What are the big trends in interactive exhibits for 2012?

Journal entry by Flickr user JoelMontes

Since it’s the end of the year, I’ve been staring at my list of “things I’d like to do in 2012” and trying to turn them into a workable personal professional development plan.  In looking at all the events and places I’ve highlighted, it turns out an emergent theme in 2011 has been looking for/at trends in museums and trying to be more proactive than reactive. Between Museums and the Web,  the Horizon Report and the Salzburg Global Seminar, MCN, and the daily drip of inspiration coming in from Twitter, it’s been a heady Fall.

At the same time, I ranted a very little bit about computers in museums. The upshot of this was starting to talk to Seb Chan about putting together some kind of conference presentation on new justifications for computer interactives. I had one of those flow moments, where a bunch of seemingly disparate elements all suddenly snap into alignment and seem like a coherent whole.  Maybe this could be my theme for the coming year! Studying new approaches to interactivity in museums!

Now I’m wondering if I can turn an unwieldy pile of people, places and events into a course of sorts that would push me to learn more about new ways you and your friends are using interactivity in museums.  There’s lots to learn!

Here’s my admittedly incomplete list of things that I want to know more about and incorporate into my practice. Can you add other trends or examples to the list?

• Universal design finally becoming more mainstream.
  Less “compliance”, more access!
• Maker culture and the DIY ethos influencing museum practice.
  First Arduino, then hackerspaces and MakerFaires, now Raspberry Pi, oh my! 
• Responsive web design.
  Is it an app, a web app, or a mobile app? And does anyone care as long as it works? (thanks to Patty Toland and the genii at Filament Group.)
• Using visitors’ personal technologies.
  Mobiles, mobiles, mobiles.
• Gestural interfaces.
  Kinect and Wii hacking and more. Using your body to control real-world and digital experiences.
• New publishing models for digital content and making better web experiences
  (thanks to Koven Smith). 
• Participatory design and practicing how to be authoritative instead of authoritarian
  (thanks to Rob Stein).
• Collaborative multitouch exhibits.

What else have I left out?

Asking (and answering) the Big Questions

Well, it’s been a heady couple of weeks!  I got an invite from Neal Stimler to submit a video response to a crowdsourced presentation he’s making at MCN 2011 titled “Philosophical Leadership Needed for the Future: Digital Humanities Scholars in Museums”.  He’s soliciting answers to three questions:

Question 1:
How can museums advance beyond the continuation of traditional practices utilizing digital tools to a new mode of interpretation that seeks to understand the meanings of collections and scholarship in a new media culture?

Question 2:
What is required of museums to establish digital humanities research centers within the framework of existing institutions?

Question 3:
Why might interdisciplinary and non-traditional scholars from outside the established professional ranks make the best leaders needed for inspired change in the philosophical directions of museums?

Q1 is pretty important stuff. How do we move beyond using new tools to do old tasks, and come to grips with what it means to be a museum in the new media world? Q2 did nothing for me, and I question the wording of Q3 as being pretty leading.  I still haven’t formulated my response, but there’s still time. You’ve got til Nov. 3rd.

While this was percolating, I almost simultaneously read Nina Simon’s post on “What are the Most Important Problems in our Field?” and got an email from Rob Stein asking me to respond to “The Challenges and Opportunities of Participatory Culture” for the Salzburg Global Seminar.  He also started a hashtag, #museumchallenges, to capture the wisdom of the hive mind.  Rather than start yet another discussion of this, I highly recommend you check out both posts. The questions they ask are different, but complimentary, and the quality of the comments on each are great! There’s about a year’s worth of learning contained in there!

Two things that struck me were Nina’s invoking of mathematician Richard Hamming, who said

“If you do not work on an important problem, it’s unlikely you’ll do important work…  It’s not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. That is what makes a problem important. When I say that most scientists don’t work on important problems, I mean it in that sense. The average scientist, so far as I can make out, spends almost all his time working on problems which he believes will not be important and he also doesn’t believe that they will lead to important problems.”

and Nancy Proctor’s response to Rob, which ended,

“I think we need to be very suspicious of the fetishization of the new in this period where there is a constant stream of shiny new toys to dazzle us with the promise of starting over in a Brave New World. Let’s make sure we don’t deceive ourselves, like Columbus discovering America, but rather undertake the much harder, less sexy, but ultimately more sustainable task of radically restructuring our museums and practices even as we work within those very institutions.”

The two comments neatly form the horns of a dilemma that plagues many of us who have been in museum work for any length of time — how to discern what matters from what’s getting all the attention. Something I’ve been wrestling with myself has been trying to define what are the problems that most deserve my attention at work, and whether I can attack them, and if so, how. Just getting them down on paper and trying to tease out whether I have any way to address them is a fascinating exercise.  It can be so easy to fall into the trap of fixating on problems that are beyond your control that it’s easy to lose sight of those that maybe can be solved.

