In 2011, the Cooper Hewitt, the Smithsonian Design Museum housed in the Andrew Carnegie Mansion in New York City, announced it was closing for a face-lift. Banners on the museum’s gates pronounced, “Like many on Fifth Avenue, I’m having a little work done.” “A little” was something of an understatement, given that the closure lasted three years. Furthermore, these changes wouldn’t be purely cosmetic. Inside the Georgian Revival structure, a team had begun sketching out ideas for all sorts of wearable devices to make the museum interactive.
Museums seem to have accepted that they need some degree of technological integration. Even the Frick Collection—notoriously the crotchety Luddites of the art world—now have an app. The approaches vary widely from museum to museum, including Imax theaters, SMS Chatbots, and and interactive staircase-cum-installation piece at the Mint Museum in North Carolina. Sometimes, the technology can seem like it’s aiming for the wow factor rather than real efficacy. But the Cooper Hewitt wanted to avoid that by building technology into its core mission. “It’s very much a relationship between the physical and the digital. It isn’t an add-on,” Carolyn Royston, chief experience officer at the Cooper Hewitt, said. “Here at the Cooper Hewitt, digital has been seen as [just] as important as the rest of the things in the galleries.”
The Cooper Hewitt has what it calls a “heads up” approach, a stance intended to dissuade visitors from burying their faces in screens. When a visitor buys a ticket, she’s given a stylus and a unique URL. The pen can scan object labels throughout the museum, which are then uploaded to the visitor’s personal collection on the Cooper Hewitt’s website. Throughout the museum, there are communal tables covered in touch screens where visitors can pull up their collections, look up additional information, or sketch designs. In building these tables, the museum was hoping to promote socializing and a little healthy voyeurism in the form of peeking over at someone else’s drawing.
Part of the challenge of technological integration is that the digital department is generally separate from curation, education, and visitor services. But at the Cooper Hewitt, all the departments collaborate on the museum’s digital effort. The museum is unique in that it has its own application-programming interface, a system that makes the museum’s internal records easily accessible by in-house developers. This isn’t a sexy selling point for the public, but Pamela Horn, director of cross-platform publishing and strategic partnerships at the Cooper Hewitt, explained that when she goes to museum conferences, the API is what makes all her peers jealous. The Cooper Hewitt’s interface allows developers to create new programs that help visitors search and explore the collection in creative ways. Horn said that getting everyone on the same interface was not easy—it took a lot of buy-in from the curators to change their workflow so that the museum staff and visitors were drawing information from the same place. Now, new objects are added to the collection earlier and are identified in such a way that there is relatable information for everyone from the director of the museum to an 8-year-old visitor.
Image source: https://steinhardt.nyu.edu/site/ataglance/2017/08/nyu-class-collaborates-with-cooper-hewitt-to-increase-accessibility.html
Comentarios