So what is the future of museums?

In our last class, our professor posed to our group the question we have been debating and wondering about all semester: What is the future of museums? What does the museum of the future look and feel like?

In class I contributed the following: that the museum of the future will become more experiential, by which I mean that museums will have to consider the sum experience of their audiences: what they see, how they can interact with each other and the museum collections, how they move through the space, and how they are engaged before and after their visits, to name a few arenas. To be more experiential, museums will need to become more engaging: they will need to engage all kinds of learners, engage all of our senses, engage all different ages, engage all kinds of visitors. To this point, I also proposed that museums will need to create ways that audiences can personalize their experience. Not all audience members have the same interests, learning types, attention spans, etc, so museums need to figure out how they can accommodate multiple kinds of visitors.

Technology will be a key tool to creating both of these kinds of experiences. I think in the future we will see more instances of tools that allow for engaging and personalized experiences. Some of these kinds of tools might include:  the Cooper Hewitt Pen, the BLDG92 interactive timetable, Casa Batllo’s  augmented reality video guide, and the American Museum of Natural History’s robot guides, to name a few of the examples I’ve discovered this semester. I imagine that most of these tools will continue to be supplemental experiences to the primary experience of interacting with and learning about the museum’s collection. While museums do want to stay up to date with these kinds of tools, I think some museums are realizing – like I experienced at the Whitney – that not all visitors want a technologically-innundated experience. Visitors will be given more choice in the kinds of experiences they can have.

I’ve really been thinking about this question a lot in the past week, especially as I read articles that attempt to answer this question (see my blog posts here and here). While I do still think museums of the future will be experiential and more personalized, I really don’t think there will be no one specific typology of the look and feel of museums of the future. Just like today we have some museums that experiment wildly with new technology, some that are a little more restrained, as well as some that completely eschew technology all together. In the future I think this will continue: some museums will continue to be very innovative and some will continue to provide an experience that is free of technological distraction. One thing I can be certain of: museums of the future will create experiences that look and feel wildly different. There are so many museums in the world that have different missions, collections, and educational goals and they will certainly not look or feel similarly.

However, in terms of the experience of visiting a museum: the two ideas I contributed both deal with the importance of the visitor and I do stand by the fact that visitor experience will be paramount in future museums. Many museums have or will come to realize that they must figure out what exactly their audiences want and they must accommodate them to stay relevant. Across all museums I think there will be an increase in professional interest in museum audiences: there will be more means of providing audience interaction, there will be more dedicated efforts to survey audience reaction, and there will be a more conscious effort to engage people, both in the physical museum space and through the museum’s online portals. Museums exist to educate – and they must remember who they are educating. Those audiences are they key to their continued existence, so museums of the future will have to pay close attention to what those audiences need.

The Met’s Sree Sreenivasan talk

On the same day that Ariana French came to lecture our class, Sree Sreenivasan – the Chief Digital Officer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – also visited. He opened his talk by saying we should always be Charging (our phones), Collecting (information and photos), and Connecting (with people around us). He started off saying he structures his talks so that there is very little emphasis on technology, he soon went into a detailed presentation of some of the Met’s technology-based projects and their successes.

The Met’s website

Sree told us that the staff of the Met consider the institution to be comprised of four equally important spaces: the main building; the Cloisters; the Old Whitney, now the Met Breuer, and finally the website: the digital Met. To further emphasize the importance of the website Sree told us that for the museum digital visitors are as important as the physical visitors. Because of this they have a very large staff of 70 who create the visitor facing digital content. Sree made it clear that for his department it isn’t enough to just create lots of content, but they always strive to make sure they are creating engaging content. They make sure to only do what makes sense for the museum’s mission, they don’t strive to be first or the most cutting-edge, but to only produce what supports the greater museum’s goals. Sree noted that the Met sees their main competition as Netflix, Candy Crush, and life in general in 2015. They constantly challenge themselves to compete with these platforms and to encourage more people to visit the museum. This can be a challenge in today’s world where as Sree says, the scarcest resource is human attention. For every project his department does they always have an internal and external marketing plan so that they can ensure they are reaching the widest audiences possible.

