Digital and technology practice in museums has, like a jet plane strapped to a hand cart, been artificially
grafted onto this ancient model, with checkered results. Technology has been used by museums primarily
as a tool of efficiency (produce label copy out of our CMS, stat!) or of strained relevancy (participatory
culture! gamification!), rather than as a foundational concept. But what if this weren’t the case? What if
a museum’s overall practice were built outwards from its technology efforts, rather than the other way
around? What would a museum built from the ground up for speed and agility, rather than stability and
longevity, look like? This presentation will speculate on this idea by examining the possible evolution of
museum practice from a number of perspectives, including (but not limited to):

• Scholarship and Content Development: What would the equivalent of GitHub look like for
  scholarship? How could museums leverage the work of hundreds of thousands of curators and
  scientists working together towards a common repository of knowledge, rather than duplicating
  efforts from museum to museum?
• Variable Media Conservation: Artists are inventing, implementing, and discarding means of
  creating works of art orders of magnitude faster than conservation practice is evolving. How can
  the practice of conservation change to accommodate web-speed innovation?
• Constituent Software Systems: Collections management, digital asset management,
  development, and other primary museum software systems are generally built on a cataloguing
  paradigm, with distribution, publication, and collaboration tacked on as “premium features,” when
  present at all. How would systems built for action and outcome, rather than simply cataloguing,
  change the practice of museums from the ground up?
• Staffing: Digital media teams tend to be a tiny minority on an average museum’s staff, even though they are responsible for the vast majority of the museum’s interactions with the public. What would be the effect of inverting this model?

This presentation will pose many more questions than it will answer, but in so doing, will suggest new
frameworks of understanding as attendees work towards building the museum of the future.

See you there, kids!

Video streaming by Ustream

You can find more information about the job, and how to apply, here. Let’s rock it up, people.

