Open Hardware Belongs in Your Museum: the pre-session chat

This conversation took place as we prepped for our talk “Open Hardware Belongs in Your Museum”, at the Museums & the Web Conference in Los Angeles on April 9th. We designed this poster to guide museum staff through some ideas and projects that would be useful in gallery spaces.

Hardware trouble

Jason: Sometimes you buy hardware, knowing it’s not the right thing exactly, but there’s nothing better out there. So you have to change your exhibit design to fit the hardware — your visitors may not know, but you know you’ve compromised.

Miriam: That happened to us recently, for an installation at Coronado Historic Site in New Mexico- we had to use a tablet but what we wanted was something that would not count touches but recognize specific 3D prints. We found that later in the HP Sprout (which has a camera) but now we’re building our own version with a Raspberry Pi/Pi Cam setup.

Maintenance is hella important

JA: Yeah, and on top of that, there’s the ever-present issue of maintenance — you build something, and (of course) it ends up having a far longer exhibit life than you expected. That’s not bad, but then you have to support it for longer than planned. Which means your proprietary electronics are higher risk — manufacturers could discontinue the components, or go out of business, and the schematics aren’t anywhere to be found.

ML: Right, so open source hardware (OSHW) could solve that for museums who don’t know the length of an exhibit — or, maybe something is going on and off the floor over time. It’s better if it’s well documented and easy to update.

JA: We’re seeing museum technologists switch out old hardware, too — using Raspberry Pi boards to control things that used to be locked down.

ML: That’s definitely happening at my home museum (the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science). Things break, and we replace them with a Pi or an Arduino.

Inexpensive rapid prototyping

JA: I’m new to the museum world, but from what I’ve seen, museums are starting to get on board with rapid prototyping. Like other industries, though, it’s tough to get institutional buy-in on big interactive projects — how will we know it will work? How it will be used? Open source hardware is much less of an up-front financial investment.

ML: I’ll throw fear of starting in here, too — how many museum staff have the physical space for storing partially finished prototypes?

JA: We also want museums to consider how using OSHW serves their mission. It’s another way to connect with their community and visitors and aligns with their goals of accessibility, sharing, and openness.

ML: Museums got on board with open source software pretty early on, and we know from our research that lots of people are using OSHW in museums, but just because it’s the tool they chose, or the cheaper option, not due to ethics, or mandate.

JA: I know! When we asked museum folks why they were using it, we got, “The community support is so much better” and “It’s easier to find documentation, the parts are more robust” — along those lines. The things that make OSHW better for the designers and developers are in line with what museums should do, anyway.

Skate where the puck is going

ML: We also want museum staff to know that the OSHW community includes a variety of fields- research science, farming, and healthcare to name a few. Making connections to those areas can expand your volunteer base, and lead to more engagement.

JA: So, I’m almost done scanning in drawings…. Did you finish that list of parts for the poster? Do you think we should explain what all the sensors do?

ML: We can’t fit anything else on there! Let’s get people familiar with names and appearance, and share some of our trusted resources for tutorials and examples. Public code repositories are great when you know how to use them, but are intimidating if you don’t know what you’re looking for.

JA: We should definitely point out that there’s a role for OSHW in many aspects of museum work. I mean, it’s obvious for exhibit designers, and they are probably already using some of this stuff, but it’s perhaps less obvious for education.

ML: I think that as museum and library makerspaces continue to expand, kids are using Arduino boards and kits like littleBits, so they might already be familiar with the tools. Museum educators can use OSHW to get kids thinking about interaction design and creating experiences.

JA: Let’s wrap up by talking about how museum leadership can support people who want to use open hardware, such as, give your staff more opportunities to share with other museums and ascribe value to what was once simply “the cheapest way.” Do it on purpose!

ML: Let’s wrap up with me saying how much I love this poster! Thank you for staying up all night to finish it. Let’s go share it with everyone!

Miriam Langer is a professor of Media Arts & Technology at New Mexico Highlands University and Jason Alderman is a polymath who codes, draws and bakes bread. They both do a lot of work for museums, and tweet as @arduinogirl and @justsomeguy, respectively.

Our paper, Open Source Hardware Belongs in Your Museum, can be found here: http://mw2016.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/open-hardware-belongs-in-your-museum/