Museum Next

Becoming Authentically Digital

Koven J. Smith,

Kinetic Museums (USA)

Museums have been hanging out on the web for almost two decades now, but are still not truly digital. Held back by metaphors left over from their brick-and-mortar operations, museums continue to under-resource, under-prioritise, and under-think their digital efforts. As a result, museums’ digital presences still exist primarily as surrogates for their buildings, and have failed to become the digital temples of innovation, interaction, and experience that they could be. So museums are at a crossroads. They can continue on our current trajectory — a path towards slow death paved with blockbuster exhibitions — or they can become authentically digital, and evolve into the museums that the 21st century needs them to be.

In this talk, Koven J. Smith (museum consultant to the stars and the guy who thought up the phrase “Drinking About Museums”) will address what it will mean for museums to address digital practice as a core function, and how doing so will transform both internal practice and external interaction. Sacred cows will be slaughtered, strawmen will be knocked over with reckless abandon, half-baked theories will abound, and R. Kelly songs may or may not be played. Let’s roll.

Digital Transformation: Make it happen!

Tijana Tasich,

Tate (United Kingdom)

Digital is a multifunctional technological environment, that is expanding opportunities for communication and interaction, information and content delivery, retrieval and sharing between individuals, individuals and organisations, and increasingly, living and dead things alike. It would be wrong to ask, what is the role of digital in the museum? The question is, how should museums operate within the new parameters, both physical and digital, visible and invisible to the human eye, and use them to their full potential?

Many museums have recognised that, when it comes to digital, their organisations are not made for it. As a result we are seeing a growing trend in organisational changes, Tate being one of those institutions, all with an attempt to transform institutional effectiveness within digital dimension.

In this session, Tijana will share some of the practical strategies that institutions can implement or learn from in order to boost the effectiveness and success of their change initiatives. She will also offer an insight into the digital transformation project currently underway at Tate.

From Insights to Prototypes: How Museums Can Use the Design Thinking Process to Engage and Delight Visitors

MASTERCLASS: INCREASING YOUR VISITORS THROUGH DIGITAL MARKETING

Rui Guerra & Esther Herberts,

INTK & Naturalis Biodiversity Centre (The Netherlands)

How can museums increase their footfall using online marketing? This 1 hour masterclass shows the outcome of several experiments realized during 2013 with the goal of increasing museum visits by 10% and will teach delegates how to put this into practice in their own museums. They experimented with Facebook, Twitter and Google ads campaigns, measuring how many people were exposed to the campaigns to the number of people that decided to visit the museum.

A campaign was designed to encourage existing visitors to invite their friends and families to visit the museum, which taught a valuable lesson, that museums have much to gain by targeting their own existing audiences both in terms of marketing and engagement.

The Food Project: A Community-Based Approach to the Development of a New Mission

Luca Melchionna,
Mart – Museum of modern and contemporary art of Trento and Rovereto (Italy)

‘The Food Project: The shape of taste’ is an exhibition on food design produced by the Mart in the early months of 2013. At the same time, the mission of the museum was being redefined like so: “we want to display the energy of people and places”.

Staff from all departments exploited the exhibition themes to put the new mission into practice. Archivists, educators, marketing operators, conservators, and librarians used a wifi connection and a diversity of web resources to engage with local communities, food enthusiasts, bloggers, producers and designers.

Light is History

Samir Bhowmik,

Media Lab Helsinki, Aalto University Finland (Finland)

The “Light is History” project in Helsinki involved a participatory public museum installation that served as a research object in an urban square where community members anonymously displayed information of their personal artefacts and shared their energy use information for the common wellbeing. Here, a co-curated and participatory framework was built around daily practices bringing together local community. The outcomes of this project allowed us to learn about community sustainability, learning and wellbeing.

The lessons learnt from this project may have implications for museums and heritage institutions. The project proposes how methodologies of participation and installation could serve museums in the future to build sustainable practices around artefacts in their own collections.

MASTERCLASS: How to use beacons to create a better Museum Experience

Chris Evernden & Tim Groot

Nodes (London & Copenhagen)

How can museums become more personalised and interactive? In a one hour masterclass Chris and Tim will explain the new iBeacon technology and how it can be used to create a better museum experience. They will use their knowledge of user experiences in mobile apps to explain what the do’s and don’ts are to create the best mobile applications with beacons.