Sree also spent some time telling us about the Met’s Media Lab, a Research & Development center that he describes as working on the Future of Culture. This department is constantly experimenting, whether with digital projection mapping, Meow Met, beacons, augmented reality, or virtual reality. As all of these links make clear, the Media Lab has a very active blog where the document a lot of their different endeavors. They also share their code on a GitHub site and use another platform called hackpad to share their new project ideas with the general public. I suspect this kind of experimental lab-style department will become more and more common in cultural institutions that are working to use technology in new ways. As technology has a more important place in museums, new departments and staff must be developed in tandem.

Meow Met (Image source)

Generally much of Sree’s talk focused on the idea of visitor engagement. This is not unlike what has been oft discussed in this class – through our readings, in class discussions, and other professionals’ lectures. Clearly visitor engagement is a very important topic in all kinds of museums today, and rightfully so given all of the competition museums have from other forms of entertainment and education. The Met – with its high number of museum visitors, wide range of digital projects, and strong technology department – is clearly a leader in visitor engagement. After hearing the very dynamic and enthusiastic Sree speak, I can understand why the museum has been so successful in their past and current projects and why they will most likely to continue to be a leader in engaging their audiences. Sree concluded his talk by telling us that his greatest achievement at the Met was including a hashtag with every exhibit. While at first I thought this seemed like a very simple and small achievement, after thinking about it more I realized it truly signifies Sree’s focus on engagement: hashtags encourage visitors to post their thoughts, they help aggregate information about visitors’ opinions, and generally they help museum staff  discover what is important to the visitors.

AMNH’s Ariana French talk

In late October Ariana French, the Director of Digital Technology at the American Museum of Natural History, came to speak to our class about her background and her work at the museum. She opened her talk with a very compelling idea: that in a museum there should be no such thing as a digital strategy, that the digital strategy should be a part of the greater business strategy. She backed this up by stating that technology is really something to be used in service of a museum’s business mission and it must support a bigger picture, not just be integrated because it is trendy.

The AMNH app

At first I thought this was a pretty provocative statement, but once she explained her logic and I really considered it, I now very much agree. We discussed this in class the next week and it seemed like several classmates had issues with this statement. But from other past class discussions, I think many people forget that museums are businesses and they need to act as such. While museums do have educational missions and scholarly research goals, they need to be viable businesses so that they can make money to support their cultural missions. From what we have learned from professionals who have spoken to our class, many decisions in museums are made in support of the business strategy of a museum, not just the greater or more abstract cultural or educational mission. While I can understand why people have a problem with business decisions taking priority over curatorial, educational, or scholarly decisions, I think those feelings are somewhat naive. If a museum isn’t financially stable then the other missions will cease to exist. So when applying these ideas to Ariana French’s proposition of integrating technology and digital strategy into a business mission instead of keeping it a separate strategy, I think it is absolutely true. I really think that most museum decisions must be made in support of the business strategy, or at least with keeping it in mind.

Now, because technology is a particularly fickle thing – what with its constantly evolving nature and the fact that so much of it is based on user trends, museums must be extra careful to ensure that their decisions around technology are truly in support of the bigger strategy of the museum. When something that changes so quickly is integrated into institutions that by nature don’t seem to change very quickly, museum staff must be very careful and methodical in deciding what kinds of technologies they choose to incorporate. That way even if some technologies fall out of popular favor or become obsolete, staff members know that they carefully considered the cost implications or other kinds of implications in using those technologies in the first place. If museums hastily try to keep up with trends without considering other factors, this can reflect very poorly on an institution. I think many museum visitors have experienced seeing outdated forms of technology that was maybe trendy for a short period of time but no longer works. Some examples include the use of QR codes, or social media accounts on platforms that are no longer popular, or features on museum websites that don’t function properly, or apps that have bugs or don’t seem to have a clear purpose. These instances are similar, but very distinct from instances where museums are using out of date technology that might look old but still supports its original function. Some examples of this are older video monitors or early interactive kiosks – both of which are present at the American Museum of Natural History. Despite the fact that the latter kinds of digital tools look outdated, they still display content that is relevant and supports the museum’s or exhibit’s greater mission. Unlike a QR code, which few people have the required apps to utilize or an app that doesn’t properly function, the outdated looking  but still functioning technologies don’t detract from visitor experience.