• Most important conversation I had in 2010: At Museums and the Web in Denver in April this year, Bruce Wyman had a long conversation that began with him saying, “you should really consider applying for the Director of Technology job at the Denver Art Museum.” And here we are!
  • Honorable Mention: The conversation I had with Madelyn five minutes after that, in which she said, somewhat tentatively, “yeah, I might consider moving to Colorado.”
• Best Concert: Tune-Yards at the Bell House in Brooklyn. Holy crap! She blew us all away with just a uke, a floor tom, her voice, and a bad-ass bass player.
  • Honorable Mention: Pearl and the Beard at Union Pool for the Farm to Folks fest. If you haven’t seen these peeps yet, you need to do that right now.
  • Honorable Mention Runner Up: The True Love Always reunion show at the Rock Shop. Seeing John Lindaman on stage always makes me smile.
• Best Moment With Madelyn: After driving three days (in separate vehicles stuffed with luggage and cats) out to Colorado, we stopped at the overlook on the Denver/Boulder Turnpike at Mile 42 to see Boulder Valley all lit up, just before driving to our new house for the first time. Yeah, that was the shit.
• Best Catfish Po-Boy Purchased From a Truck: This would be the catfish po-boy purchased while Nate Solas and I were on our way to see the bats fly out from under the Congress Bridge in Austin. The bats were somewhat underwhelming, but the po-boy was effing amazing.
• Favorite New Record of 2010: Riposte, by Buke and Gass. Goddamn. I just started laughing the first time I listened to this; I can’t remember just straight-up enjoying a record this much in quite some time.
• Favorite Record from 1969 that wasn’t released until 2010: That would be U.F.O., by Jim Sullivan. One of those rare re-discoveries latently touted as a “masterpiece” that might actually be just that. I love, love, love this record. There’s a fascinating backstory to this album as well (involving U.F.O.s and Jim Sullivan’s sudden unexplained disappearance); there’s a great interview with Light In the Attic’s Matt Sullivan on NPR about it here.
• Most Improbable Concert of 2010 that I actually saw in 2009: The inexplicable Jawbox reunion on the Jimmy Fallon show. My old bandmates and friends Mason and Megan somehow were able to swing tickets to the morning rehearsal, in which Jawbox rocked “Savory,” FF=66,”"Chinese Fork Tie,” and my all-time-favorite Jawbox song, “68.” Victor Samra ditched his duties at MoMA for the morning and walked a few blocks over to the studio to see the show with us. Trust me, you’ve never seen DC post-punk properly until you’ve seen it seated in a freezing-cold television studio.
• Strangest concert experience also involving Victor Samra: This would be the Iron Maiden/Dream Theater show at Madison Square Garden. Victor called me early the day of the concert offering an extra ticket. I am not, nor have I ever been, an Iron Maiden fan (though I admit a certain begrudging respect for the technical facilities of my fellow Berklee alums Dream Theater), but when Victor Samra calls, you’ve gotta accept the charges. We ended up in MSG’s own private box, drinking Heinekens and eating risotto with people we didn’t know while watching the show. I have officially now eaten risotto at an Iron Maiden show. How many of you fools out there can say that?
  • Honorable Mention: The Medications show in Brooklyn that ended with the sound guy attempting to turn off power to the stage mid-set, and Devin Ocampo almost killing said sound guy with his guitar. Punk rock! Sorta!
• Best Birthday Present: Madelyn gave me a bike for my birthday; it’s the first one I’ve owned (or ridden) since I was 12 years old. Now it is a vital component of my morning commute. Vroom.
• Best Quote I Totally Agree With While Recognizing That Doing So Makes Me Realize That I’m Officially Old(er): That would be this quote from former NEA Chairman Bill Ivey, on the “Hide/Seek” controversy at the Smithsonian: “A sense of proportion is required as it is not a good idea to convert every small offense into a fight over principles.” Ivey summed up in just a few words what it took me an entire post to express. These are words to live by in 2011, kids.
• Best Book I Read in 2010: Philip Jenkins’ Decade of Nightmares. Jenkins examines the decade 1975-1985 and looks at trends leading up to and following that decade, and manages to show how so much of what’s happening currently in America had its genesis in that decade. An excellent read.
  • Honorable Mention: Rick Perlstein’s Nixonland, for much the same reasons as above.
• Best Technology That Changed My Damn Life: Rdio, hands down! I got tired of waiting for Spotify to make its way to our shores, and opted for the music-streaming service Rdio instead. Jeffrey Inscho has a great post about Rdio that expresses why it works. I’ve discovered so much amazing music thanks to this service, particularly since Rdio has made big strides to license all sorts of independent music and make it available. The entire Now Again, Light In the Attic, Warp, Teenbeat, and Merge catalogs available for one low monthly price? Yes! Rdio has also caused me to stop purchasing CDs entirely, and to start purchasing LPs again–the record-as-physical-artifact has real meaning thanks to Rdio.
• Best Moment In Which I Almost Peed In My Pants: That would be my best friend Don Undeen’s sudden emergence, complete with Mexican wrestling mask, as “El Museo” the day before Halloween at MCN 2010 in Austin. I wish that I had taken a picture of the force of nature that was El Museo; I haven’t laughed that hard in a loooong time.

Awright, I guess about wraps it up, y’all. Happy New Year–see you in 2011!




]]> http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/392/feed 3 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/392 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/KovenJSmith/~3/izShiAvm8j0/359 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/359#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 23:33:25 +0000 Koven http://kovenjsmith.com/?p=359 Usually I refrain from talking about museums on this blog except to discuss how museum policy/tradition/approach affects (or is affected by) technology, and I generally keep my political opinions to myself, so this is sort of a new thing for me. And this is probably just an overreaction to a relatively small issue. So please forgive this digression–I’ll get back to ranting about collections management systems or whatever soon enough.

However…

The recent firestorm surrounding Wayne Clough (secretary of the Smithsonian Institution)’s decision to remove David Wojnarowicz’s work A Fire In My Belly from the “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, and the public response to that decision, has provoked me out of my comfortable treehouse. For those not familiar with what I’m talking about, I’ve collected a bunch of links related to the controversy here: http://bit.ly/fC7uD8. Of what I’ve read thus far, I would say that Tyler Green’s ongoing coverage at ARTINFO is the most balanced and researched.

