Upwardly mobile

June 10th, 2009

Mobile phones are ubiquitous. In any busy public place, a large proportion of people is either talking on or fiddling with a phone handset.

And if they are not, there is a high chance they are wearing headphones connected to an iPod or other music player. For many of us, the portable communications-cum-media device is now as familiar as a wristwatch.

It is no surprise, then, that museums and galleries have seen an opportunity to harness our connection with our mobiles and iPods to deliver multimedia content, cheaply and efficiently, to visitors.

The appeal is obvious: practically every visitor carries a mobile phone, most of which can play multimedia files. All the museum has to do is deliver the content; no hardware acquisition and maintenance costs, no staff needed to hire out and recharge guide devices.

Unsurprisingly, mobile phones have been viewed as an “Eldorado” by museums, removing lots of the problems of hiring out equipment such as PDAs (personal digital assistants).

One of those problems is, of course, cost. Setting up and running a PDA-based multimedia guide can prove prohibitively expensive for smaller institutions. Even large museums find the cost too high for exhibitions not intended as blockbusters. Purchasing PDAs, lanyards, charging racks, security tags, cases and so on can run into tens of thousands of pounds pretty quickly.

“It seems that many museums long for a time when they could forego the cost of maintaining their own devices in a constantly evolving hardware environment,” says Peter Samis, who develops interactive educational technologies at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMoma).

If visitors used their own mobile phones, on the other hand, they could get museum-generated content at no cost to visitors and relatively cheaply for the museums. In certain set-ups, this promise is achievable.

Inevitably, there is a “but”. The “Eldorado” of visitor-provided hardware has not really emerged in any big way. This is partly to do with technical obstacles and partly due to behavioural resistance from visitors.

Dial up and download

At SFMoma two recent exhibitions included mobile phone-delivered audio tours as part of their interpretation. For 246 & Counting, an exhibition about building a museum collection, an audioguide was available through a dial-up number.

Visitors were given a card showing the audio items available and how they related to the exhibition. To access these clips, the visitors dialled a main number followed by the corresponding item code.

A similar mobile phone guide was set up for The Art of Participation, an exhibition looking at the history of audience interaction in art. This had the additional option of a podcast, with higher-quality audio files that could be downloaded to the phone or music player via the museum’s website at any time before (or after) the visit.

Both systems gave the visitors autonomy to choose what they would like to listen to and both were relatively simple and inexpensive for the museum to deliver. On the downside, dial-up guides require some call payment which, especially for foreign visitors making international calls, could turn out to be more expensive than hiring a traditional audio tour.

And the podcast, while convenient and offering much higher quality audio than the dial-up guide, requires preplanning on the part of the visitor if they want to play the guide during the visit.

Despite these issues, SFMoma expected the guides to appeal to visitors. In reality, they were barely used. Calls to the dial-up guides, in particular, scarcely broke an average of 20 per day - a negligible proportion of the visitors to the exhibition.

Use of the mp3 podcast for The Art of Participation was nine times higher, but that still amounted to relatively few of the exhibition’s visitors.

So why was take-up so poor? The answer, according to the museum’s visitor research, might actually be a general lack of interest in using mobile phones for museum tours.

SFMoma’s experiences show that the convenience and low cost of mobile-delivered content may not yet be enough to engage visitors. “People ask: ‘Do I really want to use a mobile phone in a museum? I’m on it all day’,” says Lindsey Green, head of key accounts at multimedia guide company Antenna Audio. Uncertainty about costs is also an issue.

“In the UK there’s currently no way of making free calls on a mobile and people don’t necessarily understand SMS (short message service) billing or how many free minutes they might have. Across Europe, where many visitors come from other countries, international roaming charges could make something that’s supposed to be cheaper much more expensive. So take-up is low.”

Samis’ assessment of SFMoma’s trials is even more damning: “The majority of visitors solidly prefer a museum-provided device. And who can blame them? Cellphone reception varies, the audio can be poor, and foreign visitors must pay outrageous international roaming charges.