QR code in museum (Image source)

Screen at AMNH

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to Ariana’s lecture: she spent a lot of time talking about the museum visitor and how most of AMNH’s work is done in the name of serving visitor needs. At AMNH they consider the full journey of the visitor: before, during, and after their actual experience. They also consider the two different categories of visitor activity: intentional (looking for bathroom, cafe, specific exhibit) or serendipitous (wandering, moments of surprise) and they try to use technology to deliver content and information to both kinds of experiences. She advised us that technology departments in all museums can become marginalized if they do not constantly emphasize how their projects can benefit visitor experience, which is why they take so much care to address multiple visitor needs.

These ideas completely resonate with the concluding statements made in the Understanding the Motivations of Museum Audiences reading that I discussed in the previous post: that museums must ensure that all of their technology projects are in support of the audience members, not done solely to keep the museum up to date. Ariana also addressed some of the ideas of how to study visitor motivation or visitor experience (also mentioned in the aforementioned reading), but noted that it can be difficult to survey museum goers. At AMNH she says they shy away about using online surveys because they don’t want to seem too commercial. Knowing the importance of understanding museum visitors, Ariana believes this is a missed opportunity, but she also acknowledged that today digital tools helpfully make it easier to know the visitor. A lot can be gained from the information captured in website traffic or the metrics of mobile app users. Generally she she believes that technology can really help museums to communicate with their visitors, something that historically museums haven’t always bothered to do.

I really enjoyed Ariana’s talk and I felt like I learned a lot from it. She has a very business-minded approach to museums while still being very conscious of visitor experience. Too often museum professionals seem too caught up in the cultural or educational mission to deeply consider how their work affects, integrates with, or challenges the museum’s identity as a business or the museum’s audience and I think this is completely remiss, if not also a little irresponsible. While I’m sure it is difficult I think that scholars need to relinquish a little control over their disciplines and make sure they are prioritizing the needs of the greater institution and that institution’s visitors over their specific disciplines. I have come to believe that those who work in more multi-disciplinary roles in museums – like Ariana French –  tend to do a better job of better addressing the true needs of a museum. I think when working in multiple disciplines one is able to better connect some of the disparate needs and issues, and thus they are able to see the bigger picture.

Murder at the Met! Alice Schwarz talk

In mid-October, Alice Schwarz – an educator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art – came to visit our class to speak about some of her projects in the Education Department. Although she spoke about other projects she has worked on during her long tenure at the museum, she focused much of her talk on a mobile app she created called Murder at the Met!

The app itself was a collaboration between the Education Department, the Digital Media Department, Green Door Labs, and Toursphere. Alice described the project as being very collaborative, and really being a marriage of education, technology, and 21st century skills.

Wanting to encourage more teens to visit the Met’s American Wing, Alice came up with an idea to create a Clue-like game that would inspire teens to explore the American Wing and its collections. She described that she came up with the idea on a whim during a conversation with a colleague in the digital media department and that it was very quickly developed within three months. Murder at the Met! encourages users to problem solve a murder mystery that has taken place within the American Wing by discovering different objects and works of art that give clues and help users solve the crime.