We urge you to bring your iOS smartphone because a working prototype is available to play around with. If you can’t wait until June? Take a look at the Nodes blog where Tim blogs about iBeacon technology and how it can be used in different situations or check out their website: www.nodesagency.com

Minecraft- Adventures in Art and Culture

Adam Clarke,

The Common People (UK)

In 2013, Adam Clarke collaborated with Tullie House to take part in the Museums At Night project. He was commissioned to produce an interactive live event using museum artefacts, live gaming, art, Minecraft and archeology. Using six large scale projections from the video game Minecraft, featuring a topographical Cumbrian landscape, including a partially constructed Hadrian’s Wall. Visitors to the museum were given the opportunity to visit an online Minecraft world and play live with other people from around the world, including working with the museum archeologist to build a Roman Fort and parts of Hadrian’s Wall in Minecraft. Alongside this, the museum archaeologist showed Roman artefacts not usually on display, giving people a chance to discover them in a new and intimate way. The event brought together all different ages, with different backgrounds and involvement with museums, technology, games and creative arts, including the curious few who wanted to find out what on earth it was all about – and everyone got involved in having a go, and having fun.

This is just one way in which Minecraft can be used to engage new audiences with museums, art and culture.Recently, Adam was shortlisted for the Tate Britain IK Prize, celebrating talent in the digital industry. His proposal, TateCraft, invited audiences to take part in an immersive Minecraft adventure, exploring the BP 500 Years of British Art from an entirely new perspective - literally from inside the artwork!

Create a fictitious world in your museum

Irene Haan,
EYE Filmmuseum (The Netherlands)

Designed for the youngest film lovers, EYE has developed a new exhibit called the EYEwalk. Children receive headphones and a tablet on which they see the actual space in the museum building, making it seem as if they are looking through a camera. However, the application plays a film that shows that very museum space with actors re-enacting pivotal situations in film history combined with archival footage.

For 15 minutes, the EYEwalk offers many thrills and spills by effectively using film effects and film history. With the successful videowalk EYE engages children with film history and shows a glimpse of the films and pre-cinema instruments the museum has to offer.

Touch Van Gogh and be touched

Marthe de Vet & Jolein van Kregten,
Van Gogh Museum (The Netherlands)

In recent years, the Van Gogh Museum has conducted extensive technical research into Vincent van Gogh’s working methods. Our findings have shed new light on the world-famous artist and his work. But how can we make the technical information widely accessible to various groups, without scaring them off with incomprehensible tables and X-ray fluorescent spectrographs?

New media, such as multi-touch tablets, has influenced our curation and interpretation of the recent research findings. This has affected our range of educational tools online and onsite, where we now alternate works of art with hands-on methods, giving our public a vivid look at the artist – and the researchers – at work.

Museum on the Market: Recollecting the past with AR

Ferry Piekart,
Twnkls Augmented Reality (The Netherlands)

A brand new open-air museum is created in Spijkenisse. It can’t be seen with the naked eye though. The museum is built entirely in augmented reality. A smartphone or tablet with the Museum on the Market app is needed to see the exhibition. The museum reconstructs the old village that used to be on the market square in 3D, which also includes an audio tour. At first, this seems pretty straightforward. But constructing the old village in 3D seemed an impossible task, since there didn’t seem to be enough visual information to build the 3D buildings. At least, this information wasn’t available in archives, museums or photobooks.

The information, however, WAS available in the heads of numerous residents though. They only had to get it out of them…and the AR proved to be an idea tool to make people talk. Ferry and his team used AR as a tool to power crowdsourcing in order to fill the blanks in the archived information. The intriguing concept of ‘AR elicitation’ was born: using AR to make people talk.

Touch, Love, and Museum Data: How digital and physical "touch" work together to make our world a better place.

Colleen Dilenschneider,

IMPACTS (USA)

Let’s talk about touch, love, and museum data. Colleen Dilenschneider, the Chief Market Engagement Officer of IMPACTS Research & Development, uses “big data” to reveal audience engagement opportunities for museums. Her analysis offers a compelling strategy for the financial sustainability and mission delivery of museums worldwide: The most innovative, successful museums understand the public’s need for a loving touch. Dilenschneider will share data about the critical ways that “digital touch” and face-­‐to-­‐ face communication (“physical touch”) – two methods of communication that are too often perceived as at-­‐odds with one another -­‐ increasingly work together to create an unstoppable force in delivering extraordinary experiences for museum visitors. Supported by compelling data concerning audience motivations, visitor satisfaction, and insight into the types of experiences that people most crave and cherish in a museum experience, Dilenschneider demonstrates that “touching” is essential to gaining advocacy and support…and how these loving touches at museums are already making our world a better place.