“Barring the aid of a headset, users are asked to hold a device to their ear for extended periods - a physically taxing experience for some. Podcasts, while offering superior sound quality, require pre-visit planning. Finally, wi-fi networks are temperamental, especially in crowded situations.”

The iPod option

When Tate Liverpool organised Gustav Klimt: Painting, Design & Modern Life in Vienna 1900 in 2008, the museum created the UK’s first multimedia guide designed specifically for the iPod Touch and the iPhone. Developed by Tate Media, the guides offer something of a middle ground between asking visitors to use their own phones and hiring equipment.

Visitors to Tate Liverpool could hire a preloaded iPod Touch for £3 or connect to the gallery’s Klimt wi-fi network and view the guide on a wireless device’s web browser. In addition, a podcast of the guide could be downloaded at any time from the Tate’s website. The only snag with this was that the podcast used mp4 files that failed to play correctly on all hardware.

So how did visitors respond? According to Doug McFarlane, the digital production coordinator at Tate Media, iPod loans exceeded 10,000 - about ten per cent of visitors, which is pretty high for a multimedia guide, and the wireless site received 11,000 hits.

“People loved it and we got great feedback. The iPod is light, the screens are great and they are really easy to use, even for an older demographic,” says McFarlane.

As part of SFMoma’s study into visitors’ use of different interpretation systems, Antenna Audio developed a PDA-based multimedia guide for the museum’s exhibition Frida Kahlo in 2008. This allowed users to “tap” on the PDA screen to reveal audio information about a particular area of a painting.

Unlike the mobile phone content, this “touch-and-listen” feature proved a resounding success, where tapping the screen effectively became equivalent to pointing at the work and asking a question.

“One of the ways a multimedia tour can improve on traditional audio tours is to be less long-winded and more specific, responding to the visitor’s increments of curiosity,” says Samis.

It is these “increments of curiosity” that are being harnessed by UK company Hypertag in its guide system, which uses visitors’ mobile phones. With Hypertag’s Mentor product, users download a special Java-based application directly to their phone, for free, through a Bluetooth point in the museum. This enables the phone to receive content via Bluetooth from small devices located next to objects in the exhibition.

The tags have a range of around two to four metres and are wired to a power source (although they can run on batteries for a short time). If the building has a wireless network, content on the tags can be updated remotely and the museum can also gather information about visitor usage.

The usual barrier to this type of system is the huge variation in the capabilities of different phone handsets, according to Jonathan Morgan, the managing director of Hypertag. The company overcomes this through a database of handset models, and content that is tailored to each model.

A visitor who is interested in the object they are viewing can use their Bluetooth-enabled phone to download the content from the tag to watch or listen there and then, or save it for after the visit. There are no phone calls involved, no wi-fi networks and there is no need to prepare for the visit in advance.

Using devices outside

So far the historic houses and museums that have worked with Hypertag, such as Down House, Charles Darwin’s home in Kent, and the Royal Institution in London, have opted for lending PDAs to visitors, however.

The Derbyshire Dales National Nature Reserve, Lathkill Dale, is pioneering the first Bluetooth wildlife guide in the UK, with tags placed outdoors. Visitors can download information about species of flowers and butterflies and a historic quarry.

But what of the assertion that people already spend enough time on their mobiles? Is it possible to create a guide where the user is not always looking at the screen? “It’s about getting the implementation right,” says Morgan. “The experience is accretive - when people see something they are interested in, they want to find out more about what they are seeing.”

One of the benefits of mobile phones that arguably remains relatively untapped by museums is that they allow users to record their own interpretation. In an era of audience participation and a lessening of top-down didacticism, this self-generated interpretation might well appeal to democratic-minded museum educators and curators. And it is this aspect of the hardware that has been put to use by Ookl, a mobile-based learning system developed by design consultancy The Sea.

