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I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

sethpurcell.com

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Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

#141

Post by loco5niner »

pklausler wrote: post #121
jimmydddd wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Went to the Frost Museum of Science in Miami. They had this big (6ft x 6ft) video display and four 6-inch diameter track balls where you guided a vessel through the virtual ocean or something. These two academic minded parents asked their sons (maybe 8 and 10 years old) to try the exhibit. They ran over excitely and just started pounding on the track balls with their fists as hard as they could. They of course did no…

Maybe the parents shouldn't let their offspring go feral on the exhibits?

As a parent with one of those kids, you never know which mode they will start off with, even with the right prompting. And yes, you correct them and steer them in the right direction and hope they will eventually learn how to behave.

Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

#142

Post by PaulHoule »

kleiba wrote: post #94

There is an incredible pressure on a lot of public facing endeavors to include digital , no matter whether it makes any sense at all or not. Take education, for instance - if it weren't such an important topic, it would be almost comical to observe how our schools are trying to jump through hoops to cram more IT into the classroom. (I wish the people responsible would take a look at Scandinavia though, where they are…

To be devil's advocate it is really practical to develop and roll out digital experiences. You can be a lot more creative about it than the "big tablet" experience you have at McDonald's. Some friends of mine have built experiential art installations that have things like a custom coin-op video game, Pepper's Ghost style displays, a "time machine" experience using video projectors, etc.

I'd love to be able to sell location-based XR experiences to museums: like you go to the paleontology museum and put on a headset and now the museum is a mixed reality Jurassic Park. For that matter I'd love to set up a multiplayer VR park in a big clean span space. There are a lot of difficulties like the cheap headsets don't really have the right tracking capabilities for a seamless location-based experience [1] plus getting together and paying a team which can deliver that sort of thing. A museum with really robust funding could probably afford an XR experience and subsidize development that transfers to other museums but I can't see the economics working for turning an old American Eagle at the mall into a VR experience park: malls have unrealistic ideas about their spaces can earn and most of them have posts in them that player would crash into.

[1] It already knows where it is the instant you put the headset on and it doesn't have to retrain like the MQ3 would.

Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

#144

Post by sethpurcell »

kylestetz wrote: post #123

I was an exhibit designer there in the early 2010s (the last exhibit I worked on was "Your Brain"); we had an incredible in-house design team that did all of the design and interactive prototyping, but unfortunately everyone was let go in ~2016 in favor of outsourcing much of the design work. The truth is that the traveling exhibits (Body Worlds, Harry Potter, etc.) make a lot more money for them and do not require t…

Author here, thanks for your comment. I'm really sad to hear that everyone was let go; as I said, I loved TFI like nothing else when I was a kid.

I completely understand the incentives re: Body Worlds, Harry Potter (I've even seen an Angry Birds exhibit). But there's a fine line between a non-profit doing what it must to survive, and drifting so far from its mission that it no longer deserves to survive. TFI is still far from that point, but the trajectory is worrisome to me, so I called it out.

Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

#145

Post by PaulHoule »

kotaKat wrote: post #117
crazygringo wrote: post #5

> But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with. To be fair, that's what I remember children's museums being like in the 1980s as well. A significant number of exhibits would be temporarily out of order on any given day. I don't think screens are resp…

> I don't think screens are responsible for that. Maintaining physical exhibits that can survive constant physical contact with kids is hard. That reminds me of something I’d love to learn a bit more about: the Strong Museum of Play . It appears the Wegmans’ supermarket exhibit where kids are able to work with real point-of-sale equipment has actually gotten equipment refreshes over the years itself, and I was really…

The Museum of Play and Wegmans are really class acts.

Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

#146

Post by throwawayoldie »

madcaptenor wrote: post #115
throwawayoldie wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, this is complaining that the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has gotten worse over the decades.

You're asking a lot to expect people on HN to know that Philadelphia exists.

Maybe it would help if I describe it as being in the Extremely East Bay. Like, about 3,000 miles east.

Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

#147

Post by serial_dev »

AndrewLiptak wrote: post #124
mandevil wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a tour guide at the National Air and Space Museum for a dozen years. I still remember seeing the exhibit plans the curators had, which called for a then 90-year old airplane (a Curtiss JN-4) to be mounted such that people could look down over it from the balcony. All of us docents who saw that immediately said "what about the kids who will drop pennies onto that precious canvas and wood thing to break it?" Six…

Because sometimes museum guests aren't just pushing things too hard, they are actively taking steps to destroy things, just to see if they can get away with it. Can confirm.

If there is only two troublemakers in every group of 30 children, and a museum receives 10 groups a day, that’s 20 little rascals who are all trying to do the craziest stunt they can come up with…

Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

#149

Post by PaulHoule »

divbzero wrote: post #78
c22 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not just museum exhibits and kids, it's everything . I have some maintenance roles in my background and the rate at which things like paper towel dispensers get worn down and completely destroyed when interacted with by hundreds or thousands of people a day is eye opening.

Physical books in libraries is another example: They can typically last just a few dozen circulations.

Some books are well made but others are crap.

I think mass market paperbacks in standardized sizes hold up pretty well considering everything. My collection mostly from the 1970s and 1980s held up pretty well up to 2010 but they are going yellow now because of the acid paper. Libraries rebind them and I notice they have a lot of rebound paperbacks of the same age that have the same yellowing mine have despite better storage conditions.

Some trade paperbacks are fine but because they're not really standardized quality is all over the place. I've bought some where the binding broke the minute I spread the book out. Hardcovers are more consistent than trade paperbacks but some still fail early.

Then there are just the accidents like the book I had in my backpack when I was outside in heavy rain but I think that was one book wrecked in about 300 circulations.

Re: I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

#150

Post by RankingMember »

The Franklin Institute was in dire straits during COVID (as many similar institutions were), but has by all accounts recovered nicely financially. It felt pretty dumpy the last few times I've been there, with broken exhibits and the aforementioned screen-based exhibits. Hopefully they'll loosen those purse-strings eventually and put some money into the more expensive but much more tactile physical exhibits that had always been one of their big strengths.
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