Experience Design & Immersive Technologies Recap

Review and discuss the key ideas that came out of the day with co-leads and presenters. More about how this session will be structured soon. Track:Experience Design & Immersive Tech

Transcript

Unknown Speaker 13:55
Welcome, welcome, welcome everybody. Folks are still coming in but as you're coming in. This is gonna be very different from the last few sessions, and sorry if you came here in time you can hear me repeat this as more folks come in, but we're gonna encourage everyone to move your view to gallery to, if you're comfortable turn your microphone on, and at the moment, keep your microphones off but you have control of

Unknown Speaker 14:18
your camera on camera set your camera,

Unknown Speaker 14:22
camera on. Thank you, Robin, turn your camera on, so we can see each other. This is a group discussion. Keep your microphones off if you'd like, but you have control to turn them on. And if you want to keep them on for verbal responses, that's fine, like room in a room together. But as we go through our time together, you'll have the opportunity if you want to share to unmute yourself as well. We're gonna give us one more minute as folks are still coming in and then we'll get started.

Unknown Speaker 15:04
While we're waiting, does anybody have any appropriate museum jokes they'd like to share, you won't be getting any more from me you got all of them earlier. Feel free to put up your hand if you're not comfortable saying it out loud, feel free to put it in the chat. We'll get started in just about 30 seconds. Oh, Max, we barely begun. We barely begun he said I took the ball. Yeah, I took them all right off the web. 100.

Unknown Speaker 15:37
He even even put the link for museum jokes in the chat, of that first of the introduction so they're

Unknown Speaker 15:44
not all appropriate nor acceptable so they stay for work but I grabbed the ones that I thought we might like. Alright, shall we get started, Robin Sam Lee good Yeah, yeah. Right. Welcome everyone to the recap, we've had two and a half plus hours of hearing some from some amazing projects around the world, from some great teams that came together, what our goal is for this next, you know 30 To 45 minutes is to have an open conversation. And if we did the math right, roughly. Everybody saw two presentations and missed another four right so we want to get everyone on the same page. So, roughly what we want to be able to do, whoops, is in under 10 minutes have Robin salmon I just share with you a quick overview of what occurred a highlighter to where the goal is to get to the point where we can have an open conversation this room should be made up of attendees and panelists, this is a space for all of us, but when we come back from our recap. I'll open up the space and invite attendees to ask any questions or any comments, and then we'll lead from there and from there, we'll bring panelists in as well to collaborate in the conversation. So first, why don't we introduce ourselves. I'm Barry Joseph in New York City. As you can see behind me, I work at Barry Joseph consulting, that's my little avatar and was excited to work with Robin and Sam to read all your proposals and hear what you guys all had in mind, it was really fantastic. The two that I went to, I look forward to sharing more about them in a moment. Robin, would you please introduce yourself.

Unknown Speaker 17:15
Yep, I'm Robin white Owen I'm also in Brooklyn New York media combo and I attended the two that I attended today I'm going to do, given a very quick wrap up, but I'm happy to see that there are presenters here both Brett and I think, Sonja is here from or from from them so that if I miss anything important. You guys can step right in and, and clear up the problem.

Unknown Speaker 17:42
Thanks Robin Sam.

Unknown Speaker 17:45
Lou and seminary training engineer working the cultural heritage domain, museums and archives. An external expert for European Commission on topics related to museums archive said that asset management and artificial intelligence. So, that's it.

Unknown Speaker 18:04
Thank you. So let's see the first session, which was 115, Eastern Time. Robin would you talk about. Can't touch this the promise and perils of gestural interaction.