The National Maritime Museum (NMM) in London installed Ookl in its Atlantic Worlds gallery last September for use with school groups studying transatlantic slavery. Pairs of pupils are given a phone and objects in the gallery are marked with a code which, when entered into the phone, “collects” that object and offers additional information or raises a related question.

The pupils then have to answer this either by further examination of the object or investigation of the rest of the gallery. In other words, the phone causes them to look up as well as down.

“We were worried that kids would spend the whole 45-minute slot looking at their phones, but that hasn’t happened,” says Charlie Keitch, a formal learning officer at NMM.

As well as delivering information and asking questions, the phones let the students take photographs, write notes and make films, just like any other mobile phone. The difference is that all this material, along with the “collected” objects, is automatically uploaded to a personalised web page, for post-visit use back at the school.

“It’s a data-gathering device to help you answer questions, but it also tells you which other people have collected the same object. This hugely increases conversations about the objects, which was one of the things we wanted to do,” says Natasha Waterson, the digital project manager at NMM.

An Ookl licence gives museums standard Nokia phones preloaded with proprietary software and a 3G phone contract, allowing the phones to connect to the company’s website. Calling functions are disabled, but your museum or site will need a good signal to the phone network, or wireless internet access.

A licence for 32 handsets costs just over £10,000 per year. “This allows you to pilot with minimal risk, as you haven’t got to make your own hardware investment and the back-end development has already been done,” Waterson says.

Clearly, school groups have different requirements to the average family. Nonetheless, the NMM system shows how standard mobile phone functions can stimulate investigation and interpretation. And both Ookl and Hypertag compile information to use post-visit as you go - something that traditional guides do not.

While it is this combination of content and experience that is more important than the hardware, the mobile phone, however ubiquitous and smart, brings with it drawbacks as well as advantages.

If loaned equipment loaded with bespoke software continues to provide the richest, most compelling way of viewing information, visitors may favour that over using their own phone, even if it means spending a little more money all round.

This article was written for Museum Practice, Summer 2009.

Posted in Exhibition, Interaction, Museums | 3 Comments »

Are museums about stories or objects?

June 9th, 2009

So asks Museum-ID… Here is a quick response to this question.

The appeal of museums for me is not so much that they hold objects collected and conserved over time, but rather that these objects point to external ideas, subjects or concepts. The objects prompt these subjects to be structured and studied - through curating and exhibiting - and then support the exploration of the subject with tangible evidence. The fact of the existence of the object in the case is almost always secondary to what it represents, for me at least.

One of the difficulties in exhibition design lies in balancing the desire for rich, detailed information (such as you might get in a study book) on the one hand and the need to offer an entertaining and open experience that will appeal to a wide range of audiences on the other. Add to this the practical and conceptual limitations of exhibiting objects from a museum’s store and the final space often lacks a full and satisfying coherence.

I have been musing for a while about the possibility of a Museum of Grand Ideas, or something similar, which would pick a theme every year or two, research it, build a narrative and an educational structure and ‘write’ the exhibition in an arresting and entertaining way. Then, loan applications willing, objects could be hand picked to bring these exhibitions to life. If the ‘Grand Idea’ were gravity, in would go Newton’s and Einstein’s notebooks, a Copernican orrery and so on. If the ‘Grand Idea’ were ‘The Nation State’ objects and media could show how notions of boundaries, territory and national identity have changed through history - a history lesson with great objects basically, but where the objects are tailored to the pre-written story, not the other way around.

As a writer with an interest in education, this focus on ideas, subjects and concepts and how they are presented - in other words, how it is written - really appeals. The objects provide the magic, but the story is great to start with and that’s where you start, as Steph Mastoris at the National Waterfront Museum says.

Sadly, I suspect the Museum of Grand Ideas may not be practical and would be rather too costly without a wealthy and generous benefactor. Although the opportunities for co-branding and marketing for all the institutions which lend to any given exhibition might be quite nice.

