What museums need to learn from the social aspects of the digital revolution

Fascinating talk at Remix Sydney recently by Dr Genevieve Bell, the Australian born cultural anthropologist and now director of the User Experience Group at Intel. Her talk responded to the question 'how will the technological revolution going on outside the walls of cultural institutions transform the environment in which we operate?''

Genevieve talked to the dichotomy we are dealing with on six issues:

• Connectivity: We want to be connected all the time and get to where we want online instantly but we also want to be able to disconnect and have our own space. This leads into;
• Privacy: We want to share information and images all the time, but we also really worry about our reputations and what people make of us. We particularly worry about what has been collected in the past which might surface in the future, and interestingly the current generation (millennials) worry about it most.
• Big data: We all want more data as we think it will tell us more truths. In reality data is only as good as the data fed into it, and since we inherently tell lies a lot of the time ("you look great today" etc.), it's often not good data. We advocate transparency in others and yet jealously guard our secrets.
• Algorithms: Algorithms are required to make sense of big data, but are all based on what has happened in the past. The surprising thing about so much data is how poorly we predict what it will tell us.
• Memory and storage: The world is building unlimited storage and therefore memory - soon nothing will be forgotten. Yet as humans we are conditioned to (and indeed need to) forget some things in order to be able to move on. We should remember the big stories (e.g. the Stolen Generation), but we need to be able to forget the little stories about how we may have behaved with each other.
• Innovation: We crave new technology and are culturally wired to consider it as a good thing, as a mark of the progress of humanity. However, we also fear it because we are conditioned by books and films that human hubris will overwhelm us, and the technology will go feral and kill us.

Genevieve concluded by advising us to weigh up new tech solutions against the following criteria:

• They must be market inspired, solving problems that we care about
• They must be experience driven, delivering experiences we want
• They must be people centric, acknowledging that we are human and by our very nature a mass of contradictions

As the museum sector continues to grapple with new technologies and how to use them, this is salutary advice from someone right at the heart of the social dimension and impact of these technologies.

Conference time and the museum of the future

Back to back conferences on like themes are always interesting, if only to see how much stamina is required to keep engaged. Sydney has just hosted the Museums Australia Conference, followed by Remix Sydney.

The former is self explanatory, the annual get together of the local museum fraternity, always useful for catching up with old friends and meeting new ones, but this year a bit predictable and uninspiring in programming and discussions. Highlights for me were:

• Xerxes Mazda, formerly of the British Museum, currently at the Royal Ontario Museum and about to be head of collections  for National Museums of Scotland. Xerxes is always worth listening to on how to maximise the visitor experience, by integrating exhibitions, education, web, publications, design, front of house, visitor research, marketing, membership, volunteers and programming.
• Mega museum project updates with Gunther Schauerte from the Humboldt Forum in Berlin and Michael Lynch on M+ in the West Kowloon Cultural District, Hong Kong. Large though these are, we should not forget the New Museum that is arising in Western Australia. I blogged about this when it was announced in July 2012, and amazingly the monies ($428m) still seem to be there and the project is gaining significant momentum with an opening scheduled in 2020. 

I gave a paper boldly entitled 'Conservation in Museums – Whereto from here?', inspired by my own perception of the journey that conservation worldwide has undergone between the ICOM CC Conference in Sydney in 1987 and 27 years on the same conference in Melbourne in 2014.

And interestingly it was Remix that turned out to be in many ways a more appropriate forum for this discussion with the first session asking ‘What functions of museums are best served by external providers?’ Remix is a series of global summits on the future of cultural industries currently taking place annually in London, New York City, Dubai and Sydney, which aims to pull together cultural leaders, corporate directors, technologists and entrepreneurs.

It was a buzzy place to be around, reinforcing how the world of social media is fracturing at an ever increasing pace. With ever more platforms and media to share content on, the move to video as a medium, and mobile as the principal point of access, museums are scrambling to understand how to respond. Inevitably the focus on providing digital content continues to drive decision making on funding, but with it came reinforcement of the urge to see and value the real thing that is continuing to bring people into cultural institutions in increasing numbers.

Pick of the conference for me was Seb Chan’s keynote on the Future of Museums. Seb was at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney for many years before taking up the role of Head of Digital and Emerging Media at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in New York, which has just reopened after a $81 million refurb. Described in the Atlantic as the museum of the future, Seb has lead the charge at the Cooper Hewitt on integrating the digital and the real seamlessly. He and his team have done this by ensuring:

• Everything on exhibition is also online, i.e. not just a representative proportion
• The online data provides a rich array of extra information, so offers significant extra value that can be accessed later
• Visitors select objects they find interesting by touching the label with an interactive pen they are provided with on entry
• These selections are then downloaded upon exit and can be accessed, researched and manipulated at home via a unique url on each ticket
• No time consuming downloading of an app, pre visit or upon arrival
• No privacy issues over requiring an email address
• This is a REALLY NEAT solution

What I came away with is that we are now seeing the next iteration of visitor access through technology, the leader until now being MONA and the O. The ground breaking nature of the O is reflected in how long it has taken to see it superseded, but look to the Cooper Hewitt for the future of this aspect of museums. Read all about it at Museums and the Web 2015.