BYOD and the Museum’s Interpretive Mission
Posted by Nancy Proctor on | May 10, 2009 | 11 Comments
I just finished reading Stephanie Pau & Peter Samis‘s published paper for Museums & the Web 2009, After the Heroism, Collaboration: Organizational Learning and the Mobile Space. As always, the folks at SFMOMA bring us thoughtful analysis of real data, based on important and innovative interpretive projects. Two major insights from this latest contribution hit home with me:
1. Interpretation is at the heart of the gallery’s mission.
I have been preaching for some time that museum interpretation is essential, not a ‘nice to have’ if money is left over in the exhibition budget, nor scraped together under the radar by zealous but largely ignored would-be interpreters. SFMOMA supports this principle with a team dedicated not to ‘new media’ or even ‘educational media’ but to interpretation. When Dominic Willsdon moved to SFMOMA from Tate Modern in 2005, he brought the latter’s principle that “Interpretation is at the heart of the gallery’s mission.” Gillian Wilson laid out the rest of the Tate credo in her 2004 paper for Museums & the Web on the gallery’s multimedia tour program, and I think it bears repeating; it has certainly inspired my work ever since I had the privilege of working with Tate on their multimedia tours beginning in 2002:
- Interpretation is at the heart of the gallery’s mission.
- Works of art do not have self-evident meanings.
- We believe that works of art have a capacity for multiple readings and that interpretation should make visitors aware of the subjectivity of any interpretive text.
- Interpretation embraces a willingness to experiment with new ideas.
- We recognise the validity of diverse audience responses to works of art.
- Interpretation should incorporate a wide spectrum of voices and opinions from inside and outside the institution.
- Visitors are encouraged to link unfamiliar artworks with their everyday experience.
It seems equally essential to me that in order to fulfill the museum’s mission, interpretation needs dedicated space/time and resources, if not a team, to support cross-departmental collaborations that answer these key questions (paraphrased from Samis & Pau’s text below), regardless of platform (label, audio tour, website, etc.):
- What are the 1-3 main ideas visitors should take away from the exhibition/collection display?
- Why is this exhibition/display important to the museum now?
Equally important to realizing Tate’s 6th principle, “Interpretation should incorporate a wide spectrum of voices and opinions from inside and outside the institution,” is this question from SFMOMA’s interpretation development process:
- Are you aware of existing media created by other organizations on this topic?
A welcome response to Beth Harris’s wondering why museums don’t make more use of content created by knowledgeable third parties, like SmartHistory.org, in fulfilling the infinite demand for interpretation in the museum in the face of a chronic shortage of resources to build new content!
2. BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) is not a silver bullet
From the inception of podcasts and cellphone tours, museums have fantasized about being able to dispense with the overheads of hardware and distribution staff for audio tours. There was also a desire to be free of the control that audio tour providers exercised by literally owning the platform through which the museum’s content was delivered. But so far the movement for using visitors’ own devices has usually meant trading one padrone for another: Antenna or Acoustiguide for Apple or the telephone network providers and their resellers.
Perhaps more realistically, there was the hope, expressed in Samis’s 2007 paper for Museums & the Web, that podcasts and cellphone tours would attract audiences who would never take a traditional audio tour: comfortable with using their own devices to access other media, a new generation of museum visitors would dial up and download to get an alternative interpretive experience to “their parents’ audio tour.”
But even in 2007 and before, we recognized certain barriers to these means of delivering tour content to visitors’ own devices. In my paper for Museums & the Web of the same year, I enumerated barriers to take-up of cellphone tours in Europe, which are also factors in US cellphone tour use:
- Cellphone reception is not seamless;
- Dialing a tour can be prohibitively expensive for foreign visitors and those with ‘pay-as-you-go’ plans;
- And some museums – and their visitors – simply don’t want mobile phone use in the galleries.
