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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 | 2 Comments »
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 »
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 »
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 »
May 7th, 2009
In 1964, designer Ken Garland led a call for graphic designers to consider how their skills might be turned to ‘more useful and lasting forms of communication’ than those demanded by ‘gimmick merchant’ clients. The First Things First manifesto, as it was called, was a cry for less triviality, transience and wastefulness, and for more value.
A second FTF manifesto, drawn up in 2000 by Adbusters and signed by 33 design industry figures, also lamented how graphic designers’ ‘time and energy is used up manufacturing demand for things that are inessential, at best’, in a culture of ‘uncontested’ consumerism. Of course, it’s not only graphic designers who are complicit in the creation of desire and the promotion of disposability: in our screen-based, electronic gadget-filled lives, the hand of the industrial designer is also ever-present. And FTF’s notions could apply just as much here as in graphic design.
Ethics aside for a moment, it’s clear that ‘uncontested consumerism’ helps enormously to pay the designer’s bills and keep the whole merry-go-round spinning. Yet the huge groundswell in support for Green practices has planted environmental considerations in the agendas of most consumer-facing businesses, making unfettered materialism - delivered at any cost - a much harder sell. Now, commercial designers and clients are facing a moral conundrum together: how to keep producing masses of stuff for the market, while committing to reducing waste and environmental harm.
For consumer electronics companies, the answer seems to lie in improving the Green credentials of (usually just some of) their products, rather than a wholesale rethink on how many of those products we actually need. Indeed, changing the business practices through which global companies have thrived is surely like turning the proverbial oil tanker around - a gradual, lumbering process.
Fortunately, Green sells. South Korean groups LG and Samsung, as well as Chinese company ZTE, have all recently unveiled mobile phone handsets with built-in solar-charging panels, for example. Good news? Perhaps, but as consumers ditch their current units in favour of these eco-powered entrants, the conundrum rears its head again: sustainable design equals more demand equals more resources. Truly ecological design demands a shift away from planned obsolescence and constant marketing.
Despite this, designers shouldn’t find the moral scruple too debilitating, because it is design which is instrumental in finding better materials, more efficient practices, better packaging and many other improvements that can ameliorate the unavoidable cost ofproducing and distributing products on a mass scale. To put it another way, if we’re going to have products delivered on a mass scale, they may as well be well designed.
So, how are we doing? Well, not surprisingly, Greenpeace International has been keeping a watchful eye on the electronics industry and earlier this year published its Green Electronics Survey to answer just this question. A few big companies - Apple, Microsoft, Nintendo and Philips included - were conspicuously absent from the report, having declined Greenpeace’s invitation to take part. From the 15 companies which did participate, 50 products were assessed in terms of their use of hazardous substances, power consumption, product life cycle and the environmental costs of manufacture.
Overall, it’s good news. Hazardous chemicals continue to be phased out, while the growing use of LED displays in laptop computers saves energy and avoids the need for mercury in backlights. In larger products, such as TV sets, more post-consumer recycled plastic is being used, although computers and mobile phones, on the whole, are lagging behind in this regard.
‘The electronics industry continues to make progress in launching products with reduced environmental impacts. Product scores are increasingly closer together, suggesting a more competitive environment in a “race to the top” to produce truly Green products,’ reports Greenpeace.
Of special note is the Lenovo L2440x monitor, which was found to be way ahead of the competition in terms of toxic materials, and also features recycled plastic for nearly 30 per cent of its plastic parts and an LED-backlit display. Toshiba topped the notebook category with its Portégé R600 model, thanks to the elimination of many toxic chemicals.
The highest-scoring mobile phone was Samsung’s SGH-F268, which is built without the use of brominated flame retardants, substances that can release hazardous bromine when burnt for disposal. Nokia’s 6210 Navigator was the Greenest of the smart phone/PDAs tested, mainly thanks to its energy efficiency and product life cycle.
Interestingly, the Pearl 8130 product submitted by leading PDA brand Blackberry lost a lot of points because of poor energy efficiency, failing even to meet the Energy Star standard.
Although Greenpeace International’s survey is far from exhaustive and relies on voluntary product submissions, it nonetheless paves the way for better products in the future. ‘Taking the top scores within each criteria and product category, a pathway to the design of truly Green electronics products becomes clear,’ says the report. In other words, a combination of all the best attributes in each category would create a significantly Greener product than currently available.
The next step is for these piecemeal Green practices to be integrated into a company’s whole manufacturing, distribution, marketing and end-of-life processes, replacing environmental lip service with a new ethos. First things first, and slowly, slowly the tanker may turn.
