Belated: Say hello to Museums Dashboard

Whilst I was galavanting about at Museums and the Web and Museum Next one of our projects that we have been working on launched!

Say hello to UCL Museums Dashboard!

The idea from the Museums Dashboard came from UCL CASA’s  brilliant City Dashboard and some of the fatastic museum dashboards that are already up and running.  Have a look at the IMA’s dashbaord for an excellent example.  We wanted to explore how live data and data visualisations can create a more transparent, open place that involves students, staff and the public in all aspects of UCL Museums.  So immediately thought a real time dashboard would be a quick and convenient way of displaying all that info in one place.

During the design and scoping of the Museums Dashboard, there was some great  feedback from some of the UCL curators, who were more than up for taking part and having fitbits to measure how many paces they do a day going from collection to collection.  We also talked about real time visitor counts, temperature, humidity, number of objects in collection, number of objects on loan, accessions and deaccessions, how many objects are currently being conserved…The list goes on and on.   However we were on a tight budget so some of the ideas had to be pared down to make a viable dashboard in the couple of months we had available.  The dashboard pulls in data from a variety feeds (Social Media, weather, online collection images, museum temperature), developing our research view that the next trend in OpenData is towards a live interactive view of museums.

My favourite data feed is the museum sensors measuring live temperature at 5 key UCL Museum spaces. So right now the Grant Museum Elephant is 20.8C the Art Museum is a bit hotter at 23.4C and poor old Jeremy Bentham is currently shut up in the pitch black of his box with a illuminance of 0.

Its in Beta, we would love to build on it, if we get the chance!  It has been developed by  CASA), (UCLDH),and UCL Museums and Public Engagement.  It is part of the bigger CityDashboard project, this Museum special version shows data from, or relevant to, UCL Museums and Collections. It is part of the NeISS project and was jointly funded by JISC and UCL Museums and Public Engagement.

Bits2Blogs: Flip-Flops, Crapjects, Playful learning and leaving the phone at home

 

This week I had the pleasure of being back up in my home town for the Bits 2 Blogs conference.  Bits2Blogs  is an annual event for anyone working in the North East cultural heritage sector, it was great to see and hear a regional spin on new ideas and new technologies to engage audiences. Particularly in a region which is dealing with horrible governmental cuts to arts and culture.  The focus on best practice on innovative digital projects saw topics range from some pretty nifty mobile apps, through to vanishing soundscapes and creating meaning from archives processes. And to add some extra sparkle there was the addition of Flip-Flopping and Crapjects. What more could you want in a conference!? Here’s the condensed version of my notes.

Leave the Phone at Home!

Jason daPonte is a brilliantly inspiring speaker. Fact.  He’s very good at highlighting the point that staring at a mobile phone screen instead of the surrounding environment is unnatural.  You should always use the device that comes most naturally to the interaction. This is not mobile phones.   We all seem to be obsessed with mobile applications, mobile web experiences.  But really what is awesome is standing in front of the object in the gallery.  Jason’s talk really reminded me of something Bruce Wyman said at MW2012 “Design for verbs” design experiences for specific interactions you want people to have.  Because the value of the interaction is critically important.  Jason talked about

Jason discussed the ways museums need to consider the futures relating to mobile media.  Or lack of future , instead focusing on subphones where he underlying phone functionality is embedded in other things, and the silent conversations of the Internet of Things.  So forget unnatural interactions on your phone, and start thinking about playing tag with hoodies (check out  Neighbourhoodie);or  embedding the ability for the oyster card to refund you if you are more than 15minutes late on the tube; or even Clothes hangers in C&A which tells shoppers how many people have liked the item of clothing on Facebook.

Jason hit home that working across platforms won’t be about web, mobile and tv. It will be about delivering contextual content and services in the most relevant places for users.  Competition for attention will be via ambient media.

