As part of the Museum Computer Network’s Program Committee, I’ve been part of some fascinating discussions about what the theme of this year’s conference should be. A constant theme has been the idea of “change” and museums’ response to it. This sense that museums should be doing something they’re not is persistent and I think a bit off the mark.

Change ain’t necessarily a good thing

Minot Light, Blizzard of 1978, from Flickr user cliff1066™

My beef with “change” as the term to define our discourse about the future is that change is value-neutral. The people who embrace it think of it as a positive thing, but to the rest of the world, that connotation is not obvious. Doing our job better or in some new medium obviously is a change. But death is a change, as is going bankrupt, getting fired, or becoming irrelevant. So, what is it that change agents mean when they say “change”? Is it evolution, moving from one adaptation to an environment to a newer, hopefully better adaptation to a new environment? I tend to think it is a desire to embrace the possibilities offered by new modalities, with the related desire to express our enduring values in new ways as well as in the traditional ones.

Seeing new ways forward
One way that change could express itself is in rethinknig our notion of temporality.  There’s a great article Allison Arieff wrote for the New York Times blog called “It’s Time to Rethink ‘Temporary’” that focuses on “temporary” architecture, but is easily applicable to museums with very little alteration. Liz Neely pointed out that if you change “buildings” to “museums” in the following quote, you get a pretty powerful statement about another way museums might act in this century.

“Kronenburg made a compelling argument that the experimentation inherent in such structures challenges preconceived notions about what buildings can and should be. The strategy of temporality, he explained, ‘adapts to unpredictable demands, provides more for less, and encourages innovation.’”

Embracing impermanence is one way we might approach our work differently.  There are obviously many more examples. But in order for any of them to be more than just “change” – doing something different – they need to be deliberate. In order to know how to adapt, you need to first understand what’s going on, and second, what you value – what are those things that you will carry forward with you. Then you can embrace whatever new methods you choose and do it deliberately.

Bushwhacking your desire path

Desire path, by Flickr user Kake Pugh

The future is unknown territory so how do you see a way forward, institutionally or personally, knowing it’ll follow an unpredictable path? In my post on the New Media Consortium retreat I mentioned Susan Metros’ Six minute talk on leadership and career paths. Check it out here.  All of the videos are worth watching.

What I found valuable about her talk was her advice us to think about leadership not in abstract terms but in very concrete ones. She encouraged us to ask two questions, “What do you value?” and “What influences you?” and find answers to those questions. Knowing these things gives you the ability to look at the lay of the land with its constructed paths, and see where you want to go and how you might plot a straighter course to it and blaze a trail or bushwhack your way to it. The question becomes how to learn to see not only what’s there, but what’s not there that might be desirable, and then to embrace that.

As I was thinking about those two questions, it became clear that one thing that absolutely influences me is my professional network. While I was turning this question of change over in my head, two people I am often influenced by posted about eerily similar topics.  Both of them expressed, in their own ways, many of the traits and attitudes I value.

The attitudes of innovators
Jasper Visser just put out an interesting post on the attitudes of innovative people and organizations, and it’s worth reading and seeing how you and your institution stack up. He ends with the following;

“Even if you don’t want to be at the forefront of your industry (all the time), your organisation and its people need to have the right attitude towards changes in the environment, such as a new social network suddenly popping up.”

And what are some of those attitudes? His beginning list includes:

• Readiness to experiment. Even though not always actively innovating an entire industry, they are at least regularly trying new things and testing ideas.
• Sharing. Almost all keep blogs or write regular guest posts about their work, and talk about it at conferences, opening up their work to constructive criticism.
• Changing partnerships. Working together with completely different partners on different projects ensures a constant stream of fresh ideas.
• Great people. Quite often the great stuff happens when a number of great people get together, “great” meaning people who are open to ideas of others, passionate and full of creativity and energy.
• Focus on the customer. Every single great museum focused at least as much on the experience of the visitor, reaching and engaging them, as on their collection or stories.”