This article was written for Design Week, 7 May 2009.
Posted in Design, Product | No Comments »
April 21st, 2009
Last month, a spoof edition of the Financial Times, set in the year 2020, was handed out to commuters at railway stations in London, to coincide with the G20 protests. It featured satirical stories denigrating the world’s political and financial systems, as well as similarly sardonic ads.
The latter included one carrying the Royal Bank of Scotland logo and the following text: ‘What would you do with a trillion pounds of public money? Bail out your mates and mop up the mess you all made? Or squander the lot on pipe dreams like renewable energy?’
This scornful attack represents the sharp end of a wider swathe of discontentment with the UK’s high-street banks following the emergence of toxic debts, reckless lending and mismanagement.
With their reputations in tatters, banks are having to fight to convince consumers of their trustworthiness, their dependability and solidity. So it is that in a world of decentralised, contact centre-driven customer service, the high-street branch and face-to-face communication have again become the focus of many banks’ investments in branding and design.
Over the past few years, banks have been attempting to operate more like retailers. This has resulted in some genuinely innovative environments, such as the branch format for Italy’s CheBanca!, designed by Crea International.
CheBanca!’s ‘Natural Tech’ design looks more like a set from 2001: A Space Odyssey than a high-street bank branch. According to Crea International managing partner Massimo Fabbro, the light and minimal design brings together ‘innovation and reassurance’, placing the customer at the centre of the experience.
Barclays, too, is in the process of rolling out a fresh design concept, created by interiors consultancy Aukett Tytherleigh, ¬ across its 1700 branches. ‘Branches are important to our customers,’ says Erin Biertzer, UK retail banking director at Barclays. ‘We have made a long-term commitment to refurbishing our network.’
The bank’s flagship branch, nestled under the neon lights of Piccadilly Circus in London, is undeniably striking. Touted as the first ‘brand concept’ branch in the UK, it features a host of technology and high-end design touches (see case study, above).
However, having been conceived before the crisis hit the financial sector, how comfortably do such design-led interiors sit now that the recession has taken hold?
‘When times were good and money was easy to borrow, everyone wanted retail cues,’ explains Sam D’Lacey, director at design agency Hart D’Lacey, which has worked with RBS, NatWest and Arab Bank.
‘These banks tried to link their branches with other leisure activities, such as coffee shops, to drive footfall. But retail is very disposable, so people started to see money as disposable too. However, we’ve gone back to reliability. The flippancy and the humour are gone,’ he adds.
As part of this shift toward the ‘retailing’ of personal finance, services and advice have become ‘products’. In some cases, these have been physically embodied in the form of a box that could be taken to the counter for purchase.
‘Customers want to talk to people and get reassurance, so some of these things that seemed progressive at the time now seem inappropriate,’ says D’Lacey. ‘The redesigned Barclays branches, for example, have a queue rail - which is beautiful and sculptural, but does it really instil confidence?’
Howard Milton, founder of branding agency Smith & Milton, puts it more strongly. ‘The “Eureka” moment, when banks decided to strive to become retailers, was where they lost their perspective and, ultimately, our trust,’ he says. ‘When your core product is cash, serious consideration should be given to how you handle it. Banks manoeuvred our thinking away from this custom. The cashless society has been suborned into losing touch with the value of money.’ ¬
The result of years of easy credit and bad debt has been much discussed, but bank design and branding must begin to reflect the climate and rebuild consumer trust. Experts are divided on whether the retail format branch remains the right option.
However, Roderick Logan, financial-services analyst for Datamonitor, believes it is. ‘Banks can use the less formal environment that a “store” provides to make the consumer feel more at ease. They can also win back customer trust by showing concern and offering advice,’ he says.
‘There is plenty of room for innovation in the banking sphere. Communicating with consumers in the language of retail may make some of the more complicated financial products easier to understand.’
Logan also notes that retailers themselves are competing in the personal finance market. Tesco, for example, is looking to establish a retail banking environment through its store network.
‘The traditional banks will have to maintain some degree of innovation to stave off this threat,’ he adds. ‘More flexible opening times offer greater convenience to customers and innovative branch features, like those at the Barclays Piccadilly branch, can entice inquisitive customers.’
With innovation comes technology, already a huge enabler of convenience in transactions and financial services research.
For First Direct, which operates only online, technology and digital design are especially important. The bank has been working with design agency Splendid on a Microsoft Surface table for display at the Grand Designs Live exhibition at London Excel from 25 April to 4 May. The device has a touch screen that allows consumers to interact with its mortgage products.