Three key points:

1. Designing visibility
2. Make things simple and just work
3. Gather data and create meaning out of it.

Representing Sound Visually

Ian Rawes from London Sound Survey talked about  vanished soundscapes and the importance of presented sound data well. Just because you’ve got good sound recordings on your website doesn’t mean your site visitors will necessarily listen to them. While a good content description is essential for sound archivists (check out the fab Content summaries BL sound and moving image catalogue) they’re not particularly attractive to the casual listener so how about creating some sound maps (look at BL UK sound map) and invest time in getting people browsing sounds, something like how BBC Radio provides journalistic teasers, photos and other extras on their pages.

                                                  

Starting Somewhere and making smaller, faster changes

Andrew Lewis, from the V&A reflected on the development of the V&A’s digital strategy over the last 18 months and the realities of implementing change.  I really enjoyed Andrew’s talk, I do love me a bit of institutional change chat.   the V&A has attempted to not be a ‘giant ship that’s hard to turn’ and adapt to the changing needs relating to digital. Andrew talked about how the  V&A doesn’t want to be a  giant ship with lots of little (organisational) silos that’s hard to turn but an institution which can adapt to the changing needs relating to digital. He presented a list of key themes to think about when working with digital strategy’s and making change happen:

• Be audience focused
• Use open data driven as default
• Mobile first
• Use shot planning cycles and defined product lifespans
• Make faster, smaller changes
• Be prepared for some Tough Love: Change requires hard decisions and effort

Andrew’s slides are already up on slideshare

 What on earth is Flip-Flopping?

Dominic Smith from the Tyneside Cinema did a brilliant presentation. With some excellent terminology.

The flip-flop is a term from the writer Robin Sloan and defined as: ” the flip-flop (n.) the process of pushing a work of art or craft from the physical world to the digital world and back again—maybe more than once.”

Dominic used the example of 3D printing to get his point across.  Museum have been digitising physical objects for some time both in 2d and 3d. But now that 3D printing is becoming more accessible museums have the potential to re-materialise these digital objects in interesting ways, and avoid creating ‘crapjects’ (rejects and misprints from 3D printing).  Greg Petchovsky’s work focusing on mixing digital sculptures with real objects  is a great example (see cracking video above).

But what does this mean for authenticity, value and Walter Benjamin’s aura? As media becomes increasingly transient from physical to digital and back again does its meaning change?  Is the meaning lost?

Dominic then went on to discuss starting to see a marketplace for 3D objects, but if there is a market there’s a potential for pirating. Is this a bad thing? Really? Museums have a tendency to turn a bit Gollum like and not let go of the ‘precious’ objects with a fear of something like fake Disneyland. What does it really mean when visitors can scan a perfect copy of your objects on their phone? How can museums make this work in their favour?

Compelling Objects

Rachel Clarke from Culture lab talked about exploring the qualities of digital representation through sensory & aesthetic experiences of objects. Two of the projects Rachel discussed really stood out for me:

• The Whispering Table, a gorgeous installation where the technology wasn’t retrofitted onto the objects, instead the objects were carefully designed around the technology.

• and a project dealing with Personhood and dementia- reminiscence, reflection and celebration by Jayne Wallace

Ultimately Rachel hit home that Digital processes change how we engage with objects and we need to think a bit more about what this means and the impact this has on our relationship to/with objects.

 

Playful Learning

Ben Templeton, from Thought Den talked about the creative process and the practicalities of three pretty awesome digital projects which all focus on playful learning: Wildscreen Arkive’s Survival app, Tate’s Magic Tate Ball, and Bristol Zoo’s Zoom.

Some key points in my scribbly notes:

• Content is king:  Think long an hard about what the stories are. If you are asking visitors to unlock content its important to unlock good content. Unlocking needs to have an adequate reward. Magic Tate Ball is brilliant because it focuses on stories, the contextual awareness. The human angle of interpretation is key, but this can take time and effort.  Be prepared.
• Test everything with users! User Testing is always talked about and advocated for but actually rarely done in practice.  Why? It can be done cheaply and quickly, and even a little bit of testing is better than none at all.
• Simplicity is the way forward.
• Design in order to take the visitor/user on a journey
• Making a fuss come launch day is a really good idea. And Launch isn’t just the day it goes live, it has a long tail.  It is worth the effort.

