Museum Tech 2018: A Digital Festival for Museums
Spontaneous Trips to London are not a regular occurrence for me but when I was offered the chance to attend the Museums Association’s Museum Tech event I knew it would be worth it.
The goal of the Museum Tech ‘festival’ was to highlight how museums can use new developing tech, provide case studies of tech in museums and practical demonstrations. Whilst the term ‘festival’ may be a bit misleading, the event did bring together interesting members of the digital industries, covering a broad range of topics from inclusivity to designing for impact.
After registration and a much-needed cup of tea, the conference began with four speakers covering the development considerations when designing digital for museums. Kicking off the day was Mark Ridge from MySociety which is a not for profit social enterprise, making information accessible to the public. They have worked with the British Museum in the past and much of their ethos could be easily integrated into a museums digital strategy. By building re-usable tech which is available for free, MySociety encourages and drives collaboration between businesses and individuals. One of the key points highlighted by Mark, alongside the need for institutions to be open with their work, was that this openness needs to come from the top and then filter down.
The need for increasing openness and freedom was not only identified within many of the talks at the Museum Tech but also reflected ideas discussed in a Digital Skills for Heritage Careers session I attended the day before. One of the questions posed in the first Q&A session of the day also touched on this, asking who should take the lead in social media. Here again, Mark highlighted that having an open approach to social media can help to keep engagements after a visit.
“More of the staff using social media as individuals can help keep engagement after visit”
The next two speakers of the morning both shared similar themes, principally identifying the ways in which museums can use digital and design them for impact. The first of these speakers was Tonya Nelson, Head of Museums and Collections at UCL who spoke about the ‘Culture is Digital’ project published in March by the DCMS. The second was Alison Webb from Frankly Green and Webb who talked about some things she has learned through helping museums to ensure their digital efforts succeed.
These speakers identified the need for digital in museums to become more integrated throughout the whole museum and not rely on a small set of individuals. The key takeaways from these talks were that digital cannot thrive in isolation and that digital needs to be used to address a need within the audience to empower people to use culture. Tanya highlighted that fewer than 50% of cultural organisations felt they could use digital skilfully and identified that to upskill the workforce it is important to bring expertise into the organisation.
“Begin with the audience, not the idea”
The final speaker of the morning was Robin Christopherson from Ability Net who highlighted that whilst tech can create opportunities for people with disabilities many of the elements used within inclusive design can impact able-bodied individuals as well. We are now in a place where around 60% of views to websites are through mobiles and many of the key elements of inclusive design can be easily transferred to enable more accessible digital products. The key points he highlighted were having easy to read, clear writing, text descriptions for images and ensuring that any websites are configured to allow easy multi-device viewing.
After a Q+A session with the mornings speakers and a break for lunch the second half of the ‘festival’ began. It consisted of four different case studies of digital in museums, beginning with the most high-tech from the Natural History Museum. Hold the World is a new VR experience featuring Sir David Attenborough developed by the Museum in association with Sky and Factory 42. The experience allows the user to go behind-the-scenes in the museum and ‘handle’ some specimens and was released onto several platforms to help increase its reach however the number of users is limited due to the specific tech needed to run it. The specialised tech and scale of this project is out of range for many museums, but the social media strategy used by the team highlighted the need to integrate social media into the development stages and how important it is to capture content as you go along.
The case study from the Tate also used VR, this time within the context of an exhibition, recreating an artists studio. The aim of which was to offer interpretation through emotion and was a cross Tate collaboration with the original approach coming from the curatorial colleagues. The importance of cross team collaboration being again highlighted not only through this case study but also from Màiri Lafferty from the National Gallery Scotland. She talked about her experience working with Frankly Green and Webb to re-address the digital strategy as they had problems with audiences not using the material made for them. Through using 4 small cross-gallery teams to develop quick digital projects, they were able to identify the areas in which their digital strategy needed developing, primarily that whilst working as a unit is important, assigning and sticking to roles is also vital.
The final case study came from Sara Huws from St Fagans and Alison John from Yellow Brick who were presenting their experience developing the Traces app which uses storytelling to interpret the Castle at St Fagans, an under visited area of the museum. The idea of the traces app is to challenge visitor behaviours and give a sense of agency, providing a way for them to play outside a traditional visit. Rather than simply being an audio tour of the gardens surrounding the castle, Traces uses the landscape to enhance the storytelling. One of the most interesting aspects to me is the option to listen to the story with someone else, where the story is the same, but each visitor experiences a different route with the landscape used to create interactions between the listeners.
Overall, I left Museum Tech feeling like I had learned a lot more about the ways in which museums can approach digital and most crucially how important it can be to the museum experience.
Social media and digital can often be viewed by outsiders as a solitary venture but as all the speakers at the festival identified, it is important for digital to be a group effort, integrated in some way into every department. The most important point I’ve taken away from the event however came from Sara Huws who stated that:
‘tech should enhance the experience, not be the experience’
reminding us that museums are cultural storehouses foremostand digital should celebrate this, not distract from it.