MUSEUMCAMP: IDEAS – DISCUSSIONS – TOPICS

Mar Dixon & Linda Spurdle,

MuseumCamp (UK)

Mar Dixon and Linda Spurdle founded MuseumCamp in 2011 after attending one too many conferences when the real conversations happened at the coffee break (MuseumNext being the exception!)

MuseumCamp is made up. Seriously! The idea behind MuseumCamp is we want the people attending to talk about issues that are important to YOU – not what we feel is important, or topics we know are ‘most popular’. This is about ideas, brought on the day that the participants decide to talk about.

The list of topics from prior events include: Teens in Museums, social media, funding, Museums at Night, Wikipedia, how to embrace apprenticeship, curating and more. The smallest ideas to the biggest – all are encouraged.

Getting Better: How Multimedia Guides and Art are Helping Hospital Patients

Andrew Nugée,

imagineear (United Kingdom)

Art makes people in hospital better, faster. With over 1,000 pieces of art on its patients’ walls, this is something that Chelsea and Westminster Hospital have heavily invested in. Wanting to increase the effects that their collection had, imagineear began working with them in 2012 to produce a multimedia guide for patients, their visitors and the general public alike.

Already a fast-growing field, the hospital began the project by carrying out its own research into how the arts could help their patients; the multimedia guide and its aims were directly informed by this. Feedback has been exclusively positive, making the delivery of the next stage of the project in the coming months a fascinating time. With a project that continues to develop and evidence of benefits only getting stronger, the possibilities for the future in this field are very exciting.

Float: a mobile ‘personal response’ app

Jackie Antig,
Ian Potter Museum of Art, University of Melbourne (Australia)

The Ian Potter Museum of Art have developed an app for their museum called Float. Most museum apps tell you the boring stuff, giving you information about what you’re already seeing. Float, however, wants to know what YOU think about what you’re seeing, and linking this through big, universal concepts.Which artworks make you think about time, hope, sadness, perplexity, sex, love, joy…and why?

Using location-sensitive technology that tracks your movement around the space, Float records your thoughts about the artworks and lets you see what other people thought about the same artwork or concepts.

Words That Heal: Lessons from a pop-up exhibition

Ngaire Blankenburg & Muna Faisal Algurg,
Lord Cultural Resources & Dubai Culture and Arts Authority (Canada & Dubai)

When someone you care about is taken sick or injured, it’s hard to know what to say. Medical professionals too can be at a loss for words lapsing into ‘science-speak’ at difficult moments. The ‘Words that Heal’ exhibition is a participative, technology rich pop-up exhibition opening in a main hospital in Dubai, in February 2014. Diverse patients share the words or actions that have made them feel better – whether 50 years ago or a few minutes ago – being gathered through a participative social media campaign.

C-You: the connected experience

Sébastien Cursan,
Cap Sciences (France)

So many museums and science centres struggle to attract a 15-25 year-old audience. Knowing that Generation Y is the most technology-orientated generation - born with the Internet, using smartphones and other digital technology – Cap Sciences has decided to redefine the dialogue with this generation of young people around digital media use.

The C-You project offers new platforms that include different types of interactions such as the web, exhibitions, smartphones and uses imaginative storytelling to link them together. Gamification and collaborative processes are there to provide personalization and ‘funability’ in order to meet the generation Y expectations. The presentation will focus on the C-You development process and what can be learnt from it.

DIY Museum Collections Online

Rick Lawrence,

Royal Albert Memorial Museum & Art Gallery (UK)

What’s the best way to open up a museum’s collections data? An off the shelf solution or online delivery of existing assets? With limited resources at RAMM we decided to deliver collections content online without changing our internal collections database. As well as an online database we wanted to include themes, commenting and an API. This talk reviews the decision making process and benefits of our pragmatic approach.

Digitally Capturing the Shipping Galleries

Daniel Evans & William Trossell,
Science Museum, London (United Kingdom)

Utilising cutting edge 3D laser scanning technology, the Science Museum, ScanLAB Projects and the Civil, Environmental and Geomatic Engineering, UCL have captured the entire Shipping Galleries at the Science Museum in perfect detail down to the last millimetre.