I don’t think I need to point out that the Smithsonian’s decision was horribly wrongheaded (though I’ll do that briefly below), so I want to focus on one aspect of the response to this incident: the “Clough Must Go” movement that’s been emerging this week. This movement, which will have its coming-out party at a protest scheduled for this weekend in New York City, seeks to hold Wayne Clough personally responsible for the decision (which is good), and to then remove him from office as a result (which is bad).

This feels wrong to me. Here’s why.

The Smithsonian’s response to this issue was the wrong one.

So yeah, lemme get this out of the way first. There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that the Smithsonian’s decision to withdraw Fire in My Belly from the show was absolutely wrong. Though this issue has undoubtedly caught the public’s consciousness, it would appear that the Smithsonian could still have kept the piece in the show with a fair minimum of public outcry. As the mysterious museumnerd put it pithily:

@edmj Not exactly. Those people threw a snowball of inanity. It was Clough who reacted as though it was a live grenade. #CloughMustGo
December 14, 2010 11:04 pm via twidroyd (original)ReplyRetweetFavorite

@museumnerd
Museum Nerd


And the timing of this couldn’t be worse, in that it’s hard to not fit this into a much larger (and far more dispiriting) narrative in which the voices of reason and tolerance are being drowned out by a hysterical, intolerant vocal minority. Watching one of our most beloved public institutions cave to this craven minority is enough to make one resort to extreme measures for retribution. And this is exactly what’s happening with the “Dump Clough” movement.

But…

Removing Wayne Clough over this incident sets the worst kind of precedent.

It would be one thing if this were the last straw in a long line of capitulations to political pressure on Wayne Clough’s part. However, that doesn’t appear to be the case. The last time I recall the Twitterverse speaking his name, it was to praise him for the Smithsonian 2.0 initiative, which he sponsored. Maybe Clough has made a whole lot of terrible moves that compromise the integrity of the Smithsonian as a whole, but if so, I’m certainly not aware of them. Even while acknowledging that the decision to remove the piece was wrong, Jonathan Katz, one of the curators of the exhibition, still praised the NPG for putting the exhibition on in the first place.

So what we’re talking about here is essentially a “one strike and you’re out” policy when it comes to the leaders of our institutions. The precedent we’d be setting says, in effect, that your past performance is meaningless if you step over the line even once in a way we don’t approve of. I just can’t hang with that. While there are certain transgressions that a museum administrator (or his/her bosses) can commit that rise to the level of an Impeachable Offense (such as, oh, maybe selling artwork to pay your electric bills), I don’t believe that this is one of them.

As many of us who work in museums know, there is a painful shortage of museum directors in this world who actually “get it” (I’ve been lucky enough to work for a few). And of those, there’s an even tinier subset who are capable of guiding an institution as multi-faceted and unwieldy as the Smithsonian. If we’re going to remove someone who, generally speaking, seems to be doing a good job (as opposed to a ‘heckuva’ job), we’d better be doing it for the right reasons. Which brings me to my last point…

Dumping Clough only furthers the agenda of those who sought to remove the piece in the first place.

While I don’t doubt that a tiny minority of the visitors (emphasis on ‘tiny’) who have visited this show were truly offended by the work in question, it’s not for those people that this artificial “debate” has been created. What this is, in the end, is a political power play to establish authority over our country’s public institutions. And make no mistake, this issue IS a cynical one for a majority of the politicians, pundits, and commentators who are using it to their advantage. If it served Eric Cantor’s or John Boehner’s political ends to argue that the content of “Hide/Seek” wasn’t offensive enough for an organization supported with taxpayer money (even though this particular show was privately funded), that would be the case they’d make.

