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Eh, just because I can’t get enough of this particular subject, I thought I’d do another quick post ’bout mobile interpretation in museums. As I was gearing up to write the Future of Mobile Interpretation paper for this year’s Museums and the Web conference, I did a few informal surveys via both Twitter and Yammer to see if my gut feelings on multimedia/audio tours were even close to correct. The interesting side effect of this “flash survey” was that I found that microblogging platforms were a really interesting means of acquiring quick survey results, if you’re not interested in being particularly scientific (perhaps I’ll post more on that subject in the future). Primarily, though, I was pleasantly surprised at the thoughtfulness (and pithiness, given the format) of the responses. I thought I’d post them here, since some of my Twitter peeps have expressed some desire to see the results of my survey. So basically, I asked the question, “To those of you who don’t pick up audio guides in museums, why is that?” A random sampling of the responses follows:

Most people and especially younger ones carry in their pockets much more powerful appliances (i.e. cellphones)… I can do much more about getting intersting information with a blackberry, palm or iphone by typing in name of the artist or work or genre in wikipedia.

With audio guides if you are wearing headphones, then you are disconnected for a time from the person you came in with, while you otherwise would be possibly discussing the artwork. I think there is something to audio guides being exclusively one way interaction device, apart from entering numbers.

audio guides make a museum experience feel too solitary.

Talking too slow for saying too little.

Cause I like to do things at my own pace, choose which info to absorb (I rarely read entire labels), and hear the surroundings.

Not usually for the main collection, yes for special exhibits, if it’s free and the crowd isn’t nuts. Probably because of where the guides are handed out – at the controlled entrance to the special exhibit. generally, special exhibits have a single path, so i’m thinking linearly & the guide can build a narrative, whereas in the main [galleries] I like to wander and anything gleaned from the guide will be a one-off. That said, if the guide was, already in my pocket in the shape of my mobile phone, I’d be more likely to call up info on a particular piece in the main [galleries].

I’m not usually at a museum by myself, and I want to have a shared experience with whomever I’m with. Headphones disrupt that.

Because I don’t like things in my ears.

I think we can glean a few things, even from a small sample like this one. The first (and I point this out in my paper) is that museums really don’t know much about this new audience. What studies have been done (in particular Peter Samis’s excellent survey of visitor response to the Matthew Barney: Drawing Restraint interpretive devices) are largely analyses of visitor preference between given devices, and don’t therefore tell us much about the majority of our audience that never picks up a device in the first place.

The follow-on from this, then, is of course that museums don’t yet know whether the approaches they currently employ in the development of interpretive technology strategies in galleries will produce results that satisfy this new audience. Given that most multimedia handheld devices in museums still employ what is basically an audio tour model adapted to a new device, my assumption (particularly in light of the kinds of responses like the ones above) is that this will not be the case. It’s time to figure out a new way.

Before I leave this post to go catch up on some Battlestar Galactica, I thought I’d point towards a few interesting resources. The first is a post from New Curator with a discussion about iPhone apps that might be useful for museums. Another is the Museums and Mobile Adoption Survey by the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. Of particular interest to me were the responses to the “Are you evaluating visitor usage of the device?” question. And lastly, but never leastly, the Mattress Factory dudes have made excellence happen again in the form of an aggregated MF Twitter feed viewable in the MF’s gallery space. Aside from this just being a great idea, I point to it because I mentioned making something similar to this available via handheld devices in the MW paper, and it’s nice to see this already happening. Word.

Koven Museum handhelds, IPhone, Matthew Barney, Mattress Factory, mobile, Mobile device, Mobile phone, Twitter, Yammer

Well, it’s been an exhausting few weeks here at kovenjsmith HQ. In addition to reading through scores of accolades over my recent interview with Paul Miller (thanks to all two of you that wrote in–your copy of the Koven J. Smith home game should arrive via parcel post in six to eight weeks), I’ve also been working on a new score for the great NYC choreographer Daniel Charon, which will be premiered in April at Joyce SoHo. I hope to have some mp3s of the music up here as soon as I can excerpt everything into palatable chunks.

While all o’ that has been going on, I’ve also been working on a paper for the upcoming Museums and the Web conference about the use of multimedia handheld devices in museums. The seeds for many of the concepts in this paper were planted during the two-day “From Audiotours to iPhones” symposium on handhelds at Tate Modern last September. The symposium, organized by Jane Burton of Tate Modern and Nancy Proctor from SAAM, assembled some of the leading minds in mobile interpretation, including Peter Samis from SFMOMA, Chris Alexander from SJAM, Allegra Burnette from MoMA, and Daniel Incandela from the IMA for two days of spirited debate.

While the paper I just completed for MW is in some ways a reaction to rather than a distillation of the symposium’s content, the symposium was incredibly helpful in bringing focus to the idea as a whole. My overwhelming feeling, coming out of the symposium, is that museums still have yet to make the big leap necessary for these kinds of technologies to really take hold, and the paper pretty much expands on that. From the introduction:

The last several years have seen museums carefully moving away from outmoded audio technology towards richer multimedia devices. However, while there have been a handful of successful museum installations of multimedia guides, these devices still have yet to take hold in museums in the same way that audio guides have. The failure of the majority of handheld projects to date has been blamed on their trying to do too much, using technology that is too complex, too expensive, or “not ready for prime time.” The resulting best practices, as witnessed in the recent symposium on handheld devices at Tate Modern, have emphasized simplifying handheld applications and devices, in effect bringing them into line with traditional audio tours but adding a few visuals. Although a few of these devices may have individually failed as a result of poorly executed complexity, simplification as a broad solution is not the answer. If anything, the failure of these devices to find a voice in museums is because museums are, by and large, not taking full advantage of the capabilities of this new generation of multimedia devices.

Multimedia devices represent a break, a sea change, in both content and platform, from audio guides. That is to say, if one thinks of the evolution of mobile interpretive devices as a straight line from AM/FM devices through personal cassette players to the now-ubiquitous random-access mp3 players, multimedia guides do not represent the logical endpoint of that evolution, but rather a parallel and altogether different development. Multimedia guides bring with them a suite of opportunities and difficulties that only occasionally overlap with the opportunities and difficulties associated with audio guides. Although the technology has changed, the mindset that produces content for the technology has not.

UPDATE: The final version of the paper can be found at the Archives and Museum Informatics site.

Koven Museum handhelds, IPhone, mobile, Mobile device, Museum, Peter Samis, SFMOMA