Two billion precisely measured points were recorded from 275 laser scans of the galleries by ScanLAB Projects. The data shown in the animation represents only a 10^th of the total information collected, something both ScanLAB Projects and the Science Museum are working towards releasing as part of a virtual museum.

Story Drop – Museum Tales go to Town

Kevin Bacon,
Royal Pavilion & Museums, Brighton & Hove (United Kingdom)

Story Drop is a smartphone app that allows RPM to tell stories about its collections outside of the museum, by embedding them in physical locations in Brighton & Hove. This presentation will talk about the ideas behind the app, and the ambition to make local heritage a more pervasive experience.

Kevin will discuss the audience response, how they are using the app as a platform for community created stories and how flexible CMS allows us to experiment with different types of content and voice. He will also reference the problems of developing experimental digital initiatives in a large regional museum.

Unique Visitors: A Social recommendation tool to create unique experiences for museum visitors

Ana Basso
Unique Visitors Barcelona (Spain)

Unique Visitors both created and implemented a new social recommendation web/app platform for visiting museums. This app allows users to create and then share itineraries for visiting cultural venues, allowing them to add comments if they wish and explore the pieces they are viewing in more detail.

Teaming up with Museo Nacional d’Art de Catalunya (MNAC) and Fundació Joan Miró meant that the project was awarded the Cultural Institute of Barcelona City Council’s ‘most innovative cultural app of 2013’ award. Since then, it has received much attention from the local and national press, as well as international specialized media.

In this talk, Ana will give an overview of the app and revisit the difficulties, successes and mistakes they were able to detect during the process.

The Great North Museum social

After our first day of talks filled with learning, our second social event is held in Newcastle’s Great North Museum. With the whole gallery open to explore, this is the perfect setting to network with your fellow delegates in a more relaxed environment while having some drinks and canapés.

Access anywhere: From culture bites to smart cities...

Jessica Taylor & Sam Billington,
Antenna International (United Kingdom)

In this talk, Jessica and Sam will highlight the potential for museums to create compelling visitor experiences outside their walls.

Drawing on non-museum sector examples (Motorola, Google, Smart City agenda) and plans for Talking Statues, a major public digital engagement project by Antenna and Sing London due to launch in mid-2014, they will lay out an ambitious vision to enable museums to collaborate with one another, create digital storytelling ‘corridors’ in our city streets and engage with the general public in totally new ways.

A Science of Happiness? Towards a Timeless Model of Visitor Engagement

Shelley Mannion,

British Museum (UK)

What do we really mean by happiness and what is its relationship to engagement? This talk sets contemporary models of engagement alongside ancient Buddhist wisdom in an attempt to move towards a more sophisticated and enduring model of how visitors relate to museums and their collections. Buddhism, which the Dalai Lama calls a science of the mind, offers an incredibly detailed description of what constitutes happiness. Grounded in the meditative experience of practitioners as well as modern scientific research, it challenges conventional notions of enjoyment and learning we currently employ and subverts our notions of what success is. Can this approach inform our task of achieving quantifiable increases in well-being among our visitors?

These questions are examined against the backdrop of the British Museum’s permanent galleries, where visitors browse in the spectre of ancient philosophers. Over the past five years, the museum’s Samsung Digital Discovery Centre has pushed the boundaries of traditional museum education through a series of mobile applications. These applications demonstrate how digital technology can achieve spiritual and emotional as well as intellectual learning outcomes, particularly on the challenging terrain of religious art.

MASTERCLASS: An Integrated Approach to Search Marketing

Marty Hayes,

Venture Stream (UK)

The term ‘search marketing’ covers a broad spectrum of digital marketing practices, techniques and channels; each one connected by one thing – the consumer. Search engine optimisation, content marketing, online PR, paid search – these areas may appear to complex and confusing, but once you understand that each one is underpinned by the user and their intent then we can begin to make more sense of this ever-changing landscape.

Throughout An Integrated Approach to Search Marketing we will examine how search marketing has evolved and what that means for those who currently operate in this channel, and for those who have not yet embarked on a search marketing campaign. We will look at what an integrated approach to search marketing looks like; tackling high impact areas including research, strategy and execution. Understanding the terms and looking at the component parts does not make for an effective strategy, and so we will also offer an insight into how to look for opportunities in your market, and you can leverage your own brand and associated assets to increase search visibility, improve user experience, and offer a more holistic, engaging and rewarding digital experience.