Removing Clough plays right into those people’s hands. It sends a message that if you can’t behead our precious institutions by stirring up bullshit controversy, we’re perfectly willing to finish the job ourselves. I fear the blowback that something like this would create. If the movement to dump Clough is successful, who do you think we’ll get in his place? Someone who’s willing to face debate head on, or someone who, when appointed by the Board of Regents, is willing to state for the record that there will be no more “controversial” exhibitions on his/her watch?

So, in short, let’s hold Clough accountable for this, certainly. But let’s find the right corrective action.




]]> http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/359/feed 5 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/359 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/KovenJSmith/~3/TH-v_p-o-rM/348 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/348#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 20:47:05 +0000 Koven http://kovenjsmith.com/?p=348 I posed a quick question on Twitter this morning (or this afternoon, for those of you east of the Rocky Mountains) that I feel needs a bit more clarification than I could squeeze into 140 characters, so I thought I’d log into the ol’ blog (for the first time since July) and do some old fashioned clarifyin’.

Anyway, the question I posed was this:

What things do museums do *exclusively* because of tradition? If you were building a museum from scratch, what would you do differently?
December 1, 2010 12:35 pm via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@5easypieces
Koven J. Smith

While it’s easy to think of all kinds of things that museums could do better (and indeed, since asking this question, I’ve received a bunch of excellent replies to this effect), what I’m really trying to get at here are identifying processes that we (perhaps grudgingly) accept as givens, but that we would never enact if we were just starting from scratch today.

A good example of this would be object (or accession) numbers. If museums didn’t already exist, each with their own unique object numbering schemas, I have a hard time imagining that we would take a similar approach to object identification. It seems far more likely that we’d do something along the lines of what Richard McCoy and I have been discussing for a while, something like an ISBN or PURL for works of art. This number would be forever permanent, and would move with the object when deaccessioned, purchased, loaned, or whatever. The reason that this is such an interesting example to me is that because unique objects don’t, in fact, have truly unique identifiers, using them in a linked data context is extraordinarily difficult. The main reason objects don’t have truly unique identifiers is because tradition dictates that objects have identifiers only within the context of an institution–once the object leaves that institution, the identifier no longer has meaning.

It’s just a small example (and a super-technical one, because that’s my thing), but the implications are huge in that we wouldn’t have to build big, complicated systems around compensating for the lack of unique IDs. I wonder what other processes there are like this in our world–how would we build museums differently, if we were just starting out now?




]]> http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/348/feed 1 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/348 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/KovenJSmith/~3/CpI2PNtPbn4/339 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/339#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:55:11 +0000 Koven http://kovenjsmith.com/?p=339 Disclaimer: This is something that I’m still trying to figure out, so a lot of what follows is still kinda half-baked and rant-y (just your typical kovenjsmith.com post, I suppose). I welcome better-informed opinions than my own…

I often hear museum staff talk about museum websites being places for visitors to the buildings to “plan their visits” and/or to “follow up after their visits.” For some institutions, it seems that this is the primary purpose of their websites. I’m willing to be convinced if someone can show me hard data that proves otherwise, but my gut tells me that this kind of activity rarely, if ever, actually occurs in the way we so often discuss it.

Let me be clear here–I’m not talking about visiting a museum site to figure out what times it’s open, or how to get there. That’s pretty basic stuff, and statistics generally show that these are typically the most-visited areas of many museum websites. I’m also not talking about using a museum’s website to determine whether you’re going to visit in the first place (“They’ve got the Naboo fighter on display? I am so there.”).

No, here I’m talking about what museum staff seem to refer to when they say “plan your visit,” which seems to be something along the lines of this scenario: the visitor figures out ahead of time what he or she wants to see, and maps out the visit, either literally on a map or conceptually (“first we see the Jackson Pollack, then the Naboo fighter”). After this thoroughly-planned-out visit occurs, the visitor goes home, pulls up the museum’s website, and reviews what he/she saw there.