What does it take to be that person?
Lynda Kelly was apparently having a stimulating time at the “21st Century Learning in Natural History Settings” conference in D.C. because she wrote about her concept of a “guerilla-in-residence” - a more appealing vision of what we used to hear referred to as “change agents”. She posited a list of qualities, which include;

a guerilla-in-residence should:

• Ask “Where’s the data?”
• Have evidence-based discussions
• Ask lots of questions
• Look at absurdities
• Hang on like a dog with a bone, be tenacious
• Look for opportunities to mentor.
• Be able to both follow and lead
• Surround oneself with young people or positive people!
• Show respect – be a thanker, get back to others

The full list is worth the read. It’s short.

The Internet is an incurable condition

Plugs, by Flickr user Brad.K

So how does this relate to digital media? Janet Carding pointed me at a piece Alexandra Samuel wrote for The Atlantic recently called “’Plug In Better’: A Manifesto” that states that “The trick isn’t to unplug from our devices — it’s to unplug from the distractions, information overload, and trash that make us unhappy.”

I wrote earlier about dealing with cognitive loads, and her article is dead on. Particualrly where it comes to new media and how museums respond to it, we seem to still be very fear-based. Most of the people I encounter react to technological change, and grudgingly. What I like about Samuel’s article is that she proposes four attitudes to adopt to counter this and approach the digital not from a place of fear. Her main advice is to unplug from four things;

• Fear of Missing Out,
• Disconnection,
• Information overload,
• The shallows.

You’ll have to read the whole thing to see her reasoning, but it’s worth it.  Her statement at the end is pretty brilliant.

“The Internet is an incurable condition — but we can’t recognize that as good news until we find a way to treat the various aches and pains of life online.

“We plug back in because this new online world offers extraordinary opportunities for creation, discovery, and connection. We plug back in because we don’t actually want to escape the online world: We want to help create it.”

Which brought back around to a quote used to keep taped to my monitor from Mihaly Csikszentmihályi, ”Creating culture is always more rewarding than consuming it.”  And how do we create that new world? Vision, Desire, Attitude, and Focus.

The February meetup for Drinking about Museums, Boston was a raucous good time! We had a couple dozen people and went until 11 talking about issues like “What’s the point of digital interactives?” and generally enjoying each others’ company. The March meetup aims to kick things up a notch. It’s time for a field trip!

Jim Olson from the Peabody Essex Museum has offered to show us around their new Shapeshifting exhibition followed by a trip across the street to drink and discuss. If you want in, send me an email and I’ll send you an invite. Space is limited!

Drinks by Flickr user The Vault DFW

Our next meetup will be this Thursday, February 2nd, at 7PM. As we have for the past few months, the meetup will be at the Cambridge Brewing Company in Kendall Square, Cambridge. I’ll be there a bit before 7 and I think I’ll even reserve a big table, so check your calendars and let me know! Our topic is new rationales for digital interactives.

And in solidarity with our peeps in Denver and DC, I’m going to use the #drinkingaboutmuseums BOS hashtag from now on, so update your filters.
Directions:

Here’s the final part of my impressions of the Future of Education retreat held by the New Media Consortium in rainy Austin, TX.  The first part can be found here.

The final day of the retreat felt different to me, more intense. After a giddy first day of throwing ideas around and throwing them up on the wall, the tasks of synthesizing, identifying and ranking metatrends was more of a slog. Our brains were tired, and it’s hard work. The discussions and statements got more heated, especially when people felt that their idea might not get heard before it was too late. By the end, I was worried that we might get bogged down and not finish our task, but Larry Johnson, Lev Gonick, and David Sibbet are great cat herders and never seemed to tire of reminding us one more time to stay on topic. Great facilitation is like gold, and credit for getting any usable result from the event will rest firmly with them in my mind.

from Britt Watwood's "Learning In a Flat World" blog

I came into the event still processing one of the small group discussions I’d had yesterday about the dueling dyads of Vision & Leadership and Desire & Will and how they should inform one’s work. Discovering your passion and deciding what is to be done are big issues, or maybe Big Issues. There’s still more to unpack there.