Art + Technology: Pursuing Purposeful Failure

Amy Heibel,

LACMA (USA)

Often we talk about the role of technology in the museum from a pragmatic point of view: as a supporting player in facilitating communication, education, and operations. But what about “impractical” applications of technology, as raw material and platform for art? The Art + Technology Lab at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is in its inaugural year, supporting several artist projects with financial and in-kind assistance from corporate sponsors and independent advisors, including representatives from Google, DAQRI, NVIDIA, Gensler, SpaceX, Jet Propulsion Labs, and UC Berkeley. The Lab builds on a tradition that began at LACMA in the late 1960s of pairing artists and technology companies. Few pairings resulted in a finished work of art, yet the program has an enduring legacy. What is the role of an R&D lab inside in the museum? What does it mean to build a capacity for purposeful failure, an express intention of the Lab? What risks are inherent in such an enterprise? While it is still too early to generalise about the experiment at LACMA, the talk will explore the ups and downs of the first year, what motivates the participants, and how the Lab fits a niche in terms of audience development. Amy will also talk about how the same principles that drive the Lab can inform smaller, one-off museum projects. More information: lacma.org/Lab

Experimonth: Know yourself, through science.

Beck Tench,

Experimonth (USA)

What started as a set of personal new years resolutions has turned into a way for the Museum of Life and Science in Durham, NC to interact with a new audience (adults goofing off at work) and its local science researchers. Learn how Experimonth was born, how the idea evolved into a new role for science centres, what we’ve learned from collaborating with researchers, and find out what happens when you ask folks to collect data about their lives and emotions.

A New Museum Engagement with Data-centered Community Story Archiving System

Hosan Kim & Sunhyuck Kim,
Lock Museum, Urban-Play (Seoul, Korea)

This project is the first archiving project in Seoul, Korea that is focused on the stories of the Ewhadong people. It was a collaboration project with the Lock Museum located in Ewhadong and URBANPLAY, a story experience company.

They continued the project under three development strategies for a community based story archiving system. The first strategy was ‘to increase search possibility of community story archive’. The more searchable the archive data was, the more valuable the data turned out to be.

The second strategy was ‘to develop semantic element within people’s story’. They collected the people’s stories and linked them by elements that gave the possibility of semantic search among their memory.

The third strategy was ‘to encourage crowd-sourcing from public experience’. They added a comment function that enabled people to write their experiences by mobile during the exhibition period.

MASTERCLASS: Opportunities for Digital Excellence with a little help from Michelangelo

Gavin Mallory & Chris How,

Cogapp (UK)

This interactive masterclass will explore the complexities of digital project management through the prism of Michelangelo’s magnificent artwork, the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo delivered this masterpiece in the face of feature creep, creative tension, slipped deadlines and unreasonable demands. Cogapp’s digital masterclass, informed by the nearly 30 years of experience, will give strategies and practical advice on how to achieve a similar degree of excellence for your digital endeavours no matter what obstacles you might face.

This masterclass will give you some usable tips to take away and test out on your own digital projects. It will be fun and interactive with post it notes, card sorting and art.

Using Social Media to Personalise the Exhibition Experience

Mikolai Napieralski,
Orientalist Museum, Doha (Qatar)

If museums want to attract a younger, more diverse audience, they need to embrace social media and personalise the exhibit experience.

This talk will explain how museums and curators can compliment traditional campaigns with interactive social media initiatives. By looking beyond the physical objects on display and tapping into broader underlying themes, museums can introduce social media initiatives that greatly expand an exhibitions digital reach.

Using real world examples, this talk will showcase how an exhibit on 16^th Century Ottoman artwork become a successful Instagram contest, and a collection of Orientalist art was curated by a Pinterest campaign.

Social Media for Museums: The Russian Experience

Anna Mikhailova,
State Historical Museum Moscow & University of Leicester - School of Museum Studies (Russia)

This presentation tells the story of how the State Historical Museum in Moscow, Russia uses social media to engage with new individual visitors and invite them to the museum. Anna joined the team in April 2013 and since then, a large number of social media projects have been launched.

The presentation summarises this experience and analyses the results achieved, not just successful ones but also some failures.

Personalisation and the Modern Day Museum Experience

Cybelle Jones,
Gallagher & Associates (USA)

Our audiences increasingly expect experiences which are tailored to them. How are museums moving beyond one-size fits all to accommodate the different needs of individuals?