Unknown Speaker 18:15
Yes, so my very quick wrap up first of all there's somebody doing construction in the apartment next door to me and I really hope that you don't hear that noise, it's very distracting. But basically, you know, so when it comes to planning gestural exhibitions, there are really five key things that people need to take into account. And the first one is certainly audience audience awareness and how familiar that people who are going to be participating might actually be with with using gestures to make things happen. So the onboarding process is extremely important. And so that's the first thing I think that people really need to keep in mind. After that it's a question of the hardware and software that you're using and bread, and Kim give a really good overview from the very beginning of computers and software through the Kinect and what's coming up is basically, you know, wearable sensors that people will be able to use to to make gestures have have actions and produce content. And the the next consideration that's really important is to provide enough space for people to make their gestures so that they can actually without hitting each other, and also without occluding each other. So that's a very important consideration when you're designing an exhibition I'm planning to use gestures. And the other thing that's related to that is making sure that the, the graphics that, that are next to the gesture or the gesture experience are very explicit and clear, when they describe what it is that you need to do what gestures, do you need to perform in order to be able to make the content appear. And then of course that leads to content. So that's the next thing that you need to think about is, you know, how does the gesture you want people to do relate to the content that they're going to get, because gestures have meanings, and, and you have to really be sensitive to that. And then that leads right up to access and inclusion, which is another very important consideration because we're talking about physical gestures here, so people. Not everybody can make all the same physical gestures and so that's a really important consideration that you need to take into account when you're designing for these kinds of experiences. So, that's my wrap up.

Unknown Speaker 20:44
Thank you, Robin, and Sam at the same time, I believe you were at climate change and the digital experience developing Arctic adventure at the Museum of Science in Boston. Is that correct.

Unknown Speaker 20:57
Yeah, that's great. Yeah, they the presentation was quite exciting because they what they have done effectively is to put to realize this pace of the artists in the museum. That is not an easy task because the artists are huge and you have to put them in the spaces, and they have done incredible work and accessibility as Robin has mentioned for the other day, and dimension, and the creativity, modeling of their, their activities for users because they have set up, not only just the space, not only projections that some people would say, obvious, they are not obvious, also because they recreated the feeling of the space, and what happens, what is the person's being in the space and feeling as if they weren't artists, so they recreated that space that is not a trivial aspect for museum in particular, because it has to reproduce something that is a dimensionally deep diverse work, and to make it feel as if it is real, all learn from it, and the creativity was really interesting also because they addressed the disability. For persons that had with wheelchairs or had visibility difficulties with with the devices so they created new way, new devices to make the feeling of these activities, and the pictures of people showed effective impact, because, smiling people were images I suppose they were visitors, and in general that was impactful, and they are moving, I asked to them. Are you moving it, or elsewhere, they are going to do it in Venice, so that is huge and transportable. That is interesting. Also because museums typically are not transferred to other places, as if they are a block. So, it is not a pop up Museum. It is really an entire exhibition. So from this point of view that the challenges are really interesting.

Unknown Speaker 23:15
Thank you Sam. Before I share it around in a minute. What I was listening to. I want to remind those who are here and those who came after we started, there's gonna be an open discussion if you need your mic, you can your mics and cameras off, that's fine. We want to encourage you if you feel comfortable to turn your cameras on this is a space for the community to see each other and be seen. And you feel free to keep your mic on as well. Your verbal responses to what we're talking about are also welcome. And after we finished doing a real quick recap of the six sessions that were presented today, so we will then facilitate an open discussion in the community about the different themes that we heard, and things that we're concerned about and thinking about experience design and immersive technologies. Alright, so with that, my session that I went to that was the first one was called Learning from an open approach, activating Smithsonian open access as a commissioning case study. Now, this activating Smithsonian open access, as if someone could unmute themselves, who can pronounce it for me, I know you have a name for the acronym ASL and want to make sure I'm getting it right. So so thank you, that's, that's great. No, not a Shoka Soca. So, okay. So so so SOA is this project that was launched by Cooper Hewitt, specifically their Interaction Lab. And what they did last spring was award seven teams $10,000 to prototype their ideas, they called it creative commissioning and what this presentation was about was about seeing some of the things that were done by having outside creatives, work with this Smithsonian's open database of 2d and 3d objects, but what they also were speaking about was what it meant to do it the way they did it, and the power of creative commissioning. Let me see if I can pull a few things out from that, too. Ryan King was here mentioned that one of the values of the process was the opportunity to mentor the grantees afterwards, he talked about how accessibility was baked into the mentoring sessions, quote, those discussions, establish the baseline and common vocabulary around digital accessibility data dot. And the other thing I wanted to mention was that announcements are made and one was Ryan talking about that. The new creative office of digital transformation was made at the Smithsonian, which I was excited to hear about, and that this department has been established integrate harness and prioritize ongoing digital initiatives as well as create a pan institutional digital strategy. So we both got to hear about something happening across the Smithsonian's, and particularly within the Cooper Hewitt, innovative technique that they use to fund some new ideas of which we heard about a number of them, and some of those folks are here as well. So with that let's move to the second set of sessions. And what we do the same order So Robin, I believe you went to a novel approach literary tools experience design, is that right,