‘The brand stands for innovation, so we have to be design-led in what we do,’ says First Direct head of brand Lisa Wood. ‘We don’t physically have a product, so you can’t try before you buy. However, it is creating an interactive way to draw people into talking about these mortgages.’
She adds: ‘We will use Surface at the exhibition to show how our offset mortgages could link to home-improvement projects. You can have up to six people using the table simultaneously and, because we don’t have branches, this is a great way to have personal interaction.’
This interaction, along with the trustworthy advice and personal reassurance that appear to have been lacking lately in banks’ relationships with their consumers, is what many in the industry are lauding as the necessary next step.
‘The big banks don’t communicate on a personal level,’ says Nick Ramshaw, managing director of design group Elmwood Leeds. ‘My local Lloyds TSB branch has no private room, for example. They need to think about the customer’s point of view.’
There are other threats, too: the rise of community lending schemes such as Zopa has put even greater pressure on the big banks to deliver the goods. ‘In order to remain relevant and compete with these new breeds, the incumbents must adapt or die,’ warns Terry Tyrrell, worldwide chairman of design agency The Brand Union.
It seems there is a fine line to tread in adapting to the current climate, while remaining competitive in a busy marketplace. Bank brands need to be seen as innovative while simultaneously emphasising traditional values and a service-led mentality.
All this has to be communicated through staff training, strategic branding and branch design, not simply through advertising - the quick fix route to shifting perceptions. As Richard Newland, global head of retail design for HSBC, concludes: ‘Branches are our most valuable source of advertising and they have to live up to that. But balancing confidence and reassurance is difficult. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it.’
This article was written for Marketing, 21 April 2009.
Posted in Branding, Design, Interiors, Retail | No Comments »
March 18th, 2009
Consumers in Sainsbury’s, who may already be overloading on the orange of the supermarket’s core branding, are now finding themselves swamped in the bright three-tone stripes of its Basics range. It’s a clamorous visual reminder, as if one were needed, of the hard times facing the economy.
As the gloom seeps from high finance down to the high street, purse strings are contracting, leaving retailers and brands jostling for a slice of dwindling consumer expenditure. Moreover, with the battle-ground for these customers very much in the aisles, the final decision over which product goes in the basket, and which is ditched or switched, is driven in no small measure by their pack design and branding.
It is, therefore, a crucial form of advertising that plays out before shoppers, right at the point of product selection. Dave Brown, chairman of design agency The Brand Union, cites its work for Andrex promotional packs as a case in point. ‘When you’re looking at this stacked on-shelf, what you’re really seeing is a 48-sheet poster campaign,’ he says.
This ability to double as visual advertising has always been one of packaging’s primary strengths, but even more so now, as shoppers consciously and carefully adjust their baskets to save a few pennies here and there. While marketing specialists have argued for years that the real battle is taking place on the supermarket shelves, some agencies complain that brands are not doing enough to promote themselves in store.
‘Consumers are starting to take more notice of product presentation in-store,’ says Sarah Hamburger, account director at market research company Spring Research. ‘We know that they read the copy on labels, and this seems to be an increasingly good way to stand out.’
However, consumers are not alone in feeling the financial squeeze. Retailers and manufacturers, too, face budget cuts in their marketing activity. Packaging design is just one element in a gamut of marketing communications channels that need to be considered.
B&Q packaging and point-of-sale manager Jonathan Couper explains how costs have to be controlled in this market. ‘We have reduced the amount we will invest in design for 2009, which I expect is the case for most companies,’ he says. ‘The reduction is not dramatic, as the business still recognises the importance of good design, but we have made a conscious decision to seek out smaller agencies as they deliver greater value and have significantly built on the use of brand guidelines.’
‘Budgets are being cut,’ agrees Jon Davies, managing director of packaging design agency Holmes & Marchant. ‘But it’s not necessarily fees that are reducing; there are just fewer projects around. And clients are asking for more. We have to demonstrate value in real terms: return on investment, awareness, sales, whatever it may be.’
According to Davies, brand owners should not be considering a complete structural redesign because it will not deliver within the first year of investment in the current climate. The trick, he says, is to look at tactical branding work which takes in the whole marketing communications mix, unifying it with a consistent aesthetic and single strategy. This is an approach that Holmes & Marchant has taken for its clients, including Guinness and Cava producer Freixenet.