Thanks to John Coburn and the Great North Museum for being excellent hosts! Lots of inspirational ideas to take away ponder and action points to implement!

A new Frontier: Claire the Exhibition Curator!

Octagon Gallery taken from ucl.ac.uk

Alternative Title: I first realised I hated Nick when… I became the Exhibition Curator!

Over the next 6 months, I have a new role! I am now the Exhibition Curator of an awesome new space part of UCL Museums and Collections, the Octagon Gallery. In my head, my new title is Grand high priestess of Curatorial Temporary Exhibition Land. I’m on a major power trip. I have access to all the curatorial knowledge and all of the collections available at UCL. That is a lot of objects!

The theme of the exhibition is the vague ‘Frontiers’. I’ve narrowed that down to the stuff I’m interested in, and so it doesn’t stray too far away from my PhD Research… It’s going to focus on Digital and the impact that is having/had/will have on culture and society. However if you think every museum exhibition is about dinosaurs. Yes that’s what it’s about dinosaurs (and perhaps even dinosaurs in space).

I’m really excited to get started, it’s going to be a steep learning curve and a challenge to juggle my PhD write up, exhibition and all the other projects I’m working on.

I’m going to blog the entire process, so will be regularly posting the exhibition’s progress, experiences, successes and, critically, failures in trying to create an exhibition, which not only uses all digital interpretation,but focuses on digital content, and includes digital immersive visitor experiences. The challenge is on! On here, I’ll be talking about the personal experiences, the nitty gritty stuff, what i love, what I find impossible, what random object I want to steal…, on the UCLDH blog I’ll be talking in a bit more of a academic professional tone about the exhibition process and visitor experiences, and on the UCL Museums blog, I’ll probably be having arguments with curators. There have already been insults thrown and its only day 1… it’s all Nick Booth’s fault. You will also get to hear from other people involved in on the exhibition, from the collection specific curators, to the exhibition officer, to the conservators. So we’ve got every perspective covered!

 

First up on the to-do list is to create a massive list of objects! better get cracking.

Positive and Negatives of Digital R&D Notes from UKMW12

Last Friday I had the pleasure of speaking at the Museum Computer Groups UK Museums on the Web: UKMW12 ‘Strategically Digital’ conference at the Wellcome Collection, London.  I love the MCG’s annual conference, it is always a great opportunity for people in the museum sector to get together and think about the big and little ideas about how digital technology is changing how we do things.

I thought I’d post the notes from Jane’s and my presentation on the Positive and Negatives of Digital R&D.  In our proposal we wanted to highlight the differences between the aspirations and the reality of undertaking a digital innovation project: Digital Research and Development (R&D) projects are being classed as a quick win; offering museum professionals’ rapid, new and experimental ways of engaging visitors and to develop more efficient ways of working within organisations. However the reality of R&D can be very different. The Social Interpretation project (SI) at IWM has been utilising R&D and innovative practice to fundamentally challenge the way in which museums interact with, and provide for, audiences. The aim being to rebalance the authority / audience divide; turning museums into social, participatory organisations – with all the challenges this entails. We would like to share the learnings from this national project, focusing on reflections on R&D processes used to engage audiences and the implications for the use of digital technology that encourages participatory content creation by visitors.   We will balance these external-facing findings with a discussion about the challenges of trying to implement R&D in a museum environment on time and on budget. In particular we will discuss the challenges of trying to work in an agile manner in these most un-agile of institutions. We will cover key themes facing the museum in a modern digital context: moderation, community engagement, co-production of design and content, internal support, external advocacy, technical development and of course funding.  Although this paper will concentrate on technology and concepts created for IWM, issues of R&D and digital innovation are applicable to any museum.