Unknown Speaker 26:07
yes it is, I went and Katie savage and Ksenia Dynkin did a fantastic job of describing what. What a novel approach what that means right I mean we're all used to looking at the idea of exhibitions as stories, basically an exhibition is like a 3d storytelling experience, but we don't usually apply literary literary devices that you might find in a novel to develop developing exhibitions, which is the exercise that they talked about and then walked all of us through. So they decided to choose for literary devices, repetition, vignettes personification and metaphor as as strategies or methodologies for designing components of exhibitions, and to give you. Well, basically, to speed things up. We did a really fun exercise where we were asked, they they gave us a suggestion suppose MC n is doing a pop up museum about the history of computers, and we were invited to think about a metaphor using a literary device of a metaphor to come up with, with, let's see, let's see let's see let's see let's see the metaphor the idea for it is. You choose a metaphor you think about what visitors would feel as a result of choosing that metaphor, what would they do as a result of that metaphor. And then what are the components the physical components that you would use to create the exhibition. So, for this idea of the computer. What metaphor would they hit the Family Computer was specifically, the subject of this exhibition. So, the group that was there started brainstorming what the metaphor for that would be and it was everything from like dining room table to, to a portal a window and Oracle I mean there were 21 of us in the the session and everybody had ideas for what this should be and it was really fun. And then you know we took the idea. Okay, so if it's going to be a portal or a window. How would that what kind of emotions would that elicit from people so people would, they'd be curious, they'd be optimistic, they would, some of them maybe be afraid. And then, what would they do so we talked about what kinds of activities they would do and then finally what the exhibition might look like. And it was really one of the most informative and entertaining sort of group experiences that I can say I participated in, they did a wonderful job.

Unknown Speaker 28:38
Thank you, Robin, and Sam, am I right that you went to expanding and enriching Metadata, through engagement with communities, you're muted Sam, please unmute.

Unknown Speaker 28:57
Yeah. I work at MCC for more than 15 years in the photographic archives in Florence, allinone archives and here what I've seen is that effectively the interest for Metadata is always renewing the topic was addressed from different point of view from one side is that addressing the return on on the traditional way, then added we did a user generated annotations, and also with artificial intelligence. So these three dimensions are very important nowadays they are effectively two completely different, we could say, they mentioned also, because in the scientific side is not what we might search, if we are not experts, they come on user don't use the same words of the experts. What was really interesting is the fact that all of these has also some kind of gender issues related to LGBT vocabulary or two topics that are sensible from ethical point of view of ethnicity of cultural. So, these aspects that in the past were not so much addressed efficiently. Now the there is the sensibility to that. One important aspect that I was under discussion or was also the biases that human brings it with with themselves, when I notating. So, then the session was effective brilliant interesting also on addressing and training, encouraging results researchers to enter in this dimension. So, the aspect of Metadata has addressed in the last point, the aspect of refreshing Metadata because once you annotate your data and you archive, you think it is fix it there. And now that the problem is that probably you need to refresh it from, from different periods, because what is inside that data, it has been done in a period where some kind of bias or whatever has influenced those annotations, and these aspects are quite new in a on the ground, because we are moving from traditional annotations to artificially annotated or come user generated annotations that each of them has some defects, we could say, and these aspects are quite relevant

Unknown Speaker 31:37
DAM Thank you. We've now gone through five of the six that means we're about to hit the sixth one. And after that we'll be opening up the space, that means we'll be turning the attention away from the three of us, to all of us together in the room. So number six, the one that I went to was called is called a journey through transition, but it'd be understandable if you get confused because both of my sessions were largely about Cooper Hewitt in New York City, and about API's, but this one was different from the first one, the first one was about Cooper Hewitt, having designers from outside the museum, work with Smithsonian's larger API. This was about Smithsonian 10 years ago, when they close their doors because we're doing a major renovation, creating a new digital and emerging media department, which made the museum's own API. And this was about looking back at it 10 years later, this was a very unusual API at the time, they built an API to be the infrastructure for not just visitor engagement, but also the website and gallery interact, it's kind of bringing it all together. So, if you're really interested in API's, go back and watch the video, it's all about the sausage of how it was made. And what they did 10 years later, through a design process, it's Cooper Hewitt, they should be using a design process to understand what users need now, from an API, and creating tools to educate others and learn from that fantastic presentation and always of course from the Cooper Hewitt amazing work. So with that, I want to open up the room, and also apologize for not starting with all of you, because what we should have done, we can do now in the chat, please type in, where you're located, you can define where you're located, any way you want. And if you like, share something in a sentence that has either been a highlight for you. From today, something you've heard that was interesting, or as a presenter if it was useful. What was something useful for you about thinking about your work and how to present it. And so let's start with that. And so I'm going to stop talking for a moment as it is watch what people are typing in the chat says art space,