Go visit Rob and Nina and share your light with us! We certainly need all the help we can get.

Tools of the trade, my 2011 edition

One of the most interesting parts of going through everyone’s responses to my question about managing their cognitive load was seeing the similarities and differences in strategies.  In fact, a couple of you wondered what those commonalities might say about us and our work. That may be a post for another day.

I thought it would be fitting end to that series to go over what tools came up as useful, and list some of the changes I’ve made to my information consumption strategies based on your input.

Twitter
The #1 tool, and the only one that everyone used was Twitter. This may be a sampling artifact, since I use Twitter a great deal, but in my decidedly unscientific pondering of the last three conferences I was at, I can pretty definitely claim that most of the museum people I run into use it as well.  Respondents to my email, like me, use Twitter clients rather than Twitter’s web page.  Filtering is vital if you’re not going to drown in the tweetstream. I have a love/hate relationship with Tweetdeck. I love it’s flexibility, and it’s lists that allow me to sort my incoming tweets. I’ve got my general museum list, hashtags I’m following like #mtogo and conferences, as well as a friends’ list, and even a celebrities list (Stephen Fry is just too interesting!) Being able to sort them means I only have to see the one two lists I feel like listening to on any given day. Things that seem interesting or worth following up on get favorited and go into their own favorites list.

After I’d started this series, I found ifttt.com. It stands for “If This, Then That” and it allows you to set up logical equations using web services. My favorite task has become “If I favorite a tweet, copy the text to a file in my Evernote account called ‘twitter favs’.” Very convenient!

Google+
We came, we saw, we looked around… and left.

RSS feeds
Coming in second was relying on RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds to aggregate the websites you want to follow.  I’d given up on RSS some time ago in favor of doing it old school style, slogging from site to site with the Firefox Morning Coffee plugin that lets you add a button to Firefox that will open tabs of any number of sites at once.  RSS readers like NetNewsWire let you corral thousands of sites and group them so you can manage your browsing before you start.  I have my twelve or so museum sites I’m most interested in keeping abreast with, maybe another twenty more tangentially connected to my work, and then a slew of general science and tech sites that spew forth potentially interesting content daily. With a reader, I can decide if I really (need to/want to/can stomach) wading through 317 Slashdot articles today or not, and I’m pretty ruthless now about hitting the “Mark All as Read” button when I don’t want to be bothered. I find it satisfying in fact to see all those little numbers of unread posts disappear. Poof! Like Jasper said in the first post, letting go is important to your sanity.

Email
I’m on the verge of getting moved from Mail to Outlook, so changing my email habits now is bit counter-productive. That said, I did clean out my inbox and outbox and went through my mail filters and updated a bunch. My inbox is a lot more manageable! More to come, post migration.

LinkedIn

What was interesting to me about LinkedIn was how many people used it, but not much, and not often.  Off all the responses I got, only one person really invested in LinkedIn, and that was for the discussion groups. For most of the others, myself included, we filled out our profiles, connected with people we knew, and … not much else.  Tweetdeck lets me post to LinkedIn, so sometimes I will send tweets that way, so it looks like I’m on more than I am.  Again, this may be a sampling artifact. Most of the people I asked have jobs and aren’t doing the kind of networking that freelancers and job seekers have to do. I have to admit that the reason I check LinkedIn is usually because I’ve gotten an alert that a contact has changed their profile, usually because they’ve gotten a new job.

Make Learning a Formal Activity, and Do It with Friends
Organizing these local meetups has been very rewarding.  And making them regular, and reliable has been important to them. Getting to the point where people expect them to happen is gratifying, and the pressure keeps me going.  I’ve enjoyed watching people make connections, and actually learn useful things from each other at the events.  Even these ostensibly social occasions can be learning experiences.

Reading about departments with built in learning communities made me a little jealous at first, and I realized how much I enjoy that kind of interaction. As I’ve been writing these responses, I’ve had any number of little epiphanies. One of them was that if I wanted to work in a more learning-centered workplace, I’d better do something about it. The outcomes of this were twofold for me.  Firstly, it reminded me that I really wasn’t doing much to pass on any of the benefits I received at the start of my career. So, I’ve got a shiny new intern (actually she’s a highly skilled, veteran intern) and am trying to figure out what is useful for her to know is a very valuable lens into my own practice.  What do I do? Why do I do it this way? It’s a lot of work, keeping an intern learning and doing stuff that’s not make-work.  Hopefully, she’ll get something useful out of the experience. Stay tuned.

The other outcome has been that the exhibit developers here agreed that we’ll hold regular professional development meetings. There are only three of us, so it can be very informal — read a book or article and discuss.  It’s not hard, it just takes determination to keep doing it.  Got any exhibit topics that you think are hot?