MuseumMobile » cellphone

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:

Be Extraordinary! Mobile Micro-volunteering

nancyproctor — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 03:36:45 +0000

‘Micro-volunteering’ is a new mobile arena being pioneered by The Extraordinaries, among others. In this podcast, I speak with Jacob Colker, CEO and co-founder of the start-up company, about how volunteers can donate small amounts of time to help non-profits with tasks like tagging images, checking addresses, or translating text through their web-enabled phones. Along the way Jacob comes up with some great ideas of how museums can use mobile apps to reinforce its role as a platform, connecting visitors in the galleries to people around the world. Noting that mobile is about ‘real-time’ interaction, he also discusses the future of ‘traditional’ cellphone uses, like voice calls and SMS, predicting the obsolescence of the latter – in the US anyway – within the next 5 years. We give a shout-out for the Steve.Museum social tagging project, and each get in a little call for museums to ‘let go’ and put at least as much energy into figuring out how to make innovations work as we currently invest in nay-saying.

Audio Tours 101: Writing the Rules

nancyproctor — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:18:12 +0000

This week kicks off a mini-series of podcasts on the basics of audio tours: their history and fundamental principles; the role of technology and theatricality in their evolution; the primacy of the story and the question of who gets to tell it.

In this first podcast, Chris Hardman, founder and Artistic Director of Antenna Theater, which became the global audio tour company, Antenna Audio, talks about ‘writing the rules’ of audio tour creation with David Torgersen, the senior sound designer for Antenna Theater for 15 years and producer of more than 300 audio tours around the world.

Stay tuned to hear about the pros and cons of linear versus random access technology, the impact of new 21st century platforms on audio tour content design and use, and the emerging role of ‘citizen curators’ as the world becomes “an audio tour waiting to happen.”