Posted in Design, Museums, Opinion | 2 Comments »

Same again?

June 4th, 2009

It’s hard to imagine just how many tests, adjustments, tweaks and overhauls consumer electronics might undergo before they end up in our hands and homes. Every button, function and finish will be considered and reconsidered, just as shape, size and form may go through numerous iterations. Mass-produced consumer products in particular are objects of huge investment and getting it right before the factory line rolls is imperative. In fact, research and development stages are arguably more critical to a product’s success than the persuasive marketing and advertising that will follow: if people don’t like it, or don’t like using it, they ain’t gonna buy it.

Part and parcel of this process is prototyping. From rough, colourless scale models through to facsimiles of the final article, prototypes aid designers, clients and consumers in ensuring everything is on track. Mark Delaney, director of design at Nokia’s mass-market division Connect, says that prototyping is ‘absolutely core’ to the way that the company’s phone handsets are developed. ‘Designs come out of your head and on to the sketch sheet, move rapidly to CAD - which is “real” and responds to the internal components you’re working with - and then straight after that we’re looking at a wax model in 3D. Literally from day one, models will be appearing,’ he says.

Prototypes for Nokia’s recent 6303 handset, for example, include an initial and basic form proposal 3D ‘print’, moving on to an aluminium
model that demonstrates the weight and material feel of the product. ‘Grey’ models then experiment with visual details and proportional differences created by the arrangement of internal components and finally a full appearance model is produced as part of a larger colour and materials study.

Similarly, when motion-capture hardware company Vicon wanted to refresh its image in the professional marketplace, design consultancy PDD used prototypes to develop a cleaner minimal aesthetic for its T-Series cameras. ‘They wanted to rebrand the products alongside the company and the visual aspects of the cameras were part of this,’ says PDD senior design consultant Oliver Stokes. Initial foam prototypes showed the camera’s form and scale, while sprayed foam models explored split-lines and colours.

As well as helping designers to judge things like scale, form and tolerances, prototypes are also regularly used in consumer testing, as LG Electronics head of design Europe Luke Miles explains. ‘Initiating dialogue with consumers is a useful way to gain feedback on general concepts and enables designers to make adjustments in the early stages,’ he says. ‘Initial “white” models can be printed with an extremely quick turnaround and are used to help analyse proportion and ergonomics, while milled models at the second stage [provide] more detail, specifically the build culture and its effect on the prototype’s external appearance. These models are often tested with consumers to get a clearer analysis on form, colour and materiality.’

There are many different ways to produce a prototype model, so it is crucial that the right approach is chosen, says Mark Hester, senior consultant in design development at PDD. ‘It’s very important to tie in research with design and prototyping, so we work with our research department to find out what kinds of prototype are best for different situations. For example, if you’re consumer-validating the finish of a material, it can be distracting if the form and size are not quite right. In consumer electronics especially, the limitations of a prototype or model shouldn’t be allowed to affect the outcome of research,’ he says.

According to Stokes, using prototypes to test ideas with consumers can increase the chances of market success and cut costs by weeding out poor designs at the early stages. However, consumer electronics design is often concerned with breaking new territory, and innovation through novel forms, materials and interfaces is something we’ve come to expect. Yet consumer testing is not known for generating mould-breaking ideas; quite the contrary. What, then, is the danger of death by focus group?

‘With new products and features you can often get quite negative responses from testers, simply because they are new,’ says Delaney. ‘We really have to unpick why people are saying “no” to something in prototype and we’ll do this in quite a lot of detail, looking at their world view, tastes, background and so on.’

If you want to shake up the market, standard consumer tests should be avoided. Patrick Hunt, director at product design group Therefore, believes that so-called ‘disruptive’ products - much sought after by consumer electronics brands - call for a new approach to consumer testing altogether. ‘Generally, our clients do much less concept testing directly with customers today than, say, five years ago. Top-tier brands have their own product vision and a desire to get new products to market quickly and it’s long been known among designers that consumer research can mean driving forward while looking in the rear view. The type of research where developers test prototypes on consumers behind a oneway mirror is declining in technology-driven products [because] paradigm-breaking products do not survive this process.’