Maybe this scenario really does occur at museums with really large campuses (sculpture parks, for instance), where a visitor really does need to optimize travel time between stops, and advance planning is actually critical. And maybe I’m completely misunderstanding what museum people mean when they say “plan/follow up”–no one has ever been able to successfully explain this concept to me. I hear it intoned all the time, but it’s an activity that seems ill-defined at best.

I feel that often museums still see their websites as inextricably tethered to the physical buildings, as opposed to distinct entities with really only the tenuous connection of the museum brand tying them together. The two are certainly related, in that the same scholarly activities and staff make them happen, but the output and use of those activities as they are manifested inside the building and on the Web are entirely different.

My main worry here is that this continued orientation towards the physical visit in museum websites results in an only slightly more evolved version of the 90s-era “brochure-ware” websites that we so often decry. There are experiences on museum websites that are impossible to have inside the building; let’s stop limiting them arbitrarily by forcing them to be something they really aren’t good at being.

I’m Koven, and that’s one to grow on.




]]> http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/339/feed 14 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/339 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/KovenJSmith/~3/8nJE8ORayLo/337 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/337#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 19:40:42 +0000 Koven http://kovenjsmith.com/?p=337 “It’s not about the technology.”

I hear this meme invoked all the time at “museum tech” conferences nowadays. Indeed, I myself have said this a bunch of times when developing (or at least contemplating) a new content-based technology project at the Museum. A big drive in my work at the Met has always been to get constituents talking about the content first and foremost, and worrying about the technology platform(s) later. (Aside: Nancy Proctor makes this point better than I do in her recent Museums and the Web paper The Museum Is Mobile.) This hasn’t always been an easy task, as often it’s excitement about the technology that has caused the constituent to contact me in the first place, but I have nevertheless always endeavored to put content first and tech second in any discussions about a possible project.

But…

This approach only goes so far, and we need to be careful about where and when we apply it, lest our thinking become too prejudiced. My concern is that thinking this way causes us to act as if content is always inherently platform agnostic, which is rarely true.

I think the issue here really is context, which is unique for each technology platform, even when the content is similar. A kiosk has the context of a museum around it, a mobile device has the context of location, the web has the context of (possibly) no context at all. Each of these situations demand different approaches to developing, filtering, and presenting content.

I don’t mean to say that the “it’s not about the technology” idea has no value–it’s still a bad idea to jump into a project with no reason for being other than exciting technology. However, we do need to be cautious about understanding the nuances of each platform, and adapting our content strategies accordingly.

Word.




]]> http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/337/feed 5 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/337 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/KovenJSmith/~3/yfJjECzzxUA/323 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/323#comments Thu, 01 Jul 2010 19:00:06 +0000 Koven http://kovenjsmith.com/?p=323 I’m becoming more and more interested, lately, in exploring the implications of interacting with museum content outside of the museum building itself. Nancy Proctor, the head of mobile strategy for the Smithsonian, led a great unconference session on the topic at this year’s MW conference, and Chris Ubik recently postulated how the location-based app Gowalla might facilitate interesting tours outside of the museum. We’re starting to see some interesting real-world examples of this kind of thing, whether it’s home-grown stuff like Richard McCoy’s tour of public art in Indianapolis or some of the cool stuff the dudes over at Scvngr are doing.

As much as I’m excited about these ideas, they are essentially using location-based services to expand the traditional museum tour model (albeit over a larger geographic area) rather than upend it. These experiences assume that the user has made a deliberate decision to interact with a museum and/or its content, and there’s an assumption that the user will follow through with that decision. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course, but what excites me about location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla is that they enable us to pursue an entirely different kind of interaction model, one that substitutes serendipitous and disposable experiences for the more immersive, intentional ones that museums are accustomed to.

What might this kind of experience look like? A relatively straightforward example is from the History Channel’s Foursquare profile. If you follow The History Channel, and check into a location for which it has supplied a “tip,” an interesting historical factoid will be displayed to you. So, for instance, if you check in at the Met Life building in Manhattan and you follow the History Channel, you will learn that the building was “originally called the Pan Am Building & was the largest commercial office building in the world when it opened on March 7, 1963.”