In one of the morning small groups (I’ve lost track of how many I was in overall. It was a lot, though.) we were charged with identifying metatrends. The conversation turned, as it did so many times, to how resistant academics were to the perceived loss of their privileged position as “authorities”. It occurred to me that I’ve had this conversation countless times in the past several months now. The “they” changes (directors/curators/academics), but they’re always the people not in the room. I wonder what they say about us at their conferences?

In the course of this, we touched on visitors/students ongoing need or desire to have ways to make sense of the superabundance of information that’s now available. I think you can view the whole app phenomenon as a manifestation of this desire, the move away from surfing around to get what you want to having an app that just gives you a tiny slice – a snack as opposed to a smorgasbord. People still want and value guidance, they just want “a guide on their side instead of a sage on the stage,” as Zoë Rose put it.

Curation
How many buzzwords has the museum sector given to popular culture? The only one I can think of is curation; the act of finding and gathering objects and information to tell stories. Do a web search on “curate” and you’ll find all kinds of thing being curated that have nothing to do with museum practice. It must be galling to many curators to have their highly-specialized craft abstracted to the point that you can now curate your clothes, your music, and, worst of all – content, whatever that is. I choose to look upon this as a mark of esteem that people value this skill so much that they want to identify what they do with what curators do. I’m working on being more of a “glass half full kind” of guy this year.

I also see it as our great opportunity in this emergent era of digital plenty. We may not be Google, or Apple, or Wikipedia, or ______, but if there is one thing we know better than anyone else, it’s curation and we already have the people and the repositories of information to tell the important stories, the universal ones, the ones that last. I think it’s no longer a question of technology or budget. What museums need to do to be the kinds of institutions that are vibrant and relevant to rising generations is essentially a question of vision and leadership, desire and will.

40 hrs of thinking in 1.5 days @ #NMChz. Put a fork in me. I'm done. Can't wait to see the synthesis of it all!—
Ed Rodley (@erodley) January 26, 2012

Final thoughts
As one of the last to leave to event, I had plenty of time to think about what I learned from the retreat to take forward with me.  I was rueing the fact that I didn’t get to spend more time talking to Liz Neely about careers. Seb Chan and I started talking about the lack of magic in science museum exhibits and how to capture more of that. Zoë Rose and I both work for large institutions that use the term “learning journey” and struggle to understand exactly what that means. And the list goes on… I decided that the sign of a good professional event is that it generates more dialogue than there is time to finish. I can’t wait to continue these talks online and off, and see where they lead.

A much-enjoyed beer afterwards

Forecasting the future of education at #NMChz http://t.co/qDbBrT5h—
Future of Museums (@futureofmuseums) January 25, 2012

The New Media Consortium’s Horizon Report 10^th Anniversary retreat has been going full swing all day and night, and I’m exhausted. All this thinking and trying to take on the abundant inspiration coming at us from all sides has been hard work.  Just check out the Twitter feed at #NMChz to get a flavor of the torrent.  I tried to live tweet a bit, but the conversations were too stimulating, and I decided it was more important to be present than to capture it.  Luckily for us all, there are several hundred tweets, videos going up already and all will be catalogued and served on the NMC site.

The following are some of the ideas a and inspirations that I have to get out of my head before I can go to bed and rest up for tomorrow.

Malcolm Brown talking abt wicked problems in design thinking. The Yankee in me wonders if a bigger one is a wicked pissah problem. #NMChz—
Ed Rodley (@erodley) January 25, 2012

Notable quotes:

Lev Gonick started with an Eleanor Roosevelt quote that she saw her mission being, “to comfort the afflicted, and afflict the  comfortable.” This appeals to the troublemaker in me no end!

David Sibbet said,

“You need communities, but you need leaders, too.”

Øystein Johannessen said,

“To innovate, you need a solid base of knowledge.”

