Why our wearable isn’t a bright shiny thing, but an architecture taking lessons learned from existing models.
We have a great challenge in our industry — it’s called the “bright, shiny object syndrome.” Anyone who works in digital in museums will know this well and, likely, you are fighting the good fight at your institution. This means leading people away from that wiz-bang-tech solution and, instead, steering stakeholders toward solutions that may be more holistic. You may have read about our wearable project and thought, “uh oh, here’s a bright shiny object project,” but here’s why it isn’t.
In looking at the engagement model for the Barnes Foundation, there are a couple of influential projects that we’re taking lessons from; one of these — Cooper-Hewitt Pen — I saw from the outside, but the other — ASK Brooklyn Museum — I had first hand experience in creating. Both projects are fascinating because of user interaction and there are golden lessons to learn and bring forward to new projects.
I’m one of those people who loves the Cooper-Hewitt Pen. While I don’t love every single thing about the project, I do think Seb and team solved a lot of issues. These issues shouldn’t be taken lightly; they cracked things that the industry had been struggling with for years.
The team at CH solved the ubiquity problem; every visitor who comes into the museum gets a Pen. More than that, though, the Pen solved the user expectation problem. Most visitors coming to a museum expect a multimedia app, but at the Cooper-Hewitt they get something different. The Pen isn’t a “known experience;” visitors likely have no idea what the Pen is and what it does — that’s one of the project’s greatest strengths. With no user expectations to fight, suddenly the whole world opens a little bit and curiosity takes over.
By contrast the single biggest challenge in the day-to-day implementation of ASK Brooklyn Museum was the user expectation problem. We developed an app that let users chat with a live team of art historians. When visitors figured out that they had a fully personal experience catered directly to their own needs, they would go “wow.” There’s a depth of experience here that we think we really nailed, but the user expectation problem became (and I’m guessing still is) a very big barrier. Download our app and — “you can chat with us in real time,” and people would counter with “you mean it shows us audio and video”…nope, let’s try this again. “You can ask any question” and people will say “you mean it will tell me about the collection.” Simply put, the user expectation of an “app” in a “museum” is a multimedia audio tour and getting over that hump is difficult. Because ASK was developed as an app, there’s a user expectation hill to climb before people even start using it.
In looking at an engagement project for the Barnes, we needed something that we could use as a prototype, but something that would have very little user expectation around it. A wearable is that thing because, while it’s gaining in popularity, it’s not in widespread use. This off the shelf solution means we can develop quickly without a lot of overhead and we can learn the lessons of short-form content delivery through the use of something somewhat “unknown.”
The other good news? This solution is not expensive and we can solve the ubiquity problem by giving every visitor a device. While we won’t be giving a device to every visitor as part of testing, it’s a factor that weighs heavily in our consideration even at these early stages because if we are going to do something different, that will require a different tool. I admire the CH team for building their own hardware and we may get there eventually, but prototyping with the watch allows us to learn some things first. The first part of this pilot will be to test short form content, but the second part will be looking at the viability of the hardware for content delivery.
We’re pretty sure the pilot will teach us things about content and hardware that may lead us in directions unknown, but these previous lessons learned had a hand in our future. We think the wearable is much less of a “bright, shiny object” and, instead, something that’s much more practical solving the experience needs of the Barnes while challenging user expectation.
The Barnes Foundation wearable digital prototype is funded by the Barra Foundation as part of their Catalyst Fund.
Want more info? Read more about the Barnes Wearable on Medium and follow the Barnes Foundation publication, where we’ve got multiple authors writing about our projects.