Unknown Speaker 33:36
and also barriers you suggested people feel free to unmute and speak, speak to us all.

Unknown Speaker 33:49
Typing while they're doing that if you're new to Zoom, I don't know if anyone here has new resume but if you are this reaction button on the bottom it's a smiley face it says reactions, you can. At the bottom it says, raise hand and as a yellow. Raise hand, you can click that and we'll do our best all three of us to watch for anyone doing that, I'm going to click on it you'll see what it looks like, you know, a hand pops up in my window it pops me to the left so I'll see if there's something you want to say, I'm also watching in the chat for people who have questions and things that they want to talk about. I see we have folks here from Colombia, from DC from Toronto. Now I see on the bottom is 40 People here I've only seen four people respond so far. There we go. Rachel in Brooklyn. Sara in Corning. I was just reading about Corning today.

Unknown Speaker 34:40
I think it would be interesting to hear from, from some of you all who were at these presentations what your, if you could share some of your reactions to what, what you heard, or similar questions I know there were some people in both of the presentations that I was at are here.

Unknown Speaker 34:59
So Robin, Francis wrote the notes that they enjoyed the Metadata session for instance you comfortable unmuting yourself and sharing what you found useful about

Unknown Speaker 35:06
it. I can do that. Just turn, my turn my camera back. Hello. Yeah. Hi. Um, well I'm doing a lot of work with collections information I'm the head of collections Information Management at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, so interested in all things Metadata, very interested in APIs to I was at the Cooper Hewitt, it's the first of the sessions today and so thinking about how we organizationally, use the API and the collections information to, to make it available and fit for purpose for all the purposes, not only that we can think of now but anything we might be able to think of in the future is that I think the exciting part of my job, doing a lot of work at the moment around documenting artists diversity and the issues around, you know, what museums do what we don't do what we Capture how we Capture what sort of language we use how we interact with artists, and so I'm particularly interested in the conversation for the Metadata session which touched on that quite a bit. There is an initiative that the association of art museum curators is running right now that I'm a part of and about 40 institutions are where we're trying to come up with some best practice around that topic, and so all things, Metadata in that realm are particularly interesting to me at the moment.

Unknown Speaker 36:43
Thank you, Francis. Is there anything you'd like to add to what Francis was saying about Metadata, or have their reflections on that before we move to someone else wants or twice. You should feel free to unmute yourself and jump into it like, Alright, next topic. Thank you. So Brett, you mentioned in the chat that we're all trying to figure out ways to be both open to and critical of gesture and quote unquote non traditional tech interactions, I'd love to hear more about what you're thinking about there.

Unknown Speaker 37:16
Sure, I think that a lot of the questions where people have great questions around trying to get drill down to more specific examples of successful or not successful uses of gesture but I think there's a lot of other questions around the limitations you know thinking about not only thinking about physical mobility but can the tech, detect, you know, reasonably detect kids and adults the same where people was really different body types and things like that so there's a lot of really interesting questions kind of probing against the what's possible. What's interesting, what sort of doable, but I also saw a lot of people just kind of curious about like hey, is this actually interesting, could this be fun, you know, trying to say like, yes, there's a lot of gotchas and a lot of things that are gonna be really tricky, but I also thought that people seem like kind of curiously optimistic at the same time.

