A version of this essay was published in Curator, the Museum Journal, v.45, n.1 (Oct. 2002)
Museums are quite often the first target for newly invented technologies, given their place as storehouses for cultural knowledge. To technologists, they represent the ultimate database on which to test their new product, as well as a great opportunity for exposure. The promised gains for the museum, of course, are endless -- why, this fantastic new system will make browsing your collection as simple as a Google search, and allow visitors to create a personalized, 3D tour! Of course, you'll need to scan and annotate every object in your collection, but you can purchase the super 3D scanning system -- all you'll need a large room in which to house it, and a staff to maintain its attached supercomputer.
Of course a successful startup company, by its nature, must maximize its profits and cannot live on museum work alone, and with the first big corporate client, that 24-hour on-site tech support you purchased suddenly isn't so accessible. And the proprietary technology you bought is soon superceded by a simple, open-source version, which you can download for free and run on your laptop. This method of invent-first-apply-later has its place, and certainly some museums have made fruitful use of interesting new technologies. But anyone who has designed, built or maintained exhibits to be used daily by thousands of people from all cultures and social strata knows that even the most robust technologies and simple designs can be notoriously difficult for visitors to use, and for museums to maintain.
As you might imagine, there were a few problems. There were delays and we were not able to test enough with the final hardware, in situ. The consumer-grade printers we bought were not built for heavy use. There were moving parts, networked computers, timed sequences, and lots of unpredictable factors. And no matter how much we simplified the instructions and interactions, we were still stymied by the ever-unpredictable nature of visitors. In the end, it all worked out nicely, and incidentally, it's a beautiful museum. But the price of doing something that has never been done before is that it brings with it unforseen consequences.
I go to a few technology conferences, and see some fantastic new technologies. There are thin, flexible displays that can be printed with a standard ink-jet printer; increasingly lifelike 3D displays large and small; computers and sensors that are all but invisible. Any natural phenomenon can be realistically simulated, and there are myriad ways of interacting with the computer. The hardware costs continue to fall, and art schools are turning out experts in crafting things from computers.
But at this stage, much of this is still basic research. The new technologies at conferences are university and research center projects, untested over constant, long-term use. In fact, the most interesting parts of such conferences are the reports of user testing with new technologies. There is some excellent work being done on the physiological and psychological aspects of human-computer interaction, and some hard lessons being learned.
The problem is that by the time a technology becomes mature, and inexpensive enough for most museums to use, it is often cheaply manufactured and marketed with planned obsolescence. To return to the printer example, they are priced so low so that you continue to buy those fancy cartridges which have such fine accuracy and color. Technology companies love to sell you ongoing services. It can be a win-win situation -- you pay someone to something you don't know how to do, and it frees you up to do your own work. But it can also become tedious for both sides.
Some printer cartridges, in fact, are nearly computers themselves, and there is a general trend toward commodification and diffusion of computing. Disposable computers will make changing a processor as simple as changing a compact disc. With small, inexpensive processors, modularity is easier, and all-out replacement of exhibit hardware is no longer a major undertaking. Still, it doesn't address the simple fact that new technologies are inherently unstable.
Research labs and universities look like attractive partners to budget-conscious museums, but often do not have the resources themselves to build, test, and maintain a robust exhibit. A research prototype of a novel new force-feedback pen or a holographic display looks great, and a one-off art project is one thing. But how many people can use it at once? Does it require each visitor to sit down and type in personal information? Does it run in a web browser? (They're particularly prone to crashes.) Most importantly, who will maintain it?
Help is on the horizon. There is a small but growing movement afoot to make both hardware and software more stable and reliable [see Lawson], to wrest control over design away from the engineers, and make computers stoop to our level, for a change. Software and sensor developments are making self-running, semi-intelligent systems a reality. Focus is shifting from interactive computing to "proactive," pervasive and sentient computing. (See Weiser.) This may strike fear, but so did contemplating walls coursing with electricity, or being propelled by a 200 horsepower motorized vehicle. We don't even think about these things today, and such will be the case when computers are embedded everywhere.
What is important is that you either have the ability to operate and service them, or at least pay someone you trust, just as you would hire a reliable electrician or a mechanic. Most of the time, you expect electricity to flow when you plug in an applicance; you expect your car to start when you turn the key. So should it be with computing technology, but we're not quite there yet.
The good news coming out of the tech conferences is that people are finding ways to do really interesting things simply and inexpensively. A real renaissance in art and technology is being driven by the convergence of cheap hardware, good ideas and creative people, all connected globally. The dot-com boom may be over, but technology and the Internet have already had profound effects, and this is just the beginning.
For example, full-body interaction used to require wiring someone to half a million dollars worth of hardware; now all you need is a laptop and a webcam. An immersive, multi-projector display system used to require intricate alignment and a supercomputer to blend the edges together; now it can be done with PCs and a casual alignment of projectors. A recent M.I.T. project utilized the small speakers from cell phones, stuck onto the corners of a window and used as simple microphones to detect the location of knocks and taps. A Silicon Valley company dreams up a new way of interacting with a PDA, and keeps it secret until the IPO market is favorable again. Meanwhile, some kid in Brooklyn invents the same thing with $20 worth of Radio Shack parts and publishes it on the Internet. (The company is still waiting.)
Is it wrong to view the museum as a database? Certainly, it holds a wealth of data in various forms. But more than that, it has many moving parts, in the form of the people that run the place. It doesn't just hold information, it processes and outputs it -- not entirely unlike a computer. Perhaps it is fruitful to borrow a page from Stephen Wolfram, and view complex phenomena as the product of simple algorithms. Granted, he is the head of a software company. But think about it -- if your museum's mission statement is a simple set of instructions, they generate some quite complex consequences (intended and not, physical and social) over time. Viewed this way, an exhibition is not merely an extraction and presentation of data from the database, but it is a process -- it is not merely visited, but it provokes and generates change. It is an interconnected system. Make sure the component parts of your system are simple and modular.
If the museum experience was like an Internet search, it would be a chaotic, unattractive place where a visitor could gain much information but little real knowledge (not unlike the Internet). But what if the museum experience was like a tour through a living, responding ecosystem, rich with sensory stimuli and knowledge about its visitors and inhabitants, a destination for enjoyment and enrichment instead of a showcase for fancy gadgets -- now that would make the Silicon Valley crowd envious.
References
Lawson, Harold W. "Rebirth of the Computer Industry." Communications of the ACM, June 2002, pp. 25-29
Weiser, Mark. "The computer for the 21st century." Scientific American,
265(3):94--104, September 1991.
Wolfram, Stephen. A New Kind of Science. Wolfram Media, Inc., 2002.