The Cooper Hewitt museum, interactive technology and service design
Reimagining the Cooper Hewitt
“Since 1976, the Smithsonian’s Cooper Hewitt museum in New York has been housed in one of the most glorious mansions from the city’s most glorious age of wealth and extravagance, the 1902 home of Andrew Carnegie. And the problem has always been: It’s the wrong kind of glory. . . a collection of objects that has never quite seemed at home amidst the opulence and grandeur of the neo-Georgian stone and brick pile on Fifth Avenue.” (Phillip Kennicott, 2014) [1]
From the beginning, the physical context of the Cooper Hewitt has provided an architectural challenge for the overall accessibility and success of the museum. With its high fences, ornate rooms and residential planning, Andrew Carnegie’s 20th century private home is a unique exhibition environment. Described by Gurian (2005) as ‘threshold fear’ [2], the mansion’s glorious settings had become a physical barrier that prevented visitors interacting in activities meant for them.
By the early 2000’s, the Cooper Hewitt’s reputation was that of “a sleepy institution hampered by its setting in the ornate turn-of-the-century Carnegie Mansion” (Pogrebin, 2007) [3]. A collection, fundamentally focused on ideas of innovation and contemporary problem solving through the study of design, was slowly being forgotten behind the museum’s stained glass windows. With low visitation and concerns being raised about long-term viability [4], the museum recognised its need to initiate a series of architectural and social interventions.
Successful fundraising for a major redevelopment began under Deputy Director (now Director) Caroline Baumann, initially conceived of as a two year, $64m renovation. This would eventually grow into a three year, $91m project that enabled a much broader reimagining of the institution’s visitor strategy. Scheduled for reopening in 2014, this “experience makeover” (Chan and Cope, 2015) provided a unique context for design thinking and intervention to occur. With a specific focus on the tools and processes of service design, the following post shows how the Cooper Hewitt used this opportunity to change from a “sleepy” museum into a leader in museum technology and visitor experiences.
Digital & Emerging Media and the pen
To start this new reimagining, the museum formed an independent department called Digital & Emerging Media (D&EM) at the end of 2011. With the hiring of a Director of D&EM, Sebastian Chan, the team expanded and began focusing on growing the museum’s digital presence. Described by Tristan Cooke as “The Carve” [5], D&EM became a beacon for the new vision of Cooper Hewitt in the rest of the organisation and a driving force behind a series of technological interventions.
D&EM’s design process started with an invitation to David Walsh, Director of Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art (MONA). Speaking to the museum staff, Walsh explained how he had abandoned object labels at MONA and developed his mobile guide, The O [6]. Whilst Cooper Hewitt chose not to implement The O, Walsh’s talk helped the museum “crack open some of the internal thinking about the way ‘things should be’ and allowed the museum to start to consider ‘what could be’.” (Chan and Cope, 2015)
D&EM also worked closely with exhibition architects Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) [7] and media designers Local Projects [8] throughout the concept phase. After scoping a series of technological interventions for the museum, Local Projects proposed creating an interactive pen [9] that would unite all the interactive experiences together. The pen would be a “system-wide platform, your ticket, your identity throughout the museum, how you make purchases, making you an active visitor, getting you away from your phone and closer to design.” (Local Projects, 2012)
A paper exploring the design and production of the final pen was written by Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope in 2015. Tasked to follow this new technology from concept to final integration into the museum, they describe a process that borrows tools from a suite of different design disciplines. One of these disciplines is Service Design.
Using Service Design
Cooper Hewitt’s D&EM used a series of service design techniques to find a way to best integrate the pen into the new museum. Whilst these techniques are not unique to the discipline, service design’s strength lies in its ability to take a holistic design approach to a problem or artefact [1o]. By identifying the museum experience as a service, D&EM were able to shift the focus of the pen from simply being about the technology to how technology could shape the whole visitor experience.
Rapid prototyping
Rapid prototyping was an integral stage in D&EM’s design process, allowing for early collaboration and understanding between the design team and museum stakeholders. According to Chan and Cope (2015), “in building an internal physical prototype, the value of the project started to become more real to the rest of the museum; evidence of the things they had previously only seen in presentation slides actually working.”
Rapid prototyping of the pen also allowed the team to immediately test the object in its context. Being a cyclical process, it created early opportunities for design iterations shaped by the visitor service it was providing.
Journey mapping
With early pen prototypes in progress, D&EM also produced a short in-house video to create an understanding of the pen within the museum. Based on an idealised visitor journey, the video became an invaluable tool for highlighting early issues that Cooper Hewitt would need to address for the pen’s successful integration within the museum.
The new Cooper Hewitt
The pen was officially launched on March 10, 2015. In the following 75 days, museum staff distributed 33,195 pens with a take up rate of over ninety-three percent. With these pens, 726,328 objects were collected and 29,219 visitor-made designs were saved.
The success of the pen lies not in the artefact itself, but in the fact that visitor have now started “exploring the breadth of the collection. . . across the whole museum” (Chan and Cope, 2015). Ornate rooms that were once barriers to interaction have become exciting hideaways where visitors are invited to collect objects and make designs. Cooper Hewitt’s ambitious integration of a technology is an example of a holistic approach to the visitor experience. With a design process focused on the overall service the museum provides, Cooper Hewitt created a journey built around its visitors.
“At a time when so many museums seem intent on new spaces for new design and new art [ …], it’s a relief that the Cooper Hewitt finally spent the time and the money to make their 1902 Carnegie Mansion sing.” (Lange, 2014) [11]
References:
[1] Kennicott, P(2014), Cooper Hewitt design museum’s artful renovation matches mansion to mission
https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/museums/cooper-hewitt-design-museums-artful-renovation-matches-mansion-to-mission/2014/11/26/10ccbfd6-741e-11e4-9c9f-a37e29e80cd5_story.html
[2] Gurian, E (2005), Threshold Fear, in Macleod, S. (ed), Reshaping Museum Space: Architecture, Design, Exhibitions, London, Routledge
http://www.egurian.com/omnium-gatherum/museum-issues/community/accessibility/threshold-fear
[3] Pogrebin, R (2007), Cooper-Hewitt Is Determined to Expand, Despite a Host of Critics
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/28/arts/design/28coop.html?_r=0
[4] Chan, S and Cope, A (2015), Strategies against architecture: interactive media and transformative technology at Cooper Hewitt
http://mw2015.museumsandtheweb.com/paper/strategies-against-architecture-interactive-media-and-transformative-technology-at-cooper-hewitt/
[5] Cooke, T (2016), The 3 ways to re-design your organisation by design to design
https://medium.com/@humansindesign/the-3-ways-to-re-design-your-organisation-by-design-to-design-a0856afee6e3#.xpas887cq
[6] Museum of Old and New Art, The O
https://www.mona.net.au/theo
[7] Diller Scofidio + Renfro
http://www.dsrny.com
[8] Local Projects
https://localprojects.net/
[9] Cooper Hewitt (2016), Using the pen
http://www.cooperhewitt.org/events/current-exhibitions/using-the-pen/
[10] Akama, Y (2009), Warts-and-all: the real practice of service design
http://servicedesign.net.au/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Warts-and-All-%E2%80%93-Akama-2009.pdf
[11] Lange, A (2014), The New Cooper Hewitt
http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/new-cooper-hewitt