Kate Waddell, managing director of consumer brands at design agency Dragon, argues that the smart route to keeping a portfolio alive on-shelf is to dovetail some design ‘refresh’ work with a product innovation or addition to a range. ‘If you bring in a new line and tweak the design, you can achieve a halo effect,’ she says. Tweaks and refreshes are less expensive and risky than range-wide overhauls, but not everyone agrees that a conservative approach to design investment is what is required.
‘Packaging on shelves in the multi-brand retail environment is mostly disappointing, dull and predictable, with the majority of ‘new’ design being shy tweaks and almost imperceptible updates of how it has always been,’ claims Nina Jenkins, creative director at Added Value UK, a brand development consultancy. ‘Despite their alleged frugality, consumers still want to be seduced by new options and feel that their choices are fresh and relevant.’
While many FMCG purchases are fairly functional in nature, there is always a potential aspirational element. Jenkins’ assertion that consumers ’still want to be seduced’ chimes with another observation from Waddell, that shoppers do not want marketing to remind them that they have less money to spend.
As supermarkets’ budget ranges are pushed to the forefront against the back-drop of a struggling economy, it could be argued that product packaging that talks of pleasure and high quality, not just value, will be most successful.
Waddell believes there to be an opportunity for so-called challenger brands, which sit below the well-known brands, to ramp up their premium design cues so that consumers do not feel negative about trading down from the leading brand to save money.
Certainly, many shoppers switch to a ‘checks and balances’ approach to shop-ping, trading down in some categories, but permitting themselves to indulge in others.
In either case, it is clear that the role of packaging design is hugely important in influencing brand perceptions and purchasing decisions. However, the dynamic is far from simple. Many factors remain at play, and a straightforward shift to cheaper, basic ranges is unlikely to be the sole outcome of constrained spending.
Designers agree that it is crucial for clients to keep an eye on the long-term strategy of a product range and that packaging should be seen neither as a ‘cheap’ way to spend marketing budgets (compared with advertising), nor as a relatively unimportant element that can be cut from the branding schedule.
‘Packaging redesign in circumstances like these is often a kneejerk reaction to make marketers feel better - leading to results that are often counter-productive,’ says David Haseler, strategy director at design agency Smith & Milton.
‘The same thing happened in the last recession. The pack is an easy place to do things, and there is plenty of relatively cheap pack design for marketers to find by shopping around.’
As in all areas of marketing, design and innovation, the debate rages over whether it is more expedient to cut budgets or to keep spending through the hard times to renew growth when the economy recovers. Realistically, some brands will benefit from an affordable and modest refresh, while some may need the shot in the arm provided by a more substantial design investment. Perhaps the crux here is the time frame over which brand owners expect to see a return on this investment.
Either way, as Jenkins points out, packaging has a lot to live up to. ‘After the strategy, positioning, advertising and marketing is said and done, the moment of truth is when the shopper is face to face with the choice of packaged products. It is essential that the pack is irresistible, with clear, simple standout from all the others on offer. Cautious tweaks will not engage, but intelligent, compelling and relevant redesigns based on good ideas - that’s another story.’
This article was written for Marketing, 3 March 2009.
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March 18th, 2009
Some would say that electronic media is at its most powerful in a museum gallery when you cannot see the technology - when immersion is everything and the clunky realities of hardware and software evaporate into a seamless, fluent experience. As any designer will tell you, equipment limitations should never be allowed to hinder or obstruct the function of a product, space or installation.
Ideally, all traces of a system’s innards - its wires, projectors, power sources, sensors and computers - would be hidden from view, while their visible effects combine powerfully to wow and educate visitors in equal measure.
This is much easier said than done: hardware can be expensive and hard to conceal, software prone to ugly crashes. Not only that, but high-end technology pervades our everyday life. Familiarity with the button-less iPhone and the wireless Nintendo Wii desensitises us to just how clever they are, posing some tricky questions for museums looking to make an impression as well as educate.
Nonetheless, some relatively simple technologies still have the capacity to create exhibition magic when they are built on a great creative idea.
Coupled with specially-written computer software, things like sensors, cameras and triggers can help to make a museum space or historic interior come alive in ways we still tend not to encounter elsewhere.
While touch-sensitive surfaces are becoming more commonplace, such things as motion-triggered light patterns, sounds or projections are still the domain of the museum and installations created by new media artists.
These types of “invisible” technology can be used in a variety of ways, to different ends. Your intention may simply be to stimulate the senses and entertain; it may be to encourage physical interaction with an exhibit, or perhaps to entice people to investigate an environment in a non-linear way.
INDUSTRIAL STRENGTH
In Verket, an historic ironworks in the Swedish town of Avesta, a sensory exploration of smelting works and blast furnaces is delivered using hand-held flashlights.