In 2009, Samis and Pau note that the ergonomic and audio quality experience of cellphone tours can be disappointingly inferior to a stereo audio tour as well. The Whitney Museum of American Art’s study and Audio Guide Technologies Survey Final Report indicates that cellphone users are also concerned about running down their batteries, and a majority would prefer to use a device supplied by the museum.
Of perhaps equal concern to the museum, I would add, is that when paying for every minute of every cellphone tour played, the museum can be a victim of its own success if more people dial in to the tour than the museum has budgeted for. Is it fortunate or unfortunate that cellphone tour take-up rates are on average even lower than those of traditional audio tours? As Samis and Pau put it, “if a cell phone tour broadcasts in a museum and nobody listens, is it still there?”
The challenge of the download model is, of course, how many people will actually prepare for their museum visit by downloading a tour before they come? I agree with Steven Zucker and Beth Harris, among others, that just as people will prepare for a commute, a plane ride, or a run by downloading content to take with them, museums can leverage the relatively high traffic to their ‘Visit’ pages and, over time, condition visitors to download tours as they check opening ours and local parking info.
There is also the option of download via wifi on-site. MoMA provides audio-visual tours to visitors’ own web-enabled devices on-site (hear an interview with MoMA Wifi’s developer, Lotte Meijer), and several vendors are now building iPhone Apps for museum tours. There are three potential barriers to usage with this model:
- The visitor’s device does not have enough free memory to download the tour on-site;
- The tour takes longer to download on-site than the visitor is willing to wait;
- The museum cannot provide consistent wifi or high bandwidth cellphone coverage in all areas of the museum where tour content download may be required.
Next steps
But as we rehearse these familiar pros & cons for different mobile tour platforms (see a summary from Tate’s 2008 Handheld Conference), three conclusions come to mind:
- There is no ‘one size fits all’ solution; the museum will best serve its diverse audiences by creating content that will work across a range of platforms, both supplied by the museum and by the visitor.
- We need to think beyond the traditional audio tour model to develop new interpretive modalities that are concurrent with visitors’ current information and communication habits and play to the strengths of the technologies visitors bring to the museum in their pockets.
- We also need to think beyond the walls of the museum: just as our websites get 3-10 times the visitors our physical museums welcome, so our mobile interpretation has the potential to reach many more people who’ll never be able to ‘take a tour’ or experience the museum on-site.
In other words:
- Think of the cellphone not as an alternate audio tour device but rather as a two-way communication tool, which is how most visitors use it, and design the interpretive content and experience accordingly. If the cellphone isn’t great at delivery a quality audio experience, it is superb at collecting visitor’s comments through voice or text message, and allowing visitors to collect and share information via SMS. (My conversation with Nina Simon on this is here.)
- Similarly, integrate other popular mobile web services, such as search, email, Twitter, and Twitpic into the multimedia experience so it goes beyond narrowcasting and positions the visitor as a platform, a node in the network, who both receives and re-transmits interpretive content to companions within the museum’s walls and beyond. (Koven Smith wrote an excellent paper on this topic for Museums & the Web 2009.)
- And also build interpretation for non-visitors who use their web-enabled mobile devices to visit the museum from afar. Cross-platform games like the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Ghosts of a Chance offer a fascinating glimpse of how ‘remote’ visitors can connect with the museum and interlocutors on-site to create a truly cross-platform alternative to the traditional audio tour.
I think we’ve all recognized for some time that the Museum is much more than its buildings and collections. Our mobile interpretation also needs to be much more than an on-site tour.
Next weekend I’ll be interviewing Peter Samis of SFMOMA for the TEC-CH online course in mobile interpretation to glean best practice from nearly a decade of mobile interpretation solutions his team has developed for the galleries – starting with iPaqs that delivered artist interviews for the 2001 Points of Departure exhibition, up to the iPhone app tour the museum currently has in production. Feel free to suggest questions and ideas for Peter & me to discuss here!