U.S. Army War College coined the term VUCA (VUCA=Volatile, Uncertain, Complex, and Ambiguous) to describe the present and its since spread into teaching strategic leadership and other areas. It’s a VUCA world. And getting more so all the time.

Susan Metros, talking about leadership, asked us to think about “What do you value?” and “What influences you?” and find answers to those questions. She then recommended three books:

• Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking
• Amos Rappaport, House Form & Culture
• Mary Catherine Bateson, Composing a Life

Look at the lay of the land and where you want to go and bushwhack your “desire path” to it.

A desire path is the term used by architects to describe those dirt paths that people wear into lawns because the paths the architects put down go in funny directions, so people just cut across the lawn to get to their destination, creating these unofficial paths.

Marsha Semmel, talking about informal education, stating that the big challenges are; Recognition, Research, Resources, Leadership, and “radical” collaborations. Yes, ma’am!

Some general themes that arose for me:

Living in Uncertainty
I love the idea of the VUCA world. It meshes with a lot of things happening in other discussions about museums. Rob Stein has been talking about the same idea at least since the last Tate Handheld conference. The MCN 2012 Program Committee has been wrestling with how to define this issue and how we should respond to it

Leadership
The “L” word came up a lot today in almost every discussion, and it was both comforting and distressing to see how much people felt that they had really limited agency to affect transformation. Leadership was needed, and of course, the people who needed to display it weren’t in the room. In museum settings, this would usually involve complaining about curators or directors “Not getting it” whatever the “it” was. After today, and hearing about the challenges my colleagues in formal education face, I will try very hard never to complain about lack of leadership. Our afternoon discussion group had a great discussion about leadership and vision and how neither of these are the exclusive domain of those in charge. Shifting all of the onus of leadership onto the leaders is a self-defeating proposition, and one that lets practitioners off the hook.  It’s certainly easier for established leaders to exercise them, but we all have some ability to lead and look ahead, if we choose to exercise those abilities.

Learning
How surprising that learning should be a theme, right? Not very, but hearing it applied to us, instead of the “audience” or “students” was very heartening to me. I’ve been thinking a lot about what lifelong learning means for practitioners, and the idea that as educators we need to learn about the things we expect/predict/guess are going to be important to our audiences is critical. How will we need to transform our work environments and processes to make this kind of learning a natural part of the culture?

Communities of Interest
The whole day was a great example of the powers of communities of interest as opposed to communities of practice which is how we usually assemble. We employed this methodology in a project we worked on a couple of years ago, and it helped us conceive of how to work with outside and why in new and better ways. See Gerhard Fischer’s works, like “Communities of Interest: Learning through the Interaction of Multiple Knowledge Systems”  

Can’t wait for tomorrow!

Boy, did the shit hit the fan then. The EULA has buried in it two interesting pieces. The first says that if you aren’t charging for your work, you can do distribute it as you see fit. The one that raised howls says, “If you charge a fee for any book or other work you generate using this software (a “Work”), you may only sell or distribute such Work through Apple…” In other words, if you use this tool, you can only sell the products you make through Apple.  Dan Wineman called it “unprecedented audacity.” And he was one of the least vitriolic.  The LA Times produced a slightly more-nuancced piece, quoting some of the pro and anti iBooks Author pieces.  And to complete the pile-on, even Microsoft was able to take a few shots at Apple via Twitter. A rocky start.

What I find interesting is that the fact that you can use their free tool to make rich media experiences and give them away without paying Apple hasn’t really elicited much comment. Perhaps because most folks aren’t in the business of giving away content the way museums are. Would you use iBooks Author to make an interactive publication?

The Future is coming, photo by Flickr user h.koppdelaney

I’ve been thinking about digital interactives lately.  The Horizon Report: 2011 Museum Edition is full of technologies poised to alter our practice. The New Media Consortium Future of Education retreat is coming up in a week or so. At our next Boston Museum Tech meetup we’re going to drink and talk about the point of digital experiences.  The Program Committee for the Museum Computer Network 2012 conference is beginning its work. And Suse Cairns has been writing some thought-provoking posts over at her blog about the physical and virtual.  All good fodder for thinking ways of interacting with visitors using digital technologies.