Visitors investigate the dark space, shining torches on glowing targets to trigger media or cause dormant machinery to lurch into motion. An invisible coded beam travels from the flashlight to the target hotspot telling computers in the background what type of event to trigger.
Verket is a complex and large-scale installation demonstrating how sensors and triggers can encourage investigation of an historic site where the building itself is one of the principal exhibits.
But the beam transmitters and receivers are basic technologies: the complexity comes in what is triggered, via software, when the two meet. And this could be something as simple as illuminating different areas of a darkened model, or triggering video footage.
ON THE RIGHT TRACK
Another “invisible” technology is radio frequency identification (RFID), which can be used to tie together a visitor’s experience of an exhibition, tracking their progress as they go.
For the Science of Survival touring exhibition, created by Science Of (a consortium of the Science Museum, London, and Fleming Media), computer exhibit specialist Joe Cutting provided technical consultancy on a system that uses radio tags to follow each visitor’s choices on a number of its interactive installations.
Users carry a unique RFID tag that is read by a card reader on the front of the installations. In the interactives themselves users make various lifestyle choices and at the end of the exhibition a concluding Future City projection automatically compiles these choices to show their environmental impact on a community in 2050.
“Science Of were interested in using a tracking system and considered barcodes, fingerprint scanners and email addresses, as well as RFID, but radio was the simplest,” says Cutting. “The cards are pretty cheap - around 30p each at the time - if you buy [them] in the thousands. An RFID supplier will offer a range of readers and tags, operating at different ranges. We used some of the simplest short-range ones.”
In The Science of Survival, the radio tags are tracked by software written by Ico Design Consultancy, the exhibition’s lead design group. From a curatorial point of view, the system links the content of the different installations, ranging from eating and drinking to transport and building, so that each forms part of the concluding section, giving an experiential mirror of the narrative thread already present in the subject.
For visitors, the invisible nature of radio communication means that this linking feels seamless and effortless. “We wanted something interactive that would be personal, putting visitors at the centre by showing them something they’ve made at the end,” explains Malinda Campbell, the creative director of Science Of.
The tracking system also gives Science Of access to anonymous information about how many people are using each exhibit, as well as content generated by their choices.
“Although it was driven by the narrative we wanted - that is, to show people, without preaching, how their decisions could impact the climate - there is also lots of information you can gather from this kind of tracking,” says Campbell.
“For anybody looking into such technology, I recommend thinking hard at the beginning about what you will want to know later. And testing is vital: you want to make sure the concept and software work before you order all the kit, but you tend to order all the equipment late on in bulk, so it can get very last-minute. Prototype and test with real people as much as you can.”
Software is likely to be a key component in any installation that uses sensors, cameras or triggers, because it is the software that determines how the information gathered from these input devices is translated into “content” or output.
If you are thinking of commissioning something that tracks or detects visitors in some way, you may end up working with software programmers who are subcontracted to the lead exhibition designers.
For example, an installation at the Curve, a new Rafael Viñoly-designed theatre in Leicester, uses cameras to track people’s movements, translating them into a mimicking “silhouette” played out in LED lights. Jason Bruges Studio designed the system, using software programming and motion capture by Chris O’Shea, an interactive designer and artist.
A wide-angle camera tracks the shapes of people passing through the Curve’s glass foyer and relays this information to a computer. The software then translates these shapes into instructions for a light controller that manipulates banks of LED lights on the inside of the vestibule. As each LED spot can be controlled individually, certain spots are switched off in real time to recreate the visitor’s “shadow” on the walls of the cube, copying their movement.
Tim Greatrex, a designer at Jason Bruges Studio, says the Curve installation was designed to reference physical performances in the theatre, not to perform any didactic function. But it does demonstrate how technologies as simple as a camera and LED lights could be employed - with the right software - to respond in all manner of ways and animate spaces.
OUT OF THE SHADOWS
Another example of physical participation is Mexican artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s Frequency and Volume installation, which was installed in the Barbican Centre in London in 2008. This uses cameras to detect shadows cast by visitors on a white wall and translates the position and size of these shadows into a radio frequency and volume respectively.
In this way, the radio spectrum is rendered visually, and participants can tune the installation’s numerous amplified radio receivers into different radio stations by walking around and altering the size and location of their shadow.
Again, Lozano-Hemmer’s work is not specifically educational (although it was originally conceived to get people thinking about the ownership and allocation of radio spectrum in Mexico), but it is another example of how sensors can help generate dynamic spaces that respond to visitors and so seem alive.