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May 10th, 2009 @ 5:49 pm
[...] @PSamis next week on mobile interpretation for museums; tweet your ? or ask @ http://wiki.museummobile.info/archives/142 #mtogo fresh, twitter « Manifesto for a New Mobile Architecture BYOD and the [...]
May 10th, 2009 @ 7:54 pm
DM from @davepatten does the use of mobiles change the social interaction between visitors #mtogo
May 11th, 2009 @ 8:45 am
[...] @PSamis nxt wk on mobile interpretation for museums; tweet your ? w/ #mtogo or ask @ http://wiki.museummobile.info/archives/142 fresh, twitter « BYOD and the Museum’s Interpretive Mission Trackbackno [...]
May 11th, 2009 @ 9:45 pm
From @MoMAlearning re: Peter Samis question – What’s the future of the museum exhibition sub-site? Pachyderm? Another publishing platform?
May 11th, 2009 @ 10:38 pm
MuseumMobile questions for Peter Samis:
How can we connect the mobile user emotionally to art in the museum?
Do you have any favorite kid-generated cell phone tour examples?
Since studies show that museum outings are most often a social experience with friends and family, how do we interlace these needs with mobile technology use?
How can we make mobile enhanced tours of our museums story-driven? Can visitors create and follow their own user-generated storylines?
How do interactions with mobile devices and their applications differ when used in the museum galleries vs. connecting with art when out on the street and or at home?
Can we create games with mobile devices that will allow museum-goers to play with the art and each other?
May 11th, 2009 @ 11:38 pm
From @murawski27 #PSamis ? What is (or should be) the role of museum tech with docent training & docent tours?
May 17th, 2009 @ 11:59 pm
[...] @PSamis nxt wk on mobile interpretation for museums; tweet your ? w/ #mtogo or ask @ http://wiki.museummobile.info/archives/142 [...]
May 18th, 2009 @ 5:15 am
I’m back in NZ from a trip to the UK post Museums and the Web. Having just returned to my desk I’m now reviewing what I learned at the conference and deciding what highlights to share with Te Papa colleagues. We’re still working our way slowly along the path to developing a mobile interpretive device so I’m certainly going to be pointing people to this website and wiki as a great source of info and debate.
This post reminded me Nancy of a comment I wanted to make at MW after hearing Peter Samis’ paper. Te Papa has long believed in the importance of interpretation. We have managed to maintain a team of interpreters since opening in 1998 – though the team has varied in size over time – and I for one think our interpretive strength has contributed much to the success of the Te Papa “experience”.
While I was in London I got a chance to visit the Tate Modern and experience for myself the multimedia tour – something I’ve been wanting to do for ages! I wasn’t disappointed. I was a little museum weary and coming down with a cold but the easy to use collections tour with it’s wonderful, varied range of content gave me some really powerful insights into some of the art works. I loved it and will be raving about it to my colleagues! – while all the time wishing Te Papa could offer a mobile interpretive guide of this quality.
June 8th, 2009 @ 11:16 am
As usual, Peter Samis opened my eyes when he retweeted a comment I made during the June 3, 2009 HandheldConference: I was quoting Beth Harris from SmartHistory.org saying that audio tour ‘stops’ are more appropriately termed ‘starts’ because we tend to start listening to them in front of a given object, but then wander off or lose interest before the end of the message – not quite what the tour designers have in mind, usually. But in his enthusiastic spin on this, Peter casts the ‘stop’ as a jumping-off point for learning and other experiences:
psamisRT @georginab: Audio stops should instead be called “starts” as they are really just the beginning… @NancyProctor #mtogo #sfmoma right on!
Thanks, Peter!
Nancy
June 8th, 2009 @ 12:35 pm
[...] reply @ http://is.gd/Tfx3 to @psamis @bethrharris on Audio stops as "starts": they are just the beginning… [...]
June 28th, 2009 @ 2:13 pm
The interview with Peter Samis is now online at http://museummobile.info/archives/221 with answers to most of the questions submitted here.
Thanks so much to you all for your input!