Unknown Speaker 38:06
Right. I'd heard from someone that works in the space that they had learned. To their dismay that the Connect, I think was to connect maybe it wasn't connect but one of the gesture control devices were was not identifying people who had darker skin, so that people of color were not being recognized. Is that accurate or was that misinformed. No,

Unknown Speaker 38:28
you know, I don't know about that that connects specifically the way that it works extensively that wouldn't necessarily be the case but I could see, I mean a lot of it it's a mix of, um, we talked about this for a second and a session two, I think that came up with the body tapes question you know it's it's hard because we're sort of. This is a weird where it has been almost like subjugating ourselves to these bigger corporate companies that are kind of doing the initial AI training that kind of informs these systems, and I think it's a word of caution to have, you know, you have to do all this testing and actually really try it out to see whether or not these things work for your target audience. So I think it is and can be an issue with, especially with cameras that are not depth, specific, but I think one of the knowns that we had was that there's a lot more AI and machine learning approaches that are enabling gesture interactions with non fancy cameras, basically, but those have the same kind of issues to that there can be biases in the way that they're trained and often are.

Unknown Speaker 39:27
Thank you, Brett, Sam.

Unknown Speaker 39:30
The point there is particularly relevant, The this question about recognization of persons, and it's really good to MANY aspects. One of these is the training. And this is also what has come in came out with Metadata. If you train an artificial intelligence with junking junk out the system, it learns what you give it to learn from it. So machine learning is sensible to that aspect. Another aspect is also the training material. And the other aspect is that to the locker side, so artificial intelligence, if it is developed by people with some biases in heritage Sundews of those aspects, inside the code, because you you train the system with data, but also the development might be affected.

Unknown Speaker 40:28
Thank you Sam. I'm seeing Victoria also responded about the Metadata workshop going back to the earlier topic. Before I mentioned that anyone else who wants to weigh in on the topic that Brett and Sam have just been talking about Ron gestures and the AI and biases inherent in the system that can create increased inequalities.

Unknown Speaker 40:58
Alright, you want to come back to in a bit, let me know. Victoria, do you can I get you on the mic, share what you're saying in the, the chat by text,

Unknown Speaker 41:07
they really don't have much more to say other than the text I am looking to connect with colleagues in the Museum Computer Network to further that work. I'm trying to build a connection of professionals in the GTA Toronto Niagara horseshoe area. And I'm reaching out to university librarians who are also very interested in this. So that's sort of the stage that I'm at, in terms of the Pro, my efforts and there's anybody else that can link me up with people that would be great.

Unknown Speaker 41:40
Victoria, that's a great segue to one of the questions asked earlier in the chat from Ryan, who wants to know what are some of the best places to that you go to that all of us go to to have these kind of ongoing questions and conversations throughout the year. We're all here, we've identified MC n, but what are some other places we go to and I'm going to ask everyone in chat to type at least one place you go to keep yourself informed how do you dip into that stream of information, how do you make sure you don't fall behind. How do you find out the latest new tech tool, how do you find out about that research, to let us know about things that are working and not working, who will who the people you follow what are the guidelines you go to connect with people. Go ahead and spend some time in the chat and I'll include myself there as well.

Unknown Speaker 43:18
If there's any individuals that you find inspiring, you follow them on Twitter, you read them on medium, wherever it might be. Be great to hear some of those names too as well we're seeing some great organizations and newsletters, social media. Little cigs hashtags to follow. So while people are thinking about things I might want to share, Victoria was using this space to ask for advice, right, which is great, that's a great way to use our time here. Is there anyone else who has a question that you'd want to ask to this group that's advice for yourself things you want to know for yourself. Things that this group might be able to help you with today.

Unknown Speaker 44:18
Do you feeling shy you can hit the hand and I'll call on you. You can type it in the chat, but I know we all have questions. We all need help. So why we come to events like this. Want to learn

Unknown Speaker 44:41
great links coming in, resource for all of us to use I say in the chat. Good. Robert and Sam, of course, feel free to come to ask questions as well. But the question I might ask next I'm again just looking for questions that might engage us all is, what's the number one thing that keeps you up at night, about our space when we're thinking about specifically the area of experienced design and immersive technologies with museums. What concerns you the most,

Unknown Speaker 45:20
there'll be new at the first exam.

Unknown Speaker 45:23
I just I'm just reading a lot of the things that are in here I actually had a question for Lindsay that doesn't have anything to do with any of what we're momentarily just talking about so I won't, I won't derail the conversation right now.

