Closing keynote given at EuropeanaTech 2015 at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris, 13 February 2015. The talk introduced the choices made in embedding digital experiences at the heart of both the Cooper Hewitt's online and in-museum experiences, before positing that these are now the base level for a museum. Much of these choices were made at both the API and interface levels but have impacted the way in which visitors to both the website and museum behave. It closes with a caution that even these changes aren't enough to deal with the challenges of digital-born objects that will increasingly become part of every museum's collection (and hence also pose challenges for national and transnational aggregators like Europeana.

1. @sebchan
director of digital & emerging media
labs.cooperhewitt.org | freshandnew.org

2. cooper hewitt smithsonian design museum

3. powerhouse museum sydney

4. just a minor
renovation

6. a ‘design museum’ sits between the art
museum and the science museum. it can
draw attention to the processes,
choices, human decisions in the making,
not just the finished object

7. assumptions:
everything on display should be online
online content should be rich, detailed, connected
digital content in galleries should be context-aware
other collections should be visible in exhibitions
everything should be managed with a mesh of systems
interfaces should avoid ‘feeling like a database’

8. digital transformation
as a step change

10. Planter, ""Hyvalysti" Garden Tool Set", 1988. Kai International Co., Ltd. Radio, "Tykho", 1997

15. complete sentences not ‘fields’

16. associated media connected to records

17. vast amount of minimal metadata

18. “seamful-ness”

19. working with what we have

20. stability for others to point at/to

21. donor biographies

22. porous collection connected to others

23. interfaces that privilege browsing

24. interfaces that draw attention to details

25. CC0 licensed metadata on GitHub

26. public API drives everything

28. open data
persistent URLs
API driven stack
pervasive
supported by policy changes

29. assumptions:
everything on display should be online
online content should be rich, detailed, connected
digital content in galleries should be context-aware
other collections should be visible in exhibitions
everything should be managed with a mesh of systems
interfaces should avoid ‘feeling like a database’

30. search is a niche solution
to a broad problem

31. “people do not visit
museums to perform
a search”

32. 26
GETTING YOU AWAY FROM YOUR PHONE
AND BRINGING YOU CLOSER TO DESIGN
THIS IS
LOCAL PROJECTS
ENTRY TECH:
PEN
TICKETING
TABLE
ETC
PUBLIC - ENTRY TECHFIRST FLOOR- ENTRY TECH
initial local projects concept art for pen

33. early UX video storyboarding

35. 3d printed shell protypes

36. NFC reader capacitive stylus

38. tl;dr version:
“it bookmarks the web
while you walk around
the museum”

39. immersion room in action

40. 84” 4k collection tables

41. consistent interfaces

42. personal visit diaries

43. increased visitor diversity
increased dwell times
visitor satisfaction
repeat visitation
internal innovation
collecting and exhibition capacity

44. Ross Parry:“post-digital”
“The End of the Beginning :Normativity in the Postdigital
Museum”, Museum Worlds: Advances in Research 1 (2013):
24–39

45. “it is not too difficult to find
evidence today of digital being
naturalized within museums’
visions and articulations of
themselves” (Parry, 2013)

46. we’re reaching the limit
of what we can do with
what we have

47. funding for the next
‘oooh shiny’ is drying up

48. and then …

49. the evaporation of
material culture objects
into systems and
services

50. Chair, "Solid C2", Patrick Jouin , 2009. Digital Media Player, "iPod Nano", Apple, 2009 Mobile Telephone, "iPhone", Apple, 2007

51. Software and Source Code, "Planetary", Bloom Studio, 2011.

52. planetary as source code on github

53. “versioned” objects

55. Urn, "Tall Green Bloom", Micahel Eden, 2012.
Rhinoceros source code "Tall Green Bloom", Micahel Eden, 2012.
objects as surrogates

56. objects that have
their own data

57. Thermostat, "T86 Round", Henry Dreyfuss, Honeywell Inc, 1953 "Nest Learning Thermostat", Nest Labs, 2012

58. objects with data histories

59. we don’t have ways to
exhibit, document, and
store these objects

60. how will aggregators like
Europeana adjust?

61. @sebchan
director of digital & emerging media
labs.cooperhewitt.org | freshandnew.org