On Wednesday, I took a visit to the Norman Rockwell Museum in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. Norman Rockwell was responsible for many of the Saturday Evening Post’s covers. At the museum we were able to see many of his paintings and all of the covers of the Post. To learn more about the museum, visit their website. To learn more about Norman Rockwell, click here.
The Norman Rockwell Museum is one of the nicer museums I have been too. Visiting it got me thinking about the future of museums. Here are some experiences and features that you might find as part of a museum in the near future.
Interactivity
-This should include online and in the actual museum.
-Huge digital walls where you can control what art is displayed. Drag and drop images onto the screen and arrange them how you want.
-Visitors become curators by voting for what they want to see displayed as physical, original work.
Online Experience
-Give people the tools to tell others what they saw at the museum
-Create and share art and creations online
-Museum can hold online contest or scavenger hunts throughout the museum.
-A website similar to coudal.com where it is updated with links to new online resources everyday.
-Create an online community.
Other Ideas
-The use of text messaging.
-Remix the art and the museum experience.
-Podcast tours
-Headphone jack in the wall next to the painting.
What if this was applied to education. If a teacher was a curator and the classroom was a interactive exhibit that changed each day. Stay tuned, and I will explore this idea in a future post.
I’m not particularly sure much advancement can be made in a museum. The quiet, absorbing nature of museums limits most interactivity with specimens, and there’s not much museum could do online other than transferring the catalogue to the web with pictures. Personal communications online, like the sharing of photos or discussions surrounding a piece are usually not controlled under the electronic roof of the museum’s website. Unless museums are going to have a radical change in their form of communication, from absorption to interactivity, not much is changing.
However, there’s always going to be room for one and the other. Like in my area, there’s the interactive, hands-on science centre and aquarium, then there’s the calm, info-filled art galleries and libraries.
One idea I enjoyed that does work, and has been slowly making the rounds in museums and the like is the audio accompaniment. Whether it’s through audio podcasts, or more interactive, handheld portable audio machines supplied by the museum, audio certainly adds another depth to the gallery. And it streamlines productivity by replacing a tour guide. I could see it evolving to small, tablet-like mini computers who, in addition to playing audio, could also play a short video about the artist, and show more pictures of related art (Plus maps of the building! Save trees!).
Paul - I agree with you that there is a certain feeling in a museum of silence and being able to observe the art. I think that it is still possible to have more online interactivity. At the Normal Rockwell Museum we did get the audio tour handheld devices, in which a painting had a number and you punched it in to hear about it. Thanks for your thoughts.
If you ever get the chance, I highly recommend a visit to the In Flanders Fields museum in Ypres/Ieper in Belgium. This is one of the finest museums I’ve ever had the pleasure of visiting. It is filled with striking interactive exhibits, and is laid out so as to tell the narrative of the First World War. As well as some of your suggestions, they use movement and sound and clever/disconcerting lights, and numerous inter-active kiosks for visitors to engage with.
One of the real masterstrokes is the Participant Ticket given to every visitor. These have the name of a real person from the Great War and a bar-code. As you progress throug the museum, you are invited to scan your ticket and find out what ‘your’ person was doing at various stages of the war. The tickets are fairly evenly spread between combatants and civilians and between those ‘at the front’ and those ‘back home’. This personalising of your journey really helps to bring the museum to life.
I’ve taken several groups of pupils to the museum, and without exception, they are all relieved or saddened as they find out if their person survived or died in the conflict.
Neil- Thanks for sharing. Last year I went down to the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC. We were giving something similar to a participant ticket but we were not able to interact with the exhibits by using it as you said you were able to scan it.