Then

“Last year Tom Grinsted and I spoke at UKMW2011 (slides and notes) about this project and its aspirations.  We were described as a pair of excitable puppies so here are a pair of real puppies General Montgomery with his puppies “Hitler” and “Rommel” at his mobile headquarters in Normandy, 6 July 1944.  Jane and I would now like to explain the reality and the differences between the two and the share our learnings with the sector.

The last year summed up: The Social Interpretation project asked 2 key questions – 1. Does applying social media models to cultural collections successfully increase engagement and reach? 2. Is social moderation an effective response to the moderation challenge?”

Reality

“We delivered 3 Applications kiosks in gallery, qr codes in some places, mobile app and online. Can’t collect and share in gallery – too difficult to implement.

In reality looks OK – but robustness testing was live on gallery. We didn’t have enough time to properly develop and test the software.

SI came in late, November – to Family in War. To the yearly cycle of resourcing and exhibitions and facing the closure of the museum for redevelopment.

And content isn’t a quick thing to develop in a museum..for SI it was oversold and under achieved and meant full potential wasn’t achieved.”

Moderation and Co-Production

We experimented with moderation and co-production of design and content with visitors. We found that post- moderation works. There is an ingrained fear in museums that if you let visitors participate they will write rude things.  Just because they can doesn’t mean they will.  Trust your visitors.

But moderation can become resource heavy. The comment kiosks generated a significant amount of ‘social interpretation’.  The kiosks also generated significant nonsense and ‘cool’ comments. Moderating such high levels of activity was a considerable task for the IWM team.

Adaptation and adjustment to the SI process was required to deal with this.  From the outset the SI project aimed to be as open and transparent as possible; stressing the necessity in including users, stakeholders and the project team into a systems design process.  The reality, however, is very different. There is always the aspiration, and the SI team endeavoured to uphold that.  But with a one year project, once it hits delivery mode, the ability to communicate becomes increasingly difficult.  This from a UCD perspective is disappointing, as it is felt more testing and ability to act on recommendations would have enabled a better final user experience with the applications.

Visitors are up for discussion but are institutions? Do they have the time and resource to iterate? These are important questions museums need think about before you commit to user centered design.

Finally

In a nutshell, Museums don’t know how to do R&D.  Trying to be agile in a non-agile institution. Can’t do iterative development fully – costs, timings, resourcing.  Robust exhibits, project based development cycles (limited time and budgets) all work against live digital R&D in museums.  There are challenges around advocacy, communication, timescales, iterations etc.  But there are some positives and we’ve learnt a awful lot in the process.

Key Take Aways from the Social Interpretation Project

• Content, Content, Content
• Post moderation works
• Deeper engagements happen online
• QR Codes ain’t all that
• Communication and advocacy
• Be prepared to compromise
• Resourcing
• Raising Awareness
• Build in evaluation
• Incremental institutional change, baby steps
• It’s not about the technology it’s about the experience
• Is R&D right for your museum? – robust, stakeholders

In the next post I’ll talk about some brief highlights from my favourite sessions and the key ideas that were buzzing about; namely mobile, impact and evaluation.

Playing Catch up: Skulls, Sounds, Sports and Scan & Share

I’ve been quiet on the blog over the past month, it seems that I’m at that stage in the PhD where writing anything AT ALL is exceptionally difficult.  So here are some quick and dirty bullet points of things I have found fascinating this month.

• Obviously, the procrastination monster and my love of all things sport meant that the Olympics and Paralympics have been the biggest thing ever in my life over the past month. The BBC’s amazing coverage as well as Chanel 4’s brilliance of challenging perceptions and of course Clare Balding made me a very happy bunny.  The BBC also shared some mega stats and insights around the digital side of the Olympics coverage:The story of the digital Olympics: streams, browsers, most watched, four screens
• Then there is Alex Balfour’s slideshare  (I’m sure you’ve already seen it ) of the breakdown of the online traffic statistics and facts from the official digital channels, website and mobile of the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

• Accidently walking past a brilliant interactive sound installation called Phantom Railings in Malet Street Gardens, Bloomsbury.  I’m getting quite excited about the potential for interactive sound installations in museums for visitor engagement, so literally walking into this after conversations about digital sound installations was a very pleasant thing. The Fad site has a nice post about it. I love the Policemen having a go in the video above!