But what I’ve most been struck by is a comment Seb Chan made in response to Suse’s question about whether museums should treat the physical space as the most important one. It’s buried down in the replies, so read the whole thing. He writes,

“The problem is not so much whether museums ‘should’ but whether they are structurally organised and resourced to be able to”

This rang in my head like a gong. These technologies are nothing without people able to create and deploy them, and institutions organized in ways that allow them to be utilized effectively. These issues aren’t technology issues per se, they’re institutional culture issues, and require a different kind of solution than the kinds I’d been thinking of. My default thinking usually runs something along the lines of, “What do I need so I can do the kind of work I want to do?” A bit selfish, and short-sighted, but I’m working on it.

Professional development is essential in new media, because most of us learned nothing about it. If you graduated from university with a museum studies degree five years ago, you wouldn’t have learned about Twitter. Youtube was a new thing and Facebook was moving out of colleges into the wild. If you graduated ten years ago, social media in general would be an alien thing. If you’re a late Cretaceous dinosaur like me, computers were a novelty, and if you’re older, say an early Jurassic dinosaur like many museum directors, computers in general are something that happened after formal schooling.

So how can we hope to incorporate these tools in meaningful ways in our work? I think this might be one of the pillars that 2012 rests on for me. Coming up with a response to this will require real change of the painful, exhilarating sort. What do you do to bring in new ideas and workflows?

Drinks by Flickr user The Vault DFW

Our next meetup will be on Thursday, February 2nd, at 7PM.  As we have for the past few months, the meetup will be at the  Cambridge Brewing Company in Kendall Square, Cambridge.  I’ll be there a bit before 7PM. If enough people commit, I think I’ll even reserve a big table, so check your calendars and let me know!

The topic is “digital interactives”
This month, I also have an ulterior motive. I want your brains. And the brains of anybody else from your institutions you want to bring along. Seb Chan from the Cooper-Hewitt and I have been talking about new rationales for digital interactives and I’m interested in exploring why people do computer interactives.  We’d like to come up with a definition for digital interactivity that isn’t stuck in the 1990s, as I admit my default model is… We are hoping to do something at Museums and the Web akin to Koven Smith’s awesome “What’s the point of museum websites?” unconference session, and then present at MCN on the topic, so this would foundational research for us. What do you say? Wanna drink and discuss and make kiosk jokes?

Directions:

I got a lovely email last week from the people working with the Tate to announce their newest game app, “Race Against Time.” As I was downloading it, I remembered that Dave Schaller had sent me a link to Eduweb’s latest game app “Moon Walking”. Must be time to tackle games again.

This past Summer I wrote a series of four posts on gaming and museums.  It covered interactivity, the qualities of good interactives, games and play, and finally “gamification” the process of applying game principles to non-game activities.  Now, there’s a growing crop of museum games you can try out to see what’s possible.

Apps as ways to fill interstitial time
Somebody wise said the killer apps for mobiles is that they are a way to kill time while waiting for the bus – those down times that occur while we’re between places, or waiting for something to happen are a great time to engage an audience. Three of these games fit that bill.

Race Against Time

Tate’s latest game, possesses the same irreverent spirit that animates Tate Trumps, their first game.  In it, you play the part of a color-collecting chameleon, out to save the world from having all its colors sucked up by Dr. Greyscale.  Along the way, you traverse 12 decades of modern art in the background.

Race Against Time is a classic sidescroller (think “Mario Brothers”) where you gobble up color while avoiding perils and enemies. The concept is pretty simple “Don’t get killed.” I will confess I’ve been unable to get past the Fauvists before getting killed.  You can play the game anywhere, and there’s no benefit I can see to playing it in the Tate.

