TechStyle

Displaying chips

How do you display a microchip in a museum in a way that is meaningful? And how do you explain the workings of something as ephemeral as data transfer? The Science Museum's latest MacRobert Award display explains the Bluecore chip (the technology behind Bluetooth) from the Cambridge company CSR. It is a great display with retro graphics developed by Dom Robson at BlinkDesign that makes something as unengaging as a chip both eye-catching and informative. And best of all the small window of light with the button and the chip is at the perfect eye level for kids.

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...

Internet history

Yesterday I went to hear Katie Hafner from the NY Times talk at the LSE about the endless paternity debates for the Internet and the role of government funding in innovation. Her book written with her husband was a big influence on me when it came out in 1996, so I was interested to hear where she'd moved on to. It seems shes now interested in - among other things - Digital Preservation, but she still wants to get the facts of the Internet paternity debate right.

Hafner gave a very personal account of her interviews with the 'men of the net' such as J.C.R. Licklider (download his two most important papers here), Larry Roberts, Paul Barran, Donald Davies and Vint Cerf.  She then reitterated Len Kleinrock's hang-up that he doesn't get enough of the credit, but agreed wholeheartedly with Davies' analysis that it was a very liberal interpretation of Kleinrock's dissertation to say it was packet switching, given that it only looked at one node. I must admit I'd always assumed that Donald Davies' paper in 1967 at the ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles was one of the seminal works in the area, and the only true debate was between Davies and Barran. And as they had no problem acknowledging that they'd both tapped into the zeitgeist at the same time, then neither should we.

Later the debate moved on to whether the creation of the Internet is an enditment of capitalism (at this point you can seamlessly interchange 'Internet' with any number of recent inventions - personal computer, computer games..) Why is it that someone at every seminar on the history of technology feels the need to go there, oh these forces for good that could only possibly have come from our own entrepreneurial and democratic structures. What do people think they were doing in the USSR when they created Tetris?!

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.

MMW wins awards

Making the Modern World online won the 'Best of the Web' for Museums and the Web 2005 in Vancouver. We won Best Educational Use and Best Overall Museum Site. All in all the Science Museum came away from the conference looking pretty good, two awards, Mike and Dave did a great presentation on Dana Centre and I gave a paper that went down well for one of the opening session on making MMW with curators.

Rachel on 2 way comms

Rachel on 2 way comms
Originally uploaded by TechStyle.

Breakfast brainstorming the ways that blogs can be used in museums, from curators posts to weblogs tracking exhibition development. Then Gail Durbin led a workshop on way to make your site communicate in two-ways, with lots of examples from the old favourites like iCan and some new ones like Mr Picasso Head.

STIM SSN

I spent yesterday with a lively group  in Birmingham at the Museum's Collection Centre (MCC) on an industrial estate that could have been anywhere in Britain. The aim of the day was to explore what a Subject Specialist Network (SSN) could do for the Science and Industry Museum sector as a whole.

Conversations during the day got me thinking about the form and structure of a 'formal' network (like an SSN) and 'informal' networks such as the socio-technical networks explored by Thomas Hughes in his Networks of Power.  Hughes looked at the role of networks and relevant social groups in creating consensus and stability around technological artefacts. In STS and Actor Network Theory it became vital to create symmetry by reinstating the role of the technological artefact as an actor in the system; it could also be useful to look at how an artefact - either physical or non-physical - functions as a component in a formal network with agreed rules and consensus.

Hughes shows that the role of systems builders, such as Edison, is to strive to increase the size of the system under their control and reduce the size of the environment that is not. These technical and organisational networks acquire goals, direction and momentum - something that is vital for any project or network that it is its initial stages and hopes to encompass the needs of a variety of actors - museums, repositories, objects, archives.

Recovering from Doors

We are back from Doors 8 and its taken us this long to recover.  Not so much of a conference as an experience to be savoured.  (You can see the conference schedule here and the speaker listing here.)  I thought we made a lot of good friends at Doors 5 but this conference took being social one step further as we were all in the crazy mayhem that is Delhi.

The highlights are too many to mention, but include:

Usman Haque's Skyear - where were we when it was realeased into the atmosphere in Cally Park?

Bus journey - cross country to get to Apeejay Media Gallery. Cameron went pale as we headed off towards a the thoroughly modern space (in  contrast to the surrounding streets) containing video art.

Margrit Kennedy - never has the world's economic system seemed so simple

Tony Salvador - Five stories of ethnography from around the world

Used in India - how the use, reuse, recycling, repurposing and repairing of technology and media products in India has a lot to teach us.

Holi party - Wikipedia, Nokia, Nesta and even the British Council get messy

We've returned. We shouild be exhausted but we are refreshed and invigorated.