• The British Museum have released their new collection online interface (in beta). This initial release includes the free text basic search, search results, object details page, and a new image gallery.  Here’s my search on Roman Spoons.  I love how they have improved the images in the search results. And the object-page layout is pretty swish.  You can check out Matthew Cock’s a blog post about it.

• I had a bit of a play with Wolfram|Alpha Personal Analytics for Facebook I love that the stats from mine indicate that my significant words are: ‘museum’ and ‘gin’. Explains a lot.  Steve over at Big Data Toolkit has a nice post on it.

• Things have been busy over at IWM Social Interpretation the iOS app “Scan and Share” (done diss the name it was the best we could come up with) is live (android is coming soon), the website pages are live (in beta) and we are up and running in the gallery spaces with QR codes and digital ‘kiosks’ both in IWM London and IWM North.  Really highlighting what you can and can’t achieve with a 1 year R&D project.

• I’ve spent a lot of my time in the Grant Museum stalking visitors for my PhD data collection. Which was fun! Lots of sitting next to odd dead things whilst drawing maps and observing folk. I’d quite happily move into the Grant Museum tomorrow for ever. And that just gets me excited about the prospect of a geek in residence….

• Ignite London is back! We are pleased to announce #igniteLDN7 on 15th November 2012.  You can submit your awesome talks now!

Even quicker Links

• Digital Games and Pigs, whats not to love? Playing with Pigs
• Nice post by Shelley Mannion on AR applications and delivering value for museum visitors
• Guardian piece on Imapct – Impact factor: researchers should define the metrics that matter to them
• Connecting Light up at Hadrain’s wall
• The impact good research has on other arts orgs digital strategies
• Making the Case for Creativity and Experimentation as a Continuing Value for Museums

Normal bloggage about museum digital stuff and public engagement will commence shortly… hopefully.

#MuseumNext video QR codes, Smart Objects, Museums and Public Engagement.

Check out MuseumNext’s video of Chris Speed’s and my presentation about Smart Objects, QR codes, Museums and Public Engagement.  More of MuseumNext’s videos are on vimeo.

QRator wins a Museums & Heritage Award for Excellence Innovation

In case you missed the excited tweeting last night we were at a posh awards do.

Last night a contingent from UCL including brilliant people from UCLDH, CASA and Museums and Public Engagement, headed down to the 10th Anniversary Museums and Heritage Awards.  The night started badly as a waiter managed to spill a huge jug of milk all down my back and lovely dress.  But once I’d dried myself off, with the help of Claire and Melissa, and tried to mask the smell of quickly souring milk, the awards got underway.

There were 11 awards in total UCL, were up for three: The move of the Grant Museum for Project on A Limited Budget, the Grant Museum’s QRator project for Innovations and Heritage Without Borders for The International Award.

I’m proud to say that we won Museum and Heritage Award for Excellence, Innovations award for QRator: Visitor Participation Through Social Interpretation.

QRator is a collaboration between the UCL Centre for Digital Humanities (UCLDH), UCL Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis (CASA), and UCL Museums, to develop new kinds of content, co-curated by the public, and museum staff, to enhance museum interpretation, public engagement and meaning making by establishing new connections to museum exhibit content.

As QRator is a collaborative project there are a lot of people who need thanking. And in the excitement none of us actually had the foresight to prepare a speech on the night! So a really big thanks goes to Jack and Mark at the Grant Museum who were instrumental in the QRator project; Mark Carnall who worked with me originally in trialling QR codes in the Grant Museum and who is the most forward thinking curator I have ever met. Jack Ashby who writes the content and designs the displays for QRator, and who has the patience of a saint.  To Steve Gray who is an absolutely brilliant developer, and who’s skills in usability and interface design are second to none. Andy Hudson Smith, and Ralph and Martin the original team behind Tales of Things from UCL Centre for Advance Spatial Analysis, Melissa Terras and Claire Warwick who have been a the best support, PhD supervisors I could ever ask for.  Susannah Chan from UCL Museums and Public Engagement for inventing the mounts for the iPads, and spending what felt like an eternity installing them into the Grant.  A big thank you to the UCL Public Engagement Unit for their funding and support of the project, Sally MacDonald Director of UCL Museums and Public Engagement who has been a huge driving force behind the project,  it is so refreshing to have Top Down support for digital innovation in the cultural sector. Without them this project would literally be nothing.