Meanderthal

Meanderthal is one of Smithsonian’s most appealing apps in my opinion.  It’s another dead easy app in terms of functionality; you take your picture using the phone’s camera, choose a human ancestor and presto, the images are combined to make you appear Neanderthal. You can also learn about the three early human species presented in the app, but clearly the thrill lies in having your picture morphed.

What I like about Meanderthal is that it is a great snack. It does one thing and does it very well. And you actually learn some paleontology along the way. It’s got rudimentary social features like email and Facebook sharing, and it actually uses a built-in feature of a mobile – the camera – which is still surprisingly rare in museum apps.

MoonWalking

An app that goes a bit further in using the mobile platform’s advantages seems to be Eduweb’s augmented reality (AR) app MoonWalking. This app lets you overlay scenes from the first Moon landing over wherever you happen to be at the time. Thanks to GPS positioning, you can walk around Tranquility Base and use your mobile as a window into real-time recreations of highlights of the mission.

What I like about the concept behind this app is the potential it has for heritage sites, or anywhere out in the world where you might want to overlay digital content on what you’re looking at. A ruined castle could be restored, an archaeological site become a living settlement. And it is best done with a mobile device. How well MoonWalking works in the wild I can’t say. My iPhone is too old and my iPad doesn’t have 3G so I can’t get the app to work.

LaunchballI think Launchball actually predates mobile apps. This simple physics simulator-meets construction set game was launched as a website (how old school is that?) back in 2007 to much acclaim. It won awards at Museums and the Web and some other conference called SXSW, where it picked up Best Game and Best of Show awards. In 2009, it was released for iOS and is available for iPhone.

UPDATE: Mia Ridge clarified the development history for me. Thanks, Mia!

@erodley good piece! FWIW, Launchball was developed in-house and with an agency and based on Launchpad gallery experience. Mobile diff ppl—
Mia (@mia_out) January 11, 2012

NOTE: Apparently, Science Museum and the game’s developer are renegotiating contracts, so the game has been taken down from the App Store temporarily.  Try the original Flash version to get a sense of it’s addictive gameplay.

What I like about Launchball is the extent to which it works as a great game, and as a museum game.  It lets you play loads of levels, but it also lets you build your own, and share your creations with the Launchball community. First and foremost, it’s a good game. Second, it does a great job of getting you to experiment and engage in the “I wonder what would happen if…” thinking that’s an essential prerequisite to learning how scientists and engineers think.

Apps as ways to encourage visitors to pay attention in the museum

All the games I’ve mentioned thus far could be done anywhere. Nothing about them requires a museum visit, though you probably would never find them unless you were at that museum and saw a sign directing you to download the app.

Tate Trumps

Tate’s most well-known app, Tate Trumps, behaves differently than the apps above. It was originally designed to work in the Gallery, and has been updated to work anywhere. Like the title says, it’s a way to play a simple version of the card game trumps, only the cards are various artworks at the Tate.

In each of the three different games that make up Tate Trumps, you pick a hand of cards that are Tate artworks, that have attributes, some mundane like “size”, and others wildly subjective like “strength”.  When you assemble a hand, the game picks a suit, and the players try to put out their highest card with that attribute. Winner gets points, player with most points at the end of seven hands wins.

Tate Trumps is a brilliant piece of work in my opinion. It has multiple modes of gameplay. You can play it alone, or with your friends. The attributes are strange enough that they got me to look at the artworks differently than I would’ve on a more typical visit. In Collector mode, you add artworks by going around the gallery, typing in ID numbers off the object labels, “collecting” the pieces you want before your opponents can get them. And it’s connection to the Tate is crystal clear. It’s a game that only Tate would’ve made.

So what can these games teach us?

As I said in my previous app review, trying to synthesize learning from such disparate experiences is a challenge, but there are some things that rise up when I look at these games.

Good games are fun.
Seems like a no-brainer, but as you know, so many “educational” games are educational first and games second (if at all). They’re really gamified (ack) interactives, and they usually suck. If it’s going to be a game, it has to be a game first.

