A great, simple video of what everyone involved in interactive installation projects knows, but sometimes can’t articulate. By the Environmental Health Clinic at NYU, led by Australia-born conceptual artist Natalie Jeremijenko. Don’t let the name confuse you, it is a provocative design studio camouflaged as a university health think-tank, also apparently sometimes called the “x Design Project”. You figure out the rest.
Liberally excerpted from the Vimeo blurb (see here for more of the blurb, which is great, and more videos, which are also great):
This video illustrates that if you hold constant the institutional context (in this case a contemporary museum), and the information presented (in this case the curatorial information); and you only vary the technological interface, you can reveal the Structures of Participation around the differing interfaces—same info, same context, but very different experience. Because of the tight coupling, it can be very difficult to make sense of what is actually changing as we change our socio-technical system. In the first case (a) the traditional public display of text on museum wall, which, because of the social convention of quiet-while-some-one-is-reading, you can be standing next to someone, but not talk to them and never hear anything of what they are thinking. Secondly, the technological shift we have all witnessed in contemporary museums as the curatorial information is presented as an audio tour, as a privatized audio environment via headset (or similar). This has the effect of synchronizing people temporally, but precludes local discussion–you can’t hear what anyone nearby is saying. In the third case the curatorial information is presented via a deliberately triggered (pull) small located speaker (the Located Sound Speaker or LSSn). This creates a shared audio context for a small group, momentarily synchronizing people spatially and temporally, and providing an opportunity for local comments and discussion.
More on the exploits of Ms. Jeremijenko in this article and YouTube video from GOOD Magazine.
In case you missed it, Robin Pogrebin’s Brooklyn Museum article in the New York Times yesterday (“Brooklyn Museum’s Populism Hasn’t Lured Crowds”), has created quite a stir. The article itself is very much worth reading, if you are someone interested in successful visitor experiences of whatever kind. Just don’t expect pat answers, the jury is still out. Perhaps indefinitely.
One of the better responses I’ve seen thus far has been from the most mysterious, anonymous, hardworking museum twitterer around, @museumnerd, who posted this reply.
Are you as sick of your mouse as I am? Ever wonder why everyone in a two-handed species uses a one-handed interface? Via Swissmiss, the inventor of that Minority Report gesture-based computer interface demonstrates it in real time on the TED stage. “In five years, when you buy a computer, you will get this.” Brilliant.
(I’ll fix the weird cropping in a minute, but don’t worry, it’s all there.)
A happy coincidence: I was at the Miami Art Museum two weeks ago – just a few days after I wrote about the Saraceno installation image that was haunting me – and I stumbled on (and nearly into) Tomás Saraceno’s fantastic “Galaxies Forming along Filaments, Like Droplets along the Strands of a Spiders Web” (2008, elastic rope). How terrific: visitors who are “feeling flexible today,” as a guard put it, are encouraged to remove their shoes and attempt to make their way carefully between the strands if they like.
“Like Catherine Zeta-Jones in that movie with Sean Connery?” I asked. “Um, sure,” said the guard.
I do think about other things besides the Cooper-Hewitt. I just don’t blog about them, apparently. The Cooper-Hewitt’s recently-opened Triennial exhibit, “Why Design Now?” has me, well, thinking. My favorite project thus far, for a dozen reasons: the “Posterwall for the 21st Century” installation at the Graphic Design Museum in the Netherlands.
Created by design group Lust, the wall falls towards the end of the exhibit “100 Years of Dutch Graphic Design”. It is a large-scale, digital media display of overlapping minimal posters. But none of these posters were designed by a human. They are designed automatically, one every five minutes, by software drawing on “various internet sources”.
You’ll find footage of it starting at the 3:30 mark of the video above (but watch the whole video while you’re at it, you’ll be glad you did). See the online version of the wall here, and see more images from the exhibit at the Graphic Design Museum here.
Must-see: an enlightening and (very) information-packed discussion of social media and web strategy. By Sebastian Chan – charismatic director of apparently everything technological at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, Australia – speaking at the Smithsonian (archived at the Smithsonian 2.0 video collection)
I promise you my best 140 characters on accessibility, architecture, education, exhibit design, graphic design, installation art, interaction design, museums, online exhibits, philanthropy, technology, video, and wayfinding. www.twitter.com/jonathanalger
A color-sensitive interactive billboard installation at Time Warner Center in New York. A clever interface between subject matter (an IBM campaign about smarter retail supply chains) and audience (retail shoppers at the most important end of that chain). But I can easily imagine other uses for this underlying idea in other public space applications.
(On a side note, I once designed a project in that same retail concourse, an exhibit of Olympic photography for Sports Illustrated. Kudos to the designers of this project, for coming up with a smart way to get passersby engaged in their material. It’s not easy.)
Narrative Space, a conference hosted by the School of Museum Studies at the University of Leicester in the UK, starts today, despite the volcanic ash cloud. It is an “international conference exploring the interpretive potential of museum architecture and design.” (Sounds great, sad I can’t go!)
The remarkable site Artbabble won “Best Overall” honors in the Best of the Web competition last week at the Museums and the Web conference in Denver. Originally launched in April of last year by the Indianapolis Museum of Art and six partners, the site is has become “one of the premier destinations for art video online”. It’s eminently worth seeing, not only for its implications about how the web changes what museums do, but also for the innovative video-navigation core features.
From the Best of the Web writeup:
Broadening the interactive experience even further, a section for comments allows visitors to share observations and suggest links of their own. Comments can also be embedded directly into the video timeline as well, letting users comment on elements at a particular point in time. Full text transcriptions of videos drive closed captioning features for video playback and because they are rendered to the video page, search engines can index the spoken text for video content. Users can easily skip deep into a long format video picking and choosing only the content that interests them.
A great little video of the Dieter Rams exhibit at the Design Museum in London, narrated by museum director Deyan Sudjic. Just lovely. (To me, design exhibits and exhibit design are sort of the same thing, somehow.)
Explorations of new developments in exhibit design, museum planning and interactive space by Jonathan Alger, co-founder of the design firm C&G Partners.