A big congratulations to all the other winners. There was a wide range of really fantastic projects from a sector that has been hard hit with funding cuts, you can see the full list of winners, commendations and the full short lists here.

Designing for community-powered digital transformations workshop

Today I have been at the Designing for community-powered digital transformations workshop at Tate Britain, London.  The day focused on how different types of  digital transformations are forcing cultural and media organisations to adapt to a new environment in which communities of participants want to interact, to create, and curate.  I was speaking about “Putting the Visitors first” in order to design better, more user friendly, digital experiences in Museums.  I used examples from the Social Interpretation project at IWM and the QRator project at the Grant Museum.    My prezi is below.  Its a bit of hack of an earlier presentation I did with Tom about the Social Interpretation project.  The prezi might not make sense without the notes, but the pictures are pretty to look at ! Most of them taken from IWM’s Collection Online. Nicola Osborne has done a brilliant live blog of the day.  I honestly dont know how she does it! speed demon when it comes to typing!  I’ll have a think about my notes and write them up over the next couple of days.

Digital Transformations: Scholarship vs Passion

N.B.  My notes from the Digital Transformations event, they might not make too much sense; I’ve padded bits out here and there. It might be worth looking at the tweets from the day which are in a handy document here.

Final notes  from the Digital Transformation event. Neil Cummings, artist, and Professor at Chelsea College of Art and Design, discussed Critical practice and on student’s wiki breaking down boundaries between leaner and lecturer Neil then went on to discuss what is public? Public ness. What does it mean to say public space?  Neil highlighted the labour needed to successfully assemble ‘a public’ & host an open event using milk crates.

Daniel Nathan, chairman, totallyradio.com.  discussed radio DJs and curation  The word ‘curator’ gets used sprinkled about quite a lot to talk about stuff people do on the web.   Is digital curation an acceptable term? What does it mean? Is the term curator devaluated? Is what someone does on Facebook comparable to the  training and knowledge which goes into curating collections in museums and galleries? Digital curation involves maintaining, preserving and adding value to digital research data throughout its lifecycle.  dj’s aren’t curators just because they pull music together.

Daniel then went on to discuss Public Radio Exchange. PRX in US is online exchange bringing radio stations, listeners, producers together. Daniel discussed whether or not a public radio exchange would work in the uk.

One thing that came out of this was the idea that in online environments passion is a core criteria for adding most value as dj /curator/editor vs scholarship route to ‘expertise. My instant response was is scholarship not a form of passion? I think they are exactly the same thing. Arent they?

All in all lots of ideas, presentations and discussions to think about.

Digital Transformations: Being Playful. Content provider to Creative lifecycle

N.B.  My notes from the Digital Transformations event, they might not make too much sense; I’ve padded bits out here and there. It might be worth looking at the tweets from the day which are in a handy document here.

Frances Taylor from the  British Library,  talked about being playful at the British Library and her responsibilities for connecting the British Library with creative industries.  Merging collections and creativity at the British library, it’s very different from serving academic researchers, different type of support is required. The transformation of BL from a content provider to supporter of whole creative lifecycle. Frances talked about celebrating creativity fashion, designers and makers.  The BL Spring Event was used as a case study for opening up collections and being playful. Letting exploration happen.  Its about facilitating interactivity &creativity via offline and online environments and those that are “loose around the edges”

I can sum Frances talk up in the brilliant video she showed us.

This one is my favourite. I’m gutted that I couldnt attend.