It’s a short leap to imagine museum content being presented this way. A user who follows the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for instance, could check in at the Black Canyon in Colorado and be presented with this photograph and accompanying data from the Museum’s Timeline of Art History:




Black Canyon, From Camp 8, Looking Above, 1871 Timothy O'Sullivan (American, 1840–1882) Albumen silver print from glass negative Source: Timothy O'Sullivan: Black Canyon, From Camp 8, Looking Above (1986.1054.19) | Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

In essence, this approach takes content that was originally designed to be experienced as part of a museum visit (whether physical or online), and re-purposed it as a contextual/interpretive layer on a user’s experience out in the world.

This approach is interesting to me for a few reasons:

• The decision to interact and actually interacting are disconnected events. In a traditional museum experience, the visit itself follows directly from the decision to visit. Not anymore. The decision to visit (read: “follow”) a museum is now separate from the experience of interacting with that museum’s content. The interaction now only occurs when it’s most relevant.
• The object itself is used primarily as a means of delivering information. Most online collections essentially attempt to replicate the experience of viewing an object, with a digital image as a stand-in for the real thing. In this experience, however, the experience of viewing the object is downplayed in favor of its relevance as a means of connecting one information node (location) with another (whatever information you wish to provide to the user).
• The user has not made a deliberate choice to access museum content. This is the critical difference between this approach and a more tour-based model. The user isn’t going on a museum-curated tour of “famous painted landscape vistas” or whatever, but is instead only encountering that content serendipitously. (ed note: I might have made that word up.)
• The actual interaction with museum content is short-lived. Once the content is viewed, the user moves on with his or her life.

All of these factors contribute significantly to a completely different type of “visit,” and an entirely different value proposition for museums (or at least art museums, in any case). In this scenario, the museum is now less an enabler of visits and more of a provider of information. The centerpiece of the museum experience–interaction with objects–is almost nonexistent, and factors that barely warrant mention on an object’s label–the location in which it was produced–are critically important.
—————–
And P.S., to the five of you who read this blog regularly (hi, mom!), sorry for the long gap in not posting. A lot going on these days that has prevented me from posting as (ir)regularly as I might like. Hopefully I’ll be back on a more regular schedule from here on out. As always, thanks so much for stopping by and reading!




]]> http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/323/feed 0 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/323 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/KovenJSmith/~3/tdC-_l2owb4/311 http://kovenjsmith.com/archives/311#comments Fri, 29 Jan 2010 22:49:58 +0000 Koven http://kovenjsmith.com/?p=311

Milton Glaser’s 1966 Bob Dylan poster, on display at the Cooper-Hewitt. Image from the Museum of Modern Art.

I just came back from seeing the “Design USA: Contemporary Innovation” show at the Cooper-Hewitt National Design museum, and taking some time to check out its much-ballyhooed iPod Touch tour, which was designed by New York design house 2×4. I was curious to see the device in action, after first hearing about it through the #museummobile Twitter stream and then via the positive review of the tour in the New York Times. I arrived with somewhat high expectations. Would this finally be the mobile handheld implementation that I and others have been dreaming about?

Well, yes and no. I found myself somewhat frustrated by the experience–the tour does so many things right, that it makes the things it does poorly just that much more glaring.

I’ll start with the good stuff first (for a change). First, the amount of content available on the device is absolutely staggering. For each of the 78 designers with work represented in the show, there was some kind of multimedia content available. At minimum, a slide show of the designer’s work was presented, but more often than not this slide show would be accompanied by an audio interview or artist statement. Many of the profiles featured YouTube videos illustrating aspects of the designer’s work. In some cases, there were multiple videos, multiple interviews, and multiple slideshows. The devices were light on text content (there was virtually none at all, as I recall), but this didn’t feel like a critical omission, given the inherently visual nature of much of the work on display. Given that my call has always been for more, more, and more content, the amount of stuff to get into here was fantastic.

