How do you do? I was co-founder of the ill-fated WiVID Systems which developed the even more ill-fated SIguide system. Are you familiar with it’s spec or GUI? It was in the nose bleed territory of cutting edge at the time, 1GB SD cards cost $250 dollars!

Anyway, it was designed in collaboration with the participating SI museums (SAAM, NPG, Postal, Castle, A&S, NMAH, and NatHist) and given your ideas, I think you would have been appreciative.

Like you, I was and still am, uneasy with the notion of “simple is better” and I define K.I.S.S. differently: Keep It Sophisticated, Simply

To accomplish this I advocate different interface MODALITIES. Simplicity results from a user being comfortable having chosen their level of interface complexity.

SIguide had 3 basic modes to choose from:

AUTO mode, where you could wander and information was pushed, you didn’t have to do a thing.

NEAR ME mode which published a list of all interpreted objects that were near you.

TOUR mode, self explanatory although we had a breakthrough in wayfinding that hasn’t been exploited since.

Of course, one could also navigate using Maps or Text lists, and their was a FIND feature that allowed users to build their own tour plus a scapbook feature to send information home.

The Messenger was drawing based and you could send or receive messages from within your group, (even if they were in another building) or send comments to the museum.

While there are several members of this wiki(hi Bruce, I chuckled at your “Find a venture capitalist” and “be like a startup” comments)familiar with the problems WiVID had, I strongly feel the device delivered a fully featured experience using web standards, that was totally data driven.

The interface software worked fine and we did hundreds of audio, video, and hotspotted QTVR clips; but in the end, location awareness was our achilles heel and still is indoors.

Let me know if you are interested in any images from that era around 2004-5. I get a sick feeling that all the mind maps and talk is the result of a loop in time back to 2002 when we first started thinking about this stuff.

Currently I’m working on an iPod tour and a new notion: Digital Interpretopias.

Scott

I’d suggest a handful of things:
1. Find a local venture capitalist and build a friendship. You want to know what they’re looking at, what they see, and why. The important thing is to learn to see trends like they do. At the worst, you’ll talk to a bunch of really smart people that challenge your ideas without the same prejudices you have, better, you might find new partners and collaborators.

2. Treat every project that you do as a potential money-making business, pretend it’s a startup. This forces you to think about audience, how to potentially see a return on an investment, and how to be smart about potential development. But you’re always creating a product and you learn how not to orphan something. It doesn’t mean that you’re always monetizing everything in real life and sullying your institution’s goal, but it enforces an interesting discipline.

3. Look at every experience you have or enjoy, try and figure out what makes it compelling for *you* or *others* and then see if there are experiences your museum provides that can be parallel. For example, you talk about relevant iPhone apps — take a look at the style.com app. It’s entirely about fashion and seeing the latest bits off the runway, but how different is that really from looking at works of art and finding stuff you like? Think of how to pervert existing systems and examples. Reach out to them to see if their experiences contain useful nuggets for you.

4. Define the one or two sentences your experience is trying to do — share information? let visitors interact with the museum? with each other? Whatever it is, get that simple purpose and whittle away everything else.

… hm, but I digress a bit from audio — but that’s my point. You’re not solving the audio in a handheld problem. That’s the delivery mechanism. What’s the more fundamental content and experience question and then see if the handheld or audio help with that problem.