This article was written for Design Week’s Prototyping & Modelling Supplement, 2009.

Posted in Branding, Design, Product | No Comments »

Mash it up

June 4th, 2009

Like most channels of popular culture, graphic design is a scavenger of ideas and material. The visual landscape is crammed full of references pointing in all sorts of directions, often simultaneously.

The same thing happens in pop music, perhaps the ultimate forager of styles. Building on the widespread use of sampling in the 1980s, the borrowing and stealing of material has reached a new level over the past few years with the emergence of mash-ups - a technique in which whole elements of songs are combined and overlaid to create a new, composite track.

Design and music are kith and kin, of course, so it’s no surprise that an analogous trend has bubbled up in graphics, fuelled by the viral interactions of the Internet. A series of design mash-ups has seen the style of one medium combined or overlaid with content from somewhere else. Imagine a film or record title reconceived as a vintage book cover.

It all seems to have started in January, when freelance graphic designer Olly Moss created a Flickr group called Make Something Cool Everyday. On here, Moss posted his designs for classic videogame titles, restyled as if drawn by Saul Bass for 1960s Penguin. Translating each game’s core element into a single graphic illustration, Moss produced a series of six ‘covers’ for titles including Half- Life, Metal Gear Solid and Grand Theft Auto IV. ‘I went to a Design Museum exhibition which showed some Penguin book designs and thought I’d like to do something with that,’ says Moss. ‘Video games often have this fairly naff design behind them, so I decided to appropriate the great design history of Penguin, but also to rethink the graphic, to come up with a neat way of capturing the game.’

Earlier reworkings of film posters by Moss had already inspired Ohio-based freelance designer Mitch Ansara (aka Spacesick) to create his I Can Read Movies series. Again influenced by Bass, as well as Paul Rand, Ansara posted his ‘vintage movie books’ - one per day - to the same Flickr group. With similar two-colour graphic interpretations of films including Highlander and Face/Off, his book covers sit neatly alongside Moss’s ‘Penguin’ video games.

‘In January, I made a 1960s-style Space Jam book cover as a oneoff joke. But I thought it was a lot of fun, and people seemed to like it, so I continued. Fast-forward a month or so and all kinds of talented folks were doing vintage book covers of all kinds of things: video games, music albums, other books, vintage album covers for movies, vintage breakfast cereal boxes for albums - you name it,’ says Ansara.

The idea of distilling a title into a graphic icon is taken a step further in the Modernist Editions, a series of album-covers-as-pictograms created by Heath Killen, director of Australian design group Illumination Ink. As a reflection on the future of album art, Killen’s approach is not a mash-up and avoids appropriation. ‘Everyday signage is a big inspiration and pictograms in general - everything from road signs to dingbats. But I’m not really interested in pastiche and I like to think that these designs stand up without a reference point,’ he says.

Back in the UK, Littlepixel Design director Huw Gwilliam turned directly to pastiche after seeing Ansara’s I Can Read Movies series. His mash-ups of classic album covers imitate an offset, two- or threecolour print process to reference classic Pelican books, where the original album artwork is overlaid on a dog-eared jacket. ‘I spent a lot of time getting the typography right - a special form of Akzidenz Grotesk - and tried to make it look like it was photoset and distressed,’ he says.

As the meme spread, many similar ‘reimaginings’ have followed, some more accomplished than others. But for Moss the trend has more or less run its course. ‘I feel it would be derivative to work on it any more,’ he says. Nonetheless, just as music evolves through remixing and sampling, other designers will no doubt continue to take from the takers, scavenging, adding and reinventing all the way.

This article was written for Design Week, 28 May 2009.

Posted in Design, Graphics, Typography | No Comments »