Unknown Speaker 45:41
So run this, give it a moment to for my question about what's keeping people up at night, and if there's no takers then we'll get back to you. I'm glad to hear. We're all sleeping because it's been a really stressful year and a half. That's good. Any other last chance for the moment I'm pressing concerns. Oh here we go. Peter says, sustainability of the stuff we've all made exclamation mark, and Max writes the brain drain from job loss of those experienced in museum tech and learning during the pandemic. I filled that one as well. And then Ryan mentions, hate, hate to use a buzzword but relevance, but only as a bridge to really an authentically understanding and connecting with our audiences I assume what we're saying here is the loss potential loss of relevance. So we're saying Right. How to maintain that relevance.

Unknown Speaker 46:39
No more or less or building new relevance or having others make yeah just connecting with and having those conversations and discourse, more broadly, I think oftentimes we are very like, still very siloed or under snow from our own perspective, a lot of what we do produce is still very inward focused it's like reflective of like the departments that it's derived from, but not from like audience perspective, and even some of the jargon and language we use. You know, it's been varied and all over the place so I think just being more realistic about, you know if that really is the goal if we are meaning claim to have an impact in that way. How can we, I think a address a culture shift and not, but be, you know, really let our end users guide us in how we address those concerns,

Unknown Speaker 47:34
like the phrase Let the end users guide us, and we want to add to or share reflect on the ride sharing about relevance and making sure we're connected with our end users. Cyprian saying make text serve the inclusion and accessibility, maybe it's related to that. I want to reflect on what Max was saying about the brain drain from job loss that Max is talking about specifically during the pandemic, but I have some you know I have a book coming out next year I'll put the link in. It's about digital design in museums, but mostly it's about six years. 2012 to 2018, and when I finished writing it. It was both shocking and upsetting to go back and look at all the work I was talking about, not not specifically at my museum, American Museum of Natural History, but the work I was writing about about museums around the country and around the world. Almost every single person who's doing innovative work there wrote about during that time, with AR robotics design practices with young people, not only are they not at the museum they worked at it at the time, they're not even in the museum space anymore. So I agree I hear about the pandemic really having devastated our space, and what's, thinking about what it means for us to recover gives me stress, but this is not a new challenge for us in our space, people thinking about, you know, digital engagement in digital design, digital learning. This has been a challenge for years there was this rise in interest, and all these positions were created and made the top people I was writing about in the book, not only are they no longer where they were working their positions just don't exist anymore, they weren't replaced with someone else so that's of great concern to me about what it means for the future of our space to be prepared,

Unknown Speaker 49:06
what's going to happen. Oh, Francis, can you please say more about that. And just wrote the gap between digital migrant museum leadership and digital native audiences, please.

Unknown Speaker 49:22
Well, I think, depending on where you are and what your leadership is in your individual institution, you've got more or less support for doing some pretty innovative work with, with your audiences, and I think my museum currently finds itself in a situation where we don't have a Media and Technology Division anymore, it was just reorganized out of the organization, our Chief Digital Officer left to take another job and has not been replaced so we don't have anybody at the leadership level who is digitally focused or has as a clear vision, let's say, the way forward. So it's a, it's a concerning time, and the question I think for us it's part of a really major museum reorganization with a fairly new director here. And so we were very well placed based on the previous people in post, and all the work we've done around digital content. When the pandemic hit. We did great we transitioned online immediately we've already had a lot of content out there. But, as we go forward, if, if that gap persists, what happens to our, to our digital projects digital initiatives, how do we, that question of relevance, how do we remain relevant if we're not being proactive and only find ourselves in a situation where we have to be reactive. And I think that can come more quickly than people think. So

Unknown Speaker 51:15
I think we can go more quickly, which which part Exactly.

Unknown Speaker 51:19
I think the finding yourself in a position where you're sort of flat footed and you've got to react really quickly because you hadn't realized how far you'd lost your relevance, I guess is how disconnected you might have become from, from an audience that has very high expectations these days of the digital so, I think, not, not all of the leadership and all of the museums, certainly in the United States are, are very, you know, plugged in to the digital side they need some, some people to guide and help bring them along to see the vision of what's possible. I think the Museum Computer Network MC group is fabulous at that but if they are not in position, then, can lead to problems down the line. That's all.