Be in for the long haul
Tate Trumps is on version 5, and has not only fixed bugs, but added major new functionalities as time has gone on. That means the business model has to be a software development model with new version releases and point releases, not a museum exhibition, “Build it and it’s done” model.

Success has costs
I doubt anyone at Science Museum could’ve predicted that Launchball would have such a long life, and morph from being a website to being a mobile app. And whatever agreement they originally had with the developers, I bet it didn’t include this contingency.

Things you can only do with a phone make more appealing apps
Almost all of these apps use the mobile platform to do things you couldn’t do any other way. Using the camera, communication functions, GPS, etc… all make the experience more compelling because it’s obvious that you could only do this with a mobile.

What museum game apps have you played and enjoyed?

Tablet are intimate devices. 
Tablets are personal devices and as Robin pointed out, intimate. The four apps I reviewed come close to capturing some of the mystery of that experience of the authentic, what my old boss Larry Bell called the “wombat effect”.

Wombat! by Flickr user ben_lei

As an educated North American person, he knew what wombats were, he’d read about them, seen images of them in books and on TV and could tell you something about them. But he’d never “seen” one. The first time he came face to face with a wombat specimen in a museum, he had that “Aha!” moment, when being confronted with the object and all the sensory impressions you get from it (how it looks, it’s size, your proximity to it, who you’re with in the space, etc…) totally changed his understanding.

All four apps let me approach something of that feeling with varying degrees of success. I wonder if has something to do with connection between seeing a detailed depiction of something coupled with the tactile feedback of holding something in your hands, even if it’s not the thing you’re looking at, it still feels more “real” than it would if you were looking at the same thing on a kiosk. Good research question for someone…

AbExNY, and Road, Inc. I think came closest to expressing the potential for apps to express that “aura” that Kevin Slavin referred to in his MCN 2011 keynote on “the 21st Century Aura”. Both apps surrounded the objects they featured with a rich cloud of information that extended and deepened my experience of studying the depictions of the objects visually. I think it’s also a differentiating factor that they opt to do this as a subordinate activity, rather than curating an experience that merges viewing the objects with metacontent the way New York Public Library’s “Biblion” does.

 Tablets have more potential to be social.
Despite this intimacy, tablets are also better suited to sharing than mobiles. The screen size and touch interface make them easier to use socially, I find.  Whereas in the past, I would pester my lovely and talented wife to “See what I found on the Internet!”, now I just pass her the tablet and she has her own one on one experience and passes it back when she’s done. In our tour experience, we’ve seen the same behavior. If the guide pulls up an image on his or her iPad, the easiest thing to do is pass it around and let the tourists look it themselves rather then trying to see it as the guide holds it up.  (This all happens during rest stops, in case you were worried.)

 Tablets aren’t mobile in the way mobiles are
My sense is that people treat a tablet more like a small desktop than a large mobile. They’re portable as opposed to truly mobile.  So in answer to Gretchen’s comment in my last post about what it would be like to carry one around in a crowded gallery, I’d reckon that it’d be pretty tiring after an hour or so. You can’t stuff it in your pocket and none of them come with carry handles. If I could go back in time and see “Infinite Variety” or “AbExNY” , I’d probably use my phone, rather than my tablet. In my own use, and I say this knowing full well the perils of n=1 samples, I tend to carry my tablet around to safe places and then take it out and use it when I’m settled somewhere like the couch, bed, in a waiting area, or coffee shop.

As I wrote before, if the killer app for mobiles is killing time while you’re waiting for the bus, then the killer app for tablets I think is lingering over things you’re interested in. Tablet usage studies show that use peaks late in the day, and coincides with people being at home after work and sitting on their couch or laying in bed, reading.

This fits with the Pew Center’s findings on why Americans download tablet apps.  After news (74%) and communication apps (67%), the two most common kinds of apps people put on their tablets are ones that help them learn about things they’re interested in (64%), and help them get more information about a subject (55%).  More people look for ways to satisfy their curiosity on their tablet than watch movies on them (43%). That’s an opportunity for 2012.