Today, we are accustomed to shaping and adding to our own experience. Visitors want engagement that is real, visceral and participatory. A successful exhibition must give visitors what they came for, but also intrigue them with what they never expected. It must speak clearly to people of varied ages, experiences, and backgrounds, yet provide all with context and an emotional engagement relevant to their personal perspectives. The trend towards personalization has created an ever-changing landscape of layered visitor experiences through the social experience that it provides.

As a leader in the industry, Gallagher & Associates will utilise several of their signature projects to illustrate how they have created personalised, user-driven experiences. They will also show examples of effective ways to engage visitors, creating multiple ways for them to access the stories and collections, and encouraging them to become participants in the overall experience.

Making History Available to All

Martin Gebhardt,
History Management, adidas AG (Germany)

The adidas archive reveals adidas’ history and heritage online for the first time and it is available to all. Since its foundation in 2009, the History Management team has worked to preserve the company’s history as well as exhibiting and communicating it to wider audiences.

With the adidas archive, they have created a platform that allows users to access information, read fascinating stories and look at product details from various sports and fashion areas. But it doesn’t stop there: it’s been a challenge to incorporate social media and mobile access. Now the History Management team are aiming to make their brand exhibition, Walk of Fame, become part of the adidas archive and thus delivering more stories, more content and more excitement…

Everyone's a Critic: MoMA's Adventures in Social Media featuring ART140

Gretchen Scott & Jason Minyo,

The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) & POSSIBLE

Social media has been a cornerstone of The Museum of Modern Art’s digital marketing strategy since 2008, connecting with the museum’s audience through both exhibition-specific and brand-based projects. This year, The Museum of Modern Art collaborated with the digital agency POSSIBLE on ART140, a Twitter project that poses a simple prompt: “What does this work of art make you think?” By inviting the public to share their thoughts and feelings, ART140 hopes to spark a conversation about art with a broad audience.

After launching ART140 at South by Southwest Interactive in March, The Museum of Modern Art and POSSIBLE are working to create data visualizations that reveal how an initial sampling of people react to specific works in the museum’s collection. These findings will inform not just a better understanding of The Museum of Modern Art’s audience, but potentially a shift in how the museum presents these works.

What’s the first rule of Computer Club - talk about Computer Club!

Carolyn Royston, Historic Royal Palaces (UK)

Last year the Digital Media department at Imperial War Museums (IWM) introduced a new museum-wide initiative called Computer Club. Its aim is to provide friendly, informal, fun, hands-on sessions for staff in a non-training like environment to get them excited about digital technology. Computer Club is also an important part of a wider Digital Transformation Strategy that has, at its heart, the necessity to increase the confidence and digital capability of staff so they are able to embed digital instinctively in their work.

Over the last year, Computer Club sessions have included a wide range of topics from learning to use Twitter, making a movie on an iPad, playing computer games and an introduction to basic coding. Sessions have been well-attended by staff at all levels - from directors to visitor services. We recognise people’s attendance at the sessions by giving them specially designed Computer Club stickers. By reaching so many people through Computer Club and getting great feedback, we have been able to demonstrate that there is a tremendous appetite amongst staff to learn about digital technology, whilst also highlighting the importance of delivering an ongoing digital skills development programme for staff in order to support a wider digital transformation strategy in an institution.

This presentation will share the experiences of running Computer Club over the past year. It will focus on some of the practicalities, challenges and benefits. The presentation will also cover how to scale Computer Club so that it can be run in an organisation of any size and with limited resource available.

Open Stage

Jasper Visser,

Inspired by Coffee (The Netherlands)

MuseumNext’s open stage is a high-paced and mixed programme of short talks, videos, demos and - hopefully - some performances in which you can and will participate, as star and audience. Expect fresh ideas, a good laugh and new connections. Bring your camera, snacks and best possible mood and join the celebration of museum innovation.

Mobile: The Story Continues...

Hugh Wallace,

National Museums Scotland (UK)

It’s been four years since National Museums Scotland started using mobile as part of the visitor experience.

Since then, much has changed. Or has it? Hugh will explore the different ways in which National Museums Scotland have tackled audience engagement and interpretation using mobile, and highlight how research and evaluation, cross-organisation working, and piloting new technology all play a vital role in shaping projects.

From the bygone days of QR Codes, to the thrills and spills of Capture the Museum, to experimentation with Bluetooth LE, this session will look at how a range of approaches and technology have all played their part.