Murder at the Met (Image source)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The app debuted at a teen event on April 20, 2012 and around 125 students attended. 27% had never attended a teen program at the Met but even more interestingly 11% had never visited the Met at all. The teens were encouraged to dress up in 19th century garb for the event and once they arrived at the museum they split into groups to try out the game. They were surveyed after the event and Alice gave us some very interesting feedback: 29% of the teens’ favorite part of the experience was examining the works of art, 28% of them enjoyed using clues to problem solve, 27% most enjoyed working in a team, while only 14% most enjoyed the fact that they were playing a mobile game.

Students using app (Image source)

I think that the feedback received really underscores the fact that technology, and particularly mobile apps, can be used to great effect in museum settings, even fine arts museums.  From the feedback received, most of the students who used Murder at the Met! clearly preferred the experience the app afforded them over the actual app itself. I think this proves that technology can be a very successful tool for creating social and collaborative opportunities within museums.

While some museum staff or visitors might prefer a more tech-free gallery experience, I think that integrating these kinds of technological features can really add to the experience of visiting a museum. I suspect this app generated conversations about the American Wing and its collections that might not have occurred had the students simply walked around on their own or even had they taken a tour. The app engaged the students and allowed them to learn through discovery. By creating programming that is engaging and fun, I think museums can attract more visitors or different kinds of visitors. While we have seen in this class that some digital tools can detract or distract from the museum experience, I think this project proves that when done right, a digital tool has the potential to elevate the museum experience and create a more dynamic, lively, and fun visiting experience for all different kinds of museum audiences.

WSJ: A Look at the Museum of the Future

Our professor emailed us a link to a Wall Street Journal article called A Look at the Museum of the Future that I found to be incredibly interesting and relevant to our coursework:

One quote in particular – from Kurt Haunfelner, vice president of exhibits and collections at the Museum of Science and Industry, Chicago –  really resonated with me:

“Museums are ‘aware that the expectations of their audiences are changing fairly dramatically and I think they are committed to experiment and prototype different approaches to engaging an audience.'”

We’ve had several discussions in class about this idea and even in  a class entirely focused on the use of technology in museums, its seems like there are several people who are not entirely comfortable with some of the changes happening in museums. Whether its incorporating location-based technology, utilizing crowd sourced information, or creating digital proxies of exhibits, it seems like there are still hesitations about the kinds of technologies that are being utilized. I expect that similarly within most museums there are staff members who resist some changes being made. This is brought up within the article:

“While aimed at boosting crowds, the new technology could blur the lines between education and entertainment. As institutions focus on the thrill of new displays, some observers caution that the art and artifacts could get lost in the commotion. ‘It’s important that museums be responsive to audiences, but it can tip easily into making it all about the audience and maybe not pushing the audience into something outside their own experiences,’ said Elizabeth Rodini, director of the museums and society program at Johns Hopkins University.”

While I understand the point that is being made, I also disagree with this to some extent. Firstly, I think blurring the line between education and entertainment is a completely understandable and even laudable result of incorporating new technology. While many – if not all –  museums’ missions include aims to educate the visitors, I think almost all museums also strive to keep their visitors entertained. Entertainment can be very educating, and education can be very entertaining – I don’t think that these two concepts should be considered so polarized. Also, I don’t think that “making it all about the audience” is necessarily a bad thing. Museums should aim to please their audiences, they should try to create content and programming that their audiences respond to. Without an audience, what is the function of a museum? If there is no audience, there is no one to educate, to explain a collection to, to create an exhibit for. So why shouldn’t museums strive to make their spaces “all about the audience”

I love museums, whether they are big or small, very modern, or very old. While I love the new technology at the Cooper-Hewitt or the Smithsonian Natural History Museum, I also love the simplicity of the Merchant’s House Museum, or the Uffizi, or any number of smaller institutions that aren’t as [visibly] technologically oriented. I truly do appreciate the simplest, no frills, low or no-tech exhibits. But that being said, I just don’t see how anyone can expect museums to not try and take advantage of the great advances in technology we are seeing today. Not all change is bad and I think that resisting change can have a potentially negative impact on institutions. So many museums are very successfully experimenting and prototyping different ways to fulfill their missions and continue to keep their visitors engaged, and most of them are doing this with the help of new technology.