The basis of most of these technologies is pretty simple, but their application can become complex. So, as with any digital installation, it is paramount that at the outset you have a clear curatorial aim in mind and that the chosen system is the best way of meeting this objective.
This could be encouraging exploration of a space, linking and personalising installations, or perhaps unravelling a complex or abstract idea.
When approaching designers to create this kind of electronic media display or installation, look for those with interaction skills and remember that you will need reliable computers to make everything happen and to keep it all running.
Maintenance for other hardware may be provided under a contract with the hardware manufacturer or installation company, but it is worth checking this, particularly if a whole exhibit is dependent on the technology.
On the plus side, LEDs, printed circuit boards, RFID tags and camera technology are all getting cheaper and more flexible. So, armed with a strong creative idea, good designers and a skilled software programmer, a little invisible magic may not be out of reach.
This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Spring 2009.
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March 18th, 2009
While it is true to say that the whole of an exhibition or gallery should be engaging, there are some techniques that are specifically designed to pull visitors into a subject, most often using some form of interaction.
Electronic media is offering ever more ingenious and enticing possibilities - from following the clash of arms on the battlefield of Culloden in 1746 on the Battle Table at the new visitor centre there, to discovering what Winston Churchill did, almost to the day, during his life via the 15-metre-long Lifeline at the Churchill Museum, London.
Where visitors have actively engaged with something they are more likely to remember that experience, personalise it and take something from it. As Peter Higgins, the creative director of museum designers Land Design Studio, says, it is about emotional connections. “All interactions are based on input, output and feedback. The more you’ve been emotionally engaged, the more you remember it.”
Electronic technology is playing a big role in making interaction possible, largely because it is the “intelligence” of computers that provides the feedback in the model. A more typical installation than oversized tables is the standalone touchscreen kiosk, loaded with software to respond to various input decisions from users.
While kiosks have their place, the downside is that they offer a rather pedestrian form of interaction, which is often detached from the physical presence of the exhibition and its objects.
At their best, interactive installations can deliver engagement in a more fluid, instinctive and social way than a straight computer screen, especially when groups can use them simultaneously.
Encouraging people to explore is crucial. The Nobel Peace Center in Oslo, Norway, is built almost entirely on digital installations, all predicated on the idea of visitors exploring the Center in their own way. Using an array of sensors, digital media and computer-controlled lighting, many of the installations respond to people’s physical presence (see link 1 below).
This is a thoroughly high-tech solution for an unusual museum: it contains just one object, a Peace Prize medal. But it shows that there is a range of interactive techniques that can be used to engage audiences through exploration.
At the National Waterfront Museum in Swansea, a panoramic photograph of the view from nearby Kilvey Hill is projected across a 300-degree screen. Overlaid on this screen are three coloured locator bars controlled by tracker balls set into three consoles in front of the projection.
As users pan their bar across the view with the tracker ball, a “telescopic” magnification of the area selected is shown on the console screen. Embedded in the vista are a number of hotspots, typically places of cultural or historical interest, which emerge as the bar moves over them. Selecting these reveals greater layers of detail on the touchscreen below, using text, images and video footage.
“We wanted to recreate this great view of Swansea and looked at ways to achieve that,” says Damien Smith, director of ISO, the design group that created the display with lead designers Land Design Studio.
The high-resolution image was obtained by fixing a special rotating camera on a purpose-built scaffold at the site and photographing each “slice” of the view, three pixels at a time. Because the resulting photograph is so large, no more images were needed to get the “telescopic” magnification on the consoles.
But aside from the specialist camera needed to capture a picture with enough detail for the huge projection and zoom, the rest of the installation was created using relatively standard equipment: three high-definition projectors, synched across the 300-degree screen, standard tracker balls, touchscreen technology and PCs running bespoke software.
“It’s also quite a striking ambient piece, with little touches, such as the sky gradually darkening,” says Smith. “And the visitors get some information about the content through pop-ups that appear over the hotspots on the main projection. What we’re often trying to create in these kind of installations is something attractive, ambient and large scale, while also offering rich detail at the personal level.”
REALITY CHECK
The Swansea panorama is a step towards another kind of interactive interpretation, dubbed “augmented reality”. Museums are only just beginning to explore its possibilities.
One early adopter is the Museum für Naturkunde (Museum of Natural History) in Berlin, where the designers Art + Com created five “media telescopes”, or “Jurascopes”, in the World of Dinosaurs gallery.
