TechStyle

Birth of the transistor

Anyone interested in the birth of the electronic age might want to come along to the museum on Monday, where I'm in conversation with Joel Shurkin, who's written a biography of William Shockley, the Nobel prize winning inventor of the transistor.  Shurkin's book Broken Genius is a great read and I expect the tour around gallery will provide us with numerous insights into the marriage of the transistor and computer as one of the most important since the industrial revolution.

Monday 13th November 2006, 3pm, Making the Modern World Gallery, Free.

Cragside

A highlight of our summer was staying  in a cottage on Lord Armstrong's Cragside estate in Northumberland. Tucked away in the rugged hillside above Rothbury, Cragside brings together landscaped pine trees with Victorian technology.

The house was the first in the world to be lit by hydroelectricity and Amstrong installed many innovative machines to help his staff with the domestic chores. Cragside boasts the first hydraulic lift, used by Armstrong's domestic staff to carry coal and heavy pans between floors, a hydraulic spit, a Turkish steam room for the men, and was one of the earliest installations of Joseph Swan's  'incandescent lamp'.

Armstrong's money initally came from the invention of a hydraulic crane, and then from the foundation of the Elswick Works in the West End of Newcastle. Later he developed the breech-loading gun and moved into armament production and shipbuilding. The firm merged withJoseph Whitworth & Co, later becoming Vickers Armstrong.

Two exhibitions at the V&A

Last week I went to two events at the V&A. The first was a launch of their Culture Online project Every Object Tells a Story developed with Channel 4 and Ultralab. The project is a good example of where the push for User Generated Content relating to museum objects was coming from back in 2002 when Culture Online was just a small Charlie Leadbetter vision for the DCMS. At that time there seemed to be two strands of thinking about what 'culture' and 'audiences' needed online - truly broadband cultural content (some of which can be seen with Stagework but more of which we'd hope to see with the development of a PSP) and User Generated Content (some which has developed elsewhere under the guise of Social Software and the BBC, but there is still very little evidence of this in the cultural sector). Its amazing how these are still the things we bleat on about.

This project goes some of the way in addressing the issues of UGC, and has explored all those critical concerns about factual accuracy, authority of museum sites, IP rights of work submitted and community creation. Its not been live long enough to develop a real sense of a growing community, and hopefully the sense of editorial control will soon be subsumed by user enthusiasm. But at the end of the day what projects such as these really have the opportunity to do is influence institutional perception about what the web is for and the strength of community collaboration.

I also popped in to the Touch Me exhibition. An exhibition about this neglected sense was nice, but some of the objects in it seemed misguided. Despite what I originally thought, the SoMo prototype mobile phones were not my cup of tea, making me laugh out loud rather than giving any sense of serious interaction design. But maybe that was there purpose - to get users to think about the way that phone are  used appropriately and inappropriately in social space. Still, electrocuting the loud user didn't seem quite fair.

Its easy to pick on small things in a exhibition, but one thing is clear. Better to be doing things, testing the water, trying things out, than not doing anything. Both of these exhibitions make me wonder at what a live and active place the V&A is at the moment, with constantly changing small, compelling and attractive exhibitions. I'm sure the Shhhh... exhibition was only last week...

Computer History in the New Scientist

The New Scientist ran an article this week about the new enthusiasm for digital history and our work at the Science Museum on computer conservation and digital preservation. The journalist Will Knight came on one of my magnificent tours of the computing collection stores and was so inspired that he took it upon himself to write a short piece on the history of computing. Shame he only quoted me as saying I was an eighties girl, and failed to attribute any of the great intellectual and historical insights I passed on to him!

Hunkin's Objects

Is it just me or are our objects, and in turn Collections, coming back in to fashion? Mark Jones' piece in June's Museums Journal points out there is no point having rare objects and important collections if we don't have the knowledge to talk about them. Tessa Jowell stresses the importance of Collections being' at the heart of all museums do' in Understanding the Future: Museums and 21st Century Life.

Then a piece in this month's Museum Practice on Tim Hunkin nicely reminds us that museums don't need to revolutionise their spaces to refresh and rejuvinate them. He focuses on entertainment and what people actually look at - the objects. He reminds us that objects inspire people to tell their friends they've seen.

Hunkin might be Old Skool but approach to never fails to be refreshing. And he has a realistic method of ensuring interactives stay working - design them with the maintence people and make the moving parts easy to access.

Two summers ago I took the kids down to Southwold pier and we happily threw our pounds into the coin-op machines. It was only when we took a trip in a submarine under the sea to meet the pollution of the North Sea and a shark that the kids became so freeked out we had to leave quickly.

European Design

I came across the European Design Show a day too early. I had come to see WEEE man, but he'd gone on tour that morning, so I had a sunny afternoon to kill and ended up at the Design Museum. I thought I'd be interested in the web design, computer games, graphics and ceramics, but was amazed when I was more taken aback by the array of cloud and jellyfish lights that made me want to just relax in a squishy sofa and admire the view.

Then there was the blacker than black black ink from the ever inventive National Physical Laboratory. Supposedly 25 times blacker than black paint its called Super Black. Yes, black is the new black. They have come a long way since the days of the Pilot Ace computer!

Not so surprising though that I was mainly taken in by 'The technology story', with products and processes from the Belgium company Materialise. They have developed software that applys the stereolithography and sintering processes invented in the 1980s to make prototypes for the automotive and aerospace industries, to the production of everyday plastic objects. Mass production or simple craft?

Steam keenies at Ironbridge

Blists Hill wrought ironworks
Originally uploaded by TechStyle.

Blists Hill is re-enactment heaven - from a Victorian pharmacy to a replica of the Trevithick locomotive, it gives its visitors a real experience. The Victorian town at Coalbrookdale is a wonderful example of how industry and science museum volunteers preserve old skills and making themselves the life and soul of the place. We had a great day chewing inedible licorice, riding the cart and trying to explain what coal was to the kids. The moody wrought iron works were my own personal favourites, but the kids liked the Victorian kids bedroom for three.

Folksonomy

Its always good when ideas come together from lots of sources. On the plane over I read Bruce Sterling's Wired article on Folksonomy. Then one of the most interesting workshops at Museum and the Web 2005 was one on 'Cataloguing by Crowd' by Susan Chun from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The idea is that you can use the network to do your keyword cataloguing through games such as ESP. It will send shudders down the spines of museum information architects, but may mean you actually end up with the keywords that people use to search.