At the end of the day, we have to remember that museums are businesses. Whether they are non-profits, for-profits, government-run, etc they still need to maintain [and increase] their audience attendance. They need to do all they can to remain relevant and stay a popular destination within their communities, because without visitor traffic most museums couldn’t keep their doors open. Without revenue they can’t preserve their collections, or pay the staff members, or maintain their buildings. We may be uncomfortable with some of the changes being made, but I think we all need to acknowledge that its incredibly important for museums to embrace technology. Yes this may result in changes that some people don’t like, but I think there is the potential to create changes that can truly enhance and improve museums.

Digital Tools: Wölff App

 

In Karen Shelby’s lecture (see previous post) she mentioned and demonstrated an iOS App that she thought would be applicable to our class. The app is called Wölff, named after the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin, and was developed by a Yale art history Ph.D candidate named Greg Bryda. The app’s mission is: ” to improve the study and teaching of artworks, old and new, from around the globe.” (Wolffapp.com).

In Bryda’s words, the app functions “to simplify creating, showing, and sharing slide presentations of high-res images”  (Source). Users can create presentations, compare works of art side by side, or simply browse through a vast library of images. It uses crowd-sourced content: users can upload their own images and I believe they can also add textual information to existing images. Similar to the Cooper Hewitt’s interactive pen and the Google Art Project, this app exists to allow users to aggregate their own content by creating their own art collections. This brings to mind Ross Parry and Nadia Arbach’s ideas of online learning needing to be personalized and customizable to suit the current user’s needs and desires (See previous post).

 

I downloaded the app on my phone to test it out. Strangely I was unable to actually search for anything: no matter what criteria I entered in the search field, no results showed up. I also wasn’t able to create a Light Table, as every name I tested gave an error message saying that Light Table name was already in use. That being said, in concept this app seems great. I love being able to zoom in on images (though due to the crowd-sourced nature of the content, not all images are hi-res enough that you can zoom in very well), and being able to compare images side by side sounds very useful, though I was unable to test that. There was a lot of varied and interesting content on the app, most likely because it is all coming from different kinds of people, unlike Google Art Project which is controlling the content that is included. Wölff seems to be a great way to create a personal database of artworks, even if it didn’t work for me. The app itself is beautifully designed and the interface is easy to understand. It took me a bit of time to discern differences in the kinds of collections I could create (My Art vs Favorites vs Light Table), but I think this is more of an issue of terminology than user experience issue.

Looking into the app’s beginnings, I discovered that the app itself was crowd-funded on Kickstarter. Clearly crowd-sourcing is becoming more and more present and important in art history settings. Despite the fact that I perceive and have experienced art history education to be a very traditional buttoned-up and closed-off field of study, its clear that it is evolving. From Wölff to Art History Teaching Resources, more and more people in the field are trying to tap into the vast amount of knowledge on the Internet and utilize a large group of people to help gather and create content. This is similar to how museums are struggling to make all of their own resources accessible and educational for large audiences online. It’s difficult to transition fields of study and institutions from being very closed off to becoming more open. I’m sure many scholars and curators have issues with knowledge being created and accessed in new and different ways, but in reality this is allowing for the democratization of information and knowledge.

