I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens • Hacker News Board

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

#161

Post by kylestetz » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:15 PM UTC