When pointed at the actual fossil remains, these viewers offer a computer-generated image of the fossilised bones that “grow” muscles and skin, before taking a walk in a Jurassic landscape. A computer reads where in the gallery the Jurascope is pointing and presents the corresponding view and animation on a screen embedded behind the eyepieces.
What is interesting about this installation is not so much the individual technologies, but the intuitive simplicity of its presentation: everyone knows how seaside-style telescopes work, so they look, pan and discover.
A similar system by the same company called Timescope is installed on a street in Berlin. It offers views of Tauentzienstrasse and the surrounding area taken at various points in history, as well as an on-board web camera feed of the live scene. Users can literally turn back (or fast forward) time using archive material and set artwork in the real vista before them, watching buildings come and go.
Although these media telescopes require some specialist hardware and software, the concept is simple and flexible and their appeal is as enduring as that of the old Mutoscope, or “what-the-butler-saw” machines of the 1900s. The key really lies in the programming of the software that delivers the content to the final “view”.
If you are thinking of commissioning something similar, look for designers with skills in programming and interface design, as this is where it will succeed or fail. Naturally, if the viewer is destined for the open air, you would need to consider robustness of product design too. It must be weather- and vandal-proof.
MUSICAL ACCOMPANIMENT
There are more straightforward methods of promoting engagement with the objects on display in an exhibition. In the Music Gallery at the Horniman Museum in south London, a simple projection system allows visitors to explore and interact with the array of musical instruments displayed in showcases opposite. The layout of the cabinets is recreated on the projection table (the projector is placed vertically overhead).
Users can scroll through animated images of the instruments using large navigation buttons. Both projector and buttons are linked to software on a PC. A musical instrument can then be selected to reveal more written information and, crucially, a performance recording taken from the museum’s sound archive, which plays on speakers or headphones.
Designed by Ralph Appelbaum Associates with Rom and Son, this direct exploration of the collection does not even require touchscreen technology, just a projector, PC, navigation buttons set into the table, some speakers and sound-absorbing material above the tables (all times three, as there are three tables in total).
Margaret Birley, the keeper of musical instruments at the Horniman, says the installation has been popular and robust. It has been working since the end of 2002.
“We wanted to give people the opportunity to hear the instruments in the showcase, as well as add to the information on the object labels with things like instrument decoration, who made it and who might have played it. It also allows us to showcase recordings made through our fieldwork,” says Birley. The content has been updated to include, for example, the recently discovered composer of a previously anonymous piece.
The Horniman Museum’s musical tables show how fairly simple interactive technology can provide a direct link with the objects in the space to encourage exploration. In a more high-tech way, the National Waterfront Museum’s panorama and the Museum of Natural History in Berlin’s media telescopes also link digitally-delivered information with the real and physical.
And this is where technology should really excel: it should not promote playing with gadgets just for the sake of it, but allow visitors to connect more deeply with objects and subjects on show in ways that are intuitive, educational and perhaps even rather enchanting
This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Spring 2009.
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March 18th, 2009
In the traditional gallery of exhibits behind glass pure, unobstructed consideration of the artefacts is considered paramount. Interpretation beyond captions and a few supporting images is minimal, or absent, and the space is organised so as not to overwhelm the works themselves. In short, the atmosphere is relatively neutral.
But in contemporary exhibition design something more evocative, perhaps even provocative, is often in order, demanding an injection of drama and ambience.
Such theatre and atmosphere are important components in storytelling and, for many curators, invoking stories from the collections is exactly what exhibitions are all about. While a few star objects may be commanding enough to conjure a sense of time and place on their own, many sit statically and quietly inside glass cases, leaving the scene-setting to various other design elements.
Although heavy-handed scenography may not always be appropriate, generating some dynamism around objects can animate a space. And one of the most effective ways of creating atmosphere and ambience is through light and sound. Moving images and spoken words can be used arrestingly to make a point, or recessively to set a mood.
But for real atmosphere, you need to think beyond the traditional screen. Large-scale projections in particular can literally wrap the viewer up in images from the collection, as well as the stories and ideas it holds.
TRANSPORTS OF DELIGHT
At the London Transport Museum’s Design for Travel gallery, a 12-metre-long “screen” is created by projecting a continuously moving film on to the floor and end wall of a long, narrow space.
Around the gallery, examples from London Transport’s rich design heritage - maps, posters and signs - are exhibited in showcases, but the films help to shape the feel of the space and give context to the physical exhibits.
Organised into six thematic “essays”, the looped film showcases hundreds of items that could not otherwise be displayed, including archive footage, stills and animations.