Art History Teaching Resources

On September 9th, Karen Shelby came to speak to our class about her work as an art history professor as well as the website she developed as a resource for other art historians. She is a professor at the CUNY–Baruch College and teaches a wide variety of different art history courses, ranging from museum studies to contemporary art to Southeast Asian art and archeology to survey art history lectures. She and another professor/MoMA curatorial assistant, Michelle Fischer, saw a need for the gap to be bridged between museum educators and art historians. They also saw a need to minimize the preparation for image presentations: all over the world art historian professors are creating the same slide shows over and over, sometimes wasting hours gathering images and sources and formatting them into a powerpoint presentation. So they developed Art History Teaching Resources, a website that exists as

“a peer-populated platform for art history teachers. AHTR is home to a constantly evolving and collectively authored online repository of art history teaching content including, but not limited to, lesson plans, video introductions to museums, book reviews, image clusters, and classroom and museum activities. The site promotes discussion and reflection around new ways of teaching and learning in the art history classroom through a peer-populated blog and fosters a collaborative virtual community for art history instructors at all career stages.”

This website is an OER, or open educational resource, defined by UNESCO as “teaching, learning or research materials that are in the public domain or released with an intellectual property license that allows for free use, adaptation, and distribution”. (Source). All of the material on the site is available for anyone to use in any way they see fit, as long as it is used for educational purposes. One of the reasons why the site was created was to rethink the way art history is taught. Shelby explained that there is not a lot of focus on teaching art historians how to teach others about art, so she sees this site as a way of both valuing academic work and educating teachers about new and different ways they can teach certain subjects.

In class Shelby went through some of the different content hosted on the site and explained some of features which include a weekly blog, links to scholarly resources, lesson plans, videos of New York museums, along with a great deal of other information. Shelby also detailed some of the challenges that AHTR has faced such as different levels of performance from the different contributors, addressing such a large body of work through limited means, maintaining a social media presence, and increasing the scope of the content.

What I find most interesting about this website is that it is also based on the principles of crowdsourcing: “the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content by soliciting contributions from a large group of people and especially from the online community rather than from traditional employees or suppliers” (Merriam-Webster), though the people generating this content are vetted and in most cases specifically chosen. Shelby and Fischer – as well as several editors and an advisory board – edit, authorize, and maintain all of the content on the site. While I was really struck by the idea of teachers in a sense outsourcing some of their work, Shelby and our own professor maintained that this concept does more good than not. It creates a framework for teachers to use when creating lessons: they can then add additional content, refute or disagree with the content provided, and overall put their own spin on the pre-designed lectures.

This is a very successful form of crowdsourcing, because it utilizes many people to create something that can in turn be used by many more people. But the level of oversight ensure that the information being provided is accurate and still scholarly. I think that is a major problem with crowdsourced internet resources, Wikipedia being the most famous example. While it is amazing to get input from so many different kinds of users, when there isn’t an overarching authority verifying the information, issues with content can arise.

Both of this week’s readings discuss ideas of user interaction and participation with museum digital content. Cameron and Robinson in particular make note of the museum as a knowledge authority and that even when users participate in providing information, they still trust that the museum is presenting the “truth”. (see previous post) I think its very challenging to both include a range of opinions and perspectives while still maintaining a truth or overarching message, but AHTR is successful in their attempt to do something quite similar. The website itself is the overarching authority, ensuring that its content is “correct” even if it is based on a singular perspective. They invite other teachers and students to use this content as a jumping off point, not as the end all and be all of the research. This is done by incorporating metadata, linking to other resources, referencing scholarly material, and also by simply making it clear that there is a single author attached to every piece. This very small gesture – including an author’s name – informs users that the work is based on a singular person’s perspective, that it should not be read as a global truth. I actually think this very simple addition can change a lot about how content is always read, whether online or in a museum. So much information on is presented to viewers without a specific author, which I believe allows viewers to place more authority in that content and to assume that it is a truth verified by the overarching website or institution.
Generally I think AHTR is a good model for museums when they look to update their digital knowledgescapes and increase the information in their digital collections. This is a prime example of how to incorporate  many kinds of opinions and perspectives while still maintaining a level of authority. By monitoring and editing content, as well as maintaining a conversation between the authority and the content generators, there is a great deal of oversight. This kind of idea can allow for museums to become a space a space for gathering all types of information while still validating and maintaining that knowledge for others to utilize.