Unknown Speaker 52:12
Thank you, Francis, while you were sharing, people were reflecting what you're saying in the chat in a number of different ways. Some talking about maybe people spend less time at museums now, and what are the implications for that. And also at the same time, this, this piece around audience focus competencies are not necessarily there in staff, and what happens when you transition. In fact, Rachel was the last voice on it, saying, I find that audience focused slash design practices seemed siloed in quote unquote digital in museums in a super problematic way, Rachel, I'd love to hear you talk about what ways it's super problematic, you,

Unknown Speaker 52:51
but I would like to build on a point that Ryan made earlier, which is about relevance, and to be clear, I'm not sure that museums have been relevant to audiences, ever. I mean I think there are people in museums who are trying to really change that but I think the idea of being audience centered, which seems to make its way into museums through user experience and digital practices but then remain siloed in those practices often because the distinctions between various parts and functions of the museum don't actually adopt a user centered approach. So I think, you know, it's something that I run into a lot and I mean, being at the design museum, but also, you know, thinking kind of thinking, I mean I'm, I'm more of a strategist and a designer per se but I think thinking more in a designer's head around how to ask questions How to Ask design driven questions how to set objectives and how to actually go about defining a space and possibility it just doesn't seem like in the exposure to museums that I've had thus far, which kind of is not a ton but I've spent a lot of time talking to colleagues at Cooper Hewitt and elsewhere, it just doesn't seem like that kind of thinking is really that pervasive. Um, so, so yeah I mean I, I, Lindsay I was Lindsay I would love to Lindsay I don't know if you feel like responding or thinking about that but Lindsey green sort of made the comment to start this corner of the conversation and I feel like you always have really smart things just to call you out but if you feel like saying,

Unknown Speaker 54:31
and so we'll give you a few moments to decide, oh here we go, okay, you're muted Lindsey. Lindsey you're

Unknown Speaker 54:43
muted Lindsay you're on mute.

Unknown Speaker 54:46
Sorry. Um, no I think what I'm seeing is the language of audience centeredness and the idea of audience centeredness is really, really attractive, I think there is a difference between making a physical space, that, you know, a lot of museums are designed to be exhibition and sausage factories where you do have this kind of waterfall process and audience centeredness kind of coming into that feels very problematic. I think we've been doing quite a lot of work on strategy trying to bring in those practices into organizations and actually it's really difficult to find case studies that are very museum centered, you can find them around other industries but actually finding them in museums, so if anybody has them, that's great. I know that the Exploratorium, for example, and quite a few science museums kind of come with a more audience centered starting point, but quite often the questions that activity is trying to answer is very much a museum centered question from the start, I think probably is one of the challenges where I see a lot of digital practice now is moving more to it, starting with an audience centered question from the start. Thank you, Lindsay.

Unknown Speaker 56:09
We just have a minute or two left. Anyone else want to weigh in any voices we haven't heard yet around an audience centered Museum and keeping the professionals, we're thinking about Digital Futures employed in our cultural institutions to keep them relevant and healthy insane.

Unknown Speaker 56:35
You know, I think there are a lot of museums, a lot of virtual museums that are cropping up and also places like, Meow wolf that at one point or the Van Gogh experiences that. Well, when I first heard about me on well, they were claiming that they were a museum, and, you know, the whole definitely in other words the whole definition of what is a museum and what is the purpose of the museum. And what audiences do they serve and why, you know, it's really, it's, it's become a much more multifaceted discussion I think then than it used to be,

Unknown Speaker 57:16
for better and for worse. Definitely conversation should always go on, we should always be questioning and challenging and unpacking and repacking. What does it mean to be a museum, and maybe with that we should. And our time together. Before we break this is a community here because everyone want to make any announcements. First about things are happening, MC and you want us to know about, or anything else related to the topic at hand. I will do I haven't announced it but I'll do it last of the floor first anyone else.

Unknown Speaker 57:51
All right. So on Tuesday, we'll be having our Kahoot trivia competition, I hope you'll consider checking it out, it should be a lot of fun. The other thing I wanted to mention was no, we don't have time I'm gonna leave off the last joke, sorry about that. Let me know if you want to get by texting, to me, and contact me, um, otherwise, thank you so much for participating in this at least last few hours together, especially all the presenters would put all the work together to share their work and all attendees who came and asked all the really great questions throughout the sessions, and more importantly MC N for bringing us all together. Thanks everyone so much, we hope to see you at the future MTM sessions over the next few weeks. Bye.