Developing a digital museum idea should never start with the technology

 

Incredible #museumgif from remixthemuseum.com

 

Last week I was part of a Digital Creative Media workshop for museums and heritage sites organised by the University of Portsmouth Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries Cultural Heritage Research Group held on 27th July.

The event explored opportunities for using creative and digital technologies to enhance museum and cultural heritage interpretation and management, my quick and dirty notes are below.

The guest speakers for the event were the equally brilliant Kevin Bacon from Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove and Pat Hadley from Cogapp.  Despite coming at it from different angles the overriding message from both talks focused on the fact that any digital experience should never start with the technology and should always be visitor focused and object centred.

The Use of Digital Media at Brighton Royal Pavilion and Museums, Kevin Bacon, Digital Manager, Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton & Hove

Kevin started from the position that it is actually quite difficult to articulate the collections online, as it is such a diverse collection.   So it is important to think about the collections strategically rather than as a cohesive whole.

When it comes to talking about digital, the conversation tends to be framed to touch by the technology.  Should we always think about digital as products? If we were a tech company that would be fine. But we are a museum. Digital, therefore, should be about relationships. At Brighton Staff digital literacy is all about transparency and communication.  Digital is pervasive.  Only 2 actual members of Digital Staff who focus on helping other staff to develop digital ideas and skills.

Golden rule: developing a digital idea should never start with the technology

Start with two questions:

• What assets do you have? – museums are about stuff, stories and staff
• Who are you aiming for? Audiences

Brighton Royal Pavilion and Museums Examples

• Getting a young person to run the museum Instagram account.
• Discovery – how can we help other people find and use our collections? Collections search – what is the point of the museum online catalogue? At Brighton, they are moving towards a Digital media bank – digital asset management system. Creating a sense of agency. Creative comments – system works much better for users
• Blogging has been really successful for Brighton. 69x more views than a collection record.  People like narratives. It also opens up opportunities for new perspectives
• Remix the Museum and excellent uses of museum gifs.  A very good reminder that being playful with collections is really important!
• From 2D design… to 3D model: Coins and Medals. A great example of  Reflective transformation by working with the University of Brighton to do PTM-RTI (Polynomial Texture Mapping-Reflectance Transformation Imaging – in essence taking lots of photos with different lighting conditions and different angles and then stitching them all together)
• Blogger in Residence. Bringing other voices into the collections.
• Map the museum – stripping back to a very simple idea. Release raw Collections data to the public, and get people to locate objects on a map, correcting items that are in the wrong place. The data collected helps the museum to learn more about our collections, and the data is also released as open data.
• Story drop mobile app – reminded me a lot of the TWAM’s Hidden Newcastle app.  A way of discovering the hidden histories and surprising stories geolocated across a city.

Final top tips from Kevin

• Importance of narrative over objects
• Build in scope for failure.
• Be happy with a smaller audience.
• Be more experimental
• Use your prototype as a real thing.  – appreciate this is quite hard to do with public funding.

Thinking through digital: Top tips for designing projects and working with technologists, Pat Hadley, Developer, Cogapp Digital Media Projects

Pat’s slides are available here.

 

contemplating post-its

First off Pat got us thinking with a Post-it notes exercise about what types of digital technology we use, and what digital stuff we had heard of, but had no clue about.  It was an interesting exercise and a great way of seeing where knowledge gaps are.

 

Making museum collections and heritage sites engaging, accessible and useful for today’s audiences. This set of problems is one of the most exciting challenges areas to apply digital technology. Collaboration is key, with staff and visitors, and external partners. When thinking about digital projects you need to consider organisational culture, visitor centred approaches, and content.  Joining these up can sometimes be quite challenging sometimes. Ultimately, when thinking about digital projects, other museums are not your competition. The competition is Netflix and Candy Crush.  How do museums compete with that?

Pat touched on lots of excellent ideas and lots of projects, and then really hit home the following points:

• How do people use technology?
• YOU ARE NOT THE AUDIENCE
  • Unless… you are the audience.
• How to think through Digital? rather than stuff, stories about the stuff, technology and then people.  It should be People first, with a lit bit of stuff, a little bit of stories about the stuff and a little bit of technology.
• It comes down to what do you want the visitors to leave feeling….?

How to write a brief… think about the audience. 

• What do you want the Visitor to feel?
• At the start of any project, you know the least about the end point. Don’t demand a race car and then realise you need a horse.
• Find experts – collaborations with external partners, your audiences, your nephew.
• Get perspective. What can we uniquely do? What problems can be escaped?
• What is your unique capability to offer audiences?
• Think big, start small, move fast.
• Adjust goals accordingly.

Lots to think about.