I was also excited that much of the content on the devices was not (as far as I can tell) created expressly for the exhibition. Some of the most interesting content on the devices was delivered via YouTube videos, most of which I think were not created for the exhibition or even posted by the Museum itself. I would love to see more museums start to do this–taking content that’s freely available from other sources, and incorporating it into an in-gallery interpretation strategy.

The devices also handle comments quite well. Visitors are given the ability to comment directly on a given designer’s profile, or on the exhibition generally. These comments show up on the exhibition’s Web site, on a series of iMacs on display at the end of the exhibition itself, and, apparently, on Twitter (though it’s unclear to me how this is done). Comments received from the gallery are merged with comments received from the Web site pretty seamlessly, which is a nice feature. My only real dissatisfaction with the comments feature was the inability to respond directly to previous users’ comments. I guess I’ve become so used to the idea of an @ reply that I expect a little more asynchronous conversation than was really possible here. That’s a pretty minor point, though.

And generally speaking, the interface works nicely. After a moment or two of playing with it, it was pretty clear how to get around, how to search, and how to comment. I’d be curious to test this with someone who is less familiar with the iPhone model; I wonder if to an iPhone newbie, the navigation would have been a little daunting.

And now on to the not-so-good stuff…

Something I had not really considered before is how having to pick up a device from a museum, versus bringing in your own and downloading an app, changes how much and what kind of content one might be willing to tolerate. Many of the videos linked from the device were longer than three minutes, with some clocking in at eight minutes or more. I would guess that while I was in the exhibition, I never watched any more than perhaps a minute-and-a-half of any one video, mostly because I felt a need to move on to the next designer’s display. Had this been an application on my own device, however, I could have saved any of those videos for later viewing, or shared them with friends immediately. I wouldn’t have been frustrated by not being able to watch entire videos, because the app would have essentially been leveraging the arrangement of a physical exhibition to point me to a sea of content I could explore later. Instead, I watched pieces of a few videos, most of which I’ll never get around to finding and re-watching on my own.

This problem could possibly have been mitigated by the “send my visit” feature, in which one can e-mail a summary of his or her visit to someone else. I e-mailed my visit to myself, in the hopes that maybe there would be URLs for the videos I had viewed in the e-mail. No such luck. All that appeared in the e-mail was a statistical breakdown of what I saw (number of designers’ profiles viewed, number of videos watched, number of images viewed, and number of comments added). I’ve never been a big believer in the “e-mail me this object” features that were ubiquitous on museum kiosks for a while, but here was a situation where e-mailing this information to myself actually could have been helpful.

I think my biggest beef with the iPod Touch tour, though, and the one that the reviewer touched upon in the NYT article, is that it doesn’t seem that well-integrated into the exhibition. And here I don’t mean well-integrated in a design sense; the physical exhibition design and the app design on the iPod were well-coordinated. What I mean is that it seems that the exhibition experience and the iPod experience were separate, parallel types of engagement, in which one had to stop doing one in order to experience the other.

I found myself either focusing entirely on the device, to the exclusion of all else, or focusing on the work on display, without any of the additional interpretive content from the device. Fundamentally, the experience I had on the device seemed like it would have been more fulfilling almost anywhere other than in the gallery. Both the exhibition itself (exclusive of the device) and the iPod tour each felt like complete experiences on their own–they didn’t really appear to need each other.

This issue was probably best exemplified by the thumbnail images used in the main navigation. Each designer’s profile, when shown in the primary list-style navigation, is associated with a thumbnail image of a representative work. However, this representative work was often not the work that was on display in the gallery. There was thus no visual shorthand one could use to assist with finding the appropriate profile. This seems like such an obvious integration point between the physical exhibition and the iPod tour, that its absence was striking.

Aaaaaanyway, there you go. On the whole, the handheld tour was a good effort, probably the best of its kind I’ve yet seen, but not quite ideal. I’d be really curious to hear others’ thoughts about this, particularly if you’ve seen the show and had a different reaction to the handheld tour.




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