MuseumMobile » cellphone tour

Evaluation-led Mobile Experience Design

nancyproctor — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 02:20:06 +0000

At the MCN conference in Portland in November, I presented some of the research I’ve been doing on new approaches to mobile experience design. Sheila Carey from the Canadian Heritage Information Network kindly put together a panel for the conference on “Making the Call: Evaluating Mobile Projects in Museums” that pulled my work together with that of Sherry Hsi, who analyzed with keen hindsight the Exploratorium’s seminal Electronic Guidebook project, and Koven Smith’s latest call to action: don’t pilot – develop! More on that later…

My slides are here; the podcast of the talk is here. If you have comments or ideas to build on this work, there are pages on the Museum Mobile wiki dedicated to the topic:

Chris & Ted’s Excellent iPod Tours

nancyproctor — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 23:05:16 +0000

Apple makes it look so easy – and it is, if you’re as brilliant, creative and resourceful as Chris Alexander from San Jose Museum of Art and Ted Forbes of Dallas Museum of Art. In this podcast, Chris & Ted walk us through their developments of iPod Touch tours for their museums: from wireless networks, to interfaces, to back-end content management and signage in the galleries. Even better, they’re making their code and wireframes available to all through the Museums to Go opensource project on the MuseumMobile wiki, and are happy to answer any further questions you might have about doing it in-house and what help museums can still use from vendors in the field.

Peter Samis on Mobile Multimedia

nancyproctor — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 17:58:02 +0000

“Peter Samis is to museums as James Brown is to soul,” was tweeted earlier this year from the American Association of Museums (AAM) conference in Philadelphia. There is no doubt that Peter’s spirit has inspired my work in museum interpretation ever since my first multimedia tour projects with Tate Modern, and his educational mission and ethics remain a touchstone as I often ask, ‘what would Peter do’ to tell this story, to communicate this message, to reach this audience better?

In this podcast, Peter recounts his experiences with mobile multimedia at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) from 2000/2001 to the present day. He also speaks candidly about the future of mobile, companies and business models in the industry, as well as the ‘open source’ project that’s being pursued collaboratively on the Museum Mobile wiki. In closing, he answers questions from Dave Patten of the Science Museum in London, MoMA Learning (Beth Harris, Director of Digital Learning), and educator at the St Louis Art Museum and Michael Mouw from the Minnesota Historical Society.

Be sure to check out SFMOMA’s multimedia programs, podcasts, and in particular, writings by student contributor, Radford Leon, from Herbert Hoover Middle School, celebrated by Peter in this interview.

Peter & I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback on our conversation!

Art is hard: how mobile can help

nancyproctor — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 21:52:41 +0000

Nina Simon is an innovative designer of participatory museum experiences. In addition to lecturing widely, she authors the Museum 2.0 blog, which has become a primary touchstone and resource for best practice in the museum world. What may be less well-known about Nina is her background as a performance poet and how she was inspired to get into art museums by a painting from the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum: Morris Louis’s Faces from 1959, which she saw in a touring exhibition at the Worchester Art Museum in Massachusetts.

Nina Simon with Morris Louis's Faces, 1959, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

In January 2009, I got to revisit that painting and many other artworks in the American Art Museum, including an exhibition of Frank Gohlke’s photography, with Nina as we talked about our experiences and aspirations for mobile interpretation. Along the way we recalled Peter Samis‘s trope of ‘visual velcro‘ in describing how interpretation can be essential to helping visitors connect with certain artworks in particular. We talked about the power of dialogue and the conversational tone, as exemplified in the SmartHistory.org podcasts. Our views of cellphone tours and headphones got tossed around, with an idea for podcasts that can work both as gallery tours and as learning experiences beyond the museum. And we shared our enthusiasm for games and how they can bring adaptive learning experiences to museum interpretation, referencing Jane McGonigal’s talk for AAM’s Center for the Future of Museums.

Thanks to Nina, I got to look at the art museum for the first time through the revealing lens of the science museum. She pointed out that science museums often invoke their visitors as scientists or researchers, helping them make discoveries and relive in some way the subject as professionals experience it. Why, she asks, do art museums not position the visitor as an artist, curator, or art historian? How can we all – visitors and museum staff alike – give ourselves license to create and innovate within the museum experience?

Hear the podcast…