To achieve the gallery-long video, the design and motion graphics company ISO, working with the museum’s lead designers Ralph Appelbaum Associates, split the film across seven high-definition projectors, running in synch, with the frames digitally “stitched” together to play out across the gallery as one piece.
“It’s an enclosed, dense space which only holds a tiny sliver of the amazing design objects the museum has,” says Damien Smith, the director of ISO. “They didn’t want it to be static, but to bring things to life and delve into the huge volume of the archive. The films work in two ways because they can wash over you or you can watch them as detailed visual essays, each relating to the different physical displays.”
Rob Lansdown, the assistant director of support services at the London Transport Museum, says, “One of the issues we face is that we’re dealing primarily with transport vehicles and we can’t make them move. So we’re always looking for ways to inject movement into the galleries.”
Another way of setting off static displays in a dynamic way is through LED lighting, a technology that continues to become cheaper and more powerful. As LEDs are easily controllable by computer they can be used to set up semi-abstract moving displays, suggestive of subject themes or movement, but without the distraction of video imagery.
At the new BMW Museum in Munich every single square inch of wall inside the museum’s central space is clad with white LEDs, behind opaque, sandblasted glass. The solution, dubbed “Mediatecture”, involves millions of tiny lights controlled by four computers running special graphics software.
Created by Art + Com, working with the lead designers Atelier Brückner, it results in walls filled with fluid imagery, some abstracted from the cars’ design details, others using line art, water ripples or curtain sequences to give a sense of movement. This dynamic backdrop then plays around the otherwise static cars on show, reflecting on their surfaces.
“The best way of creating a dynamic space is through moving images,” says Joachim Sauter, the creative director of Art + Com. But unlike more cinematic projections of content, BMW’s Mediatecture purposefully lacks detail.
“It’s about making a facade and not making big screens. This is very important: people should initially just see it as the building’s glass facade and only on second glance realise it’s moving. If you make it in a cinematic way, it becomes more important than the objects.”
SOUND AND LIGHT
The Museum of London Docklands desired quite the reverse effect for its permanent London, Sugar & Slavery gallery, designed by At Large. Tom Wareham, the curator of the gallery, says they wanted people to literally stop and think about the subject at hand.
To make this happen, it commissioned a son et lumière show that would spontaneously play every 20 minutes, transforming a section of the gallery into “theatre in the round” (See link 1 below).
It is a more intimate version of the Big Picture shows at the Imperial War Museum North, where images are projected on to the double-height surfaces within a cavernous gallery.
Large-scale projections offer an “architectural” way of creating atmosphere while at the same time unlocking content from the stored collection and telling a story (or indeed, switching between the two). From a hardware point of view, high-definition projectors provide the quality needed for large projections, but these can be expensive.
At the London Transport Museum the seven projectors cost around £6,500 each, although you would not necessarily require seven for a simpler show. Bear in mind that carefully installed multiple projectors can deliver films with unusual aspect ratios to suit the gallery space.
If multiple projections do need to be synched - to project across a very wide wall, for example - you will also need a PC running software to piece the split “frames” back together, as well as PCs to drive each individual projector.
The projectors themselves use bulbs that will burn out, so you will need to keep an eye on those too. In a chain of linked projectors, every bulb should be changed simultaneously to ensure consistent brightness, even if only one is starting to dim.
UNINTENDED EFFECTS
Hardware aside, the effectiveness of projections may well come down to the clarity of your brief and the production skills of the company compiling the footage - look for designers specialising in motion graphics. And be aware of any “dizzying” effects that large-scale image movement might have on visitors, as well as possible concerns for visitors with epilepsy related to flashing lights.
These are not always easy to test, as Lansdown discovered at the London Transport Museum. “The scale is such that mock-ups don’t necessarily show you what you’ve done until it’s in place. Some of the images of posters moving initially felt as though the rug was [literally] being pulled from under your feet.”
A more ambient and abstract way of bringing a space to life can be achieved using wall-spanning LED lighting. A software programmer can animate these lights in a range of ways, linked to sound, video or image input, for example. LEDs themselves continue to become cheaper, as do the programmable computer chips that control them.
And there is another benefit over conventional incandescent lighting too: with hardly any power lost as heat, an LED’s lifespan can be upwards of 40,000 hours - important for exhibitions running all day every day.
So, whether you are after an intervention, a mood setter or a sense of movement, motion graphics, film and sound can suffuse a space very effectively, especially when delivered at scales that go far beyond the traditional television or computer screen.
This article was written for the Working Knowledge section of Museum Practice, Spring 2009.
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