildings, Expositions, Inspiration • 8726

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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23 Jul, 2009 • Thoughts about museums • 6086

Conversation is King, but how can he reach his people?

I love social media. And I think part of the future of museums is in social media. The future of museums is their community, how they can truly connect with their audience. In that, I am not alone.

This morning I received a link to a rather interesting article called “Museum’s new mantra: Connect with community”. A short Twitter discussion ensued between Jim Richardson, Jon Pratty and me. A conclusion for museums: “Conversation is king”. Later today Ryan Donahue added that if conversation is king, content should be its queen: “One by itself is uninteresting.”

Now I don’t know about the monarchy in your country, but ours has quite some difficulties connecting with the regular people. And I think that analogy applies to museums as well. And I don’t think social media can easily take that away.

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6 Jul, 2009 • Thoughts about museums • 8684

How much co-creation is OK for a museum?

Historically, museums are built by individuals around a private collection. Later, in the 18th and 19th century, museums became institutions. Although they were governed by a group of people, the audience still had little say in what was put on display (and how, and where).

In the last century, museums became interactive and especially in the last decades were focused more on the audience and less on the need to exhibit. Only recently, however, museums discovered you can let the audience have a say in the contents of a museum. (I love this example on Flickr.)

You can’t build the world’s most innovative museum alone. In fact, co-creation is one of our main focuses. We want to have a structure that enables our audience to participate in everything the museum does. We want to engage them, not only in our exhibitions and projects but also in our organization itself. Continue Reading
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15 Jun, 2009 • Technology • 15884

Practical advice on developing your presence on social media websites

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. Continue Reading
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7 Jun, 2009 • Technology • 7200

Mobile augmented reality to turn our country into a museum

Last Friday I met Maarten Lens-Fitzgerald from SPRXMobile. He gave me a demonstration of a new application they built, named Layar. Layar is, according to their website, a free application for your mobile phone which shows what is around you by displaying real time digital information on top of reality though the camera of the mobile phone.

Currently it’s only available on Android phones. In the near future, however, it might become available for the iPhone as well.

Layar is a browser. On top of the image of the camera in a mobile phone, this browser displays an information layer. For instance, the location of all ATMs around you. A small dot shows you the direction and the distance of an ATM. Once you select one ATM, you can get additional information about this ATM. Also, you can call a map to see how to get to this ATM from your current position. Continue Reading
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