Personalisation vs. The Collective Experience?

Holly Hasted,
Cultural Enterprises (Norway)

Technology plays a fantastic role in personalising visitor experiences at museums and cultural attractions. However, we must think strategically about harnessing these technologies in a way that also exploits the most underused unique selling proposition of museums – the collective experience.

When visitors engage with mobile devices or personalised Smart Labels are we depriving them from real 3D human connection? Is there a trade-off between personalisation and collective experience?

This talk will demonstrate how exceptional visitor experiences can be achieved by combining personalisation with a sense of belonging – it’s a winning combination for strategic innovation, even happiness.

The Access App: Help us build it!

Kathy Fredrickson
Peabody Essex Museum (USA)

In this presentation, Kathy describes and pitches the Access App platform the Smithsonian are developing with colleagues and museums across the US. They invite European and other organisations to take part in developing this opensource framework for authoring and crowdsourcing mobile experiences that enable access and further universal design practices in museums.

Inspired by the TAP opensource mobile tour platform and building on a number of different apps already deployed using Roundware, the Access App project fosters collaboration among museums and their audiences to ensure that people can engage with collections in the ways and media they find comfortable and compelling.

Prototyping for Mobile Development: Options, Tools and Techniques

Joe Baskerville,

Cogapp (UK)

Mobile App development doesn’t start with the first line of code. Engaging App experiences originate from multi-disciplinary environments; tech, design, UX and business input are all essential. All member of the team can be involved in exploring and creating testable ideas, whatever their level of technical ability. Diving directly into code before having fully tested an idea, on real users devices, can be costly.

This session will give an overview of the available prototyping options, running through the fidelity spectrum from lo to hi. All attempting the same goal:

- define ideas

- get user feedback

- determine technical approaches

- resolve arguments

Joe will investigate a variety of tools and techniques that can help ensure ideas are fully realised before the dirty work of coding finally begins.

Re:Making the Museum – doing it differently for a happier city

Hannah Fox,
Derby Museums (United Kingdom)

When they failed to get the funding to refurbish Derby’s Silk Mill Museum, they could have packed up and gone home. Instead, the museum decided on a different option. They mothballed the building and started experimenting – asking people what they thought they should do, and then Derby Museums did some of it – but more that that, the public did it with us.

Re:Make is a programme of rebuilding the museum from the inside out, co-making, co-building, co-producing everything with people who feel passionately about what makes the museum feel special; the collections, the building, the city and themselves.

Museum + Happiness = MORE Happiness!

Carlotta Margarone,
Palazzo Madama (Italy)

Last January, Palazzo Madama launched the first Italian crowdfunding campaign to acquire a work of art, a 42-piece Meissen porcelain service dating from around 1730, which once belonged to the Taparelli d’Azeglio family of Turin. The service was going to be sold in London for £66,000 (around €80,000). In two months the museum raised €96,203.90 from 1591 contributors. This strategy has underlined the importance of visitors through listening, caring and welcoming, creating new policies and visitor-centred activities, implementing and widening the social media network, sponsoring a sense of citizenship and community: all this has given rise to a warm fuzzy sensation – the bond that people experience when something touches them, inspiring them to action.

This case study will show how it is possible for a small museum (14 people; 150,000 visitors/year), reach the ambitious goal of funding a project with the help of the community. It will also show how work on the ‘classic’ themes like social engagement, community building, strategy management, on site and online, could result in a successful crowdfunding campaign.

Access anywhere, access any way, access happiness

Andrew Lewis,
Victoria and Albert Museum (United Kingdom)

We live our lives through screen media. Always with us, always on, swapping between devices, using screens simultaneously, switching to and from moods and modes - it’s just how it is. This churning change is daunting for museums to cope with, but the answer is simple. Think like users and give them what they love in ways that make their life better or easier. Maybe this is delight in beauty or ideas, maybe just simply something that is easy to use. By looking at user data and making knowledge data accessible, these things can be achieved.

This session is all about giving insight into data, emotion and visitor-focused to provide services on multiple devices. It focuses on user data, social-trend data, digital assets as data and how data is the key to having any chance of remaining flexible enough to the delivery of services as societal digital usage shifts. It looks at affective factors in service design: what makes people happy, whether it is good content, or just simply delivered in a way that suits their device of choice or context-driven mood.

Session attendees should come away with charged thinking and ideas that will help them make small, but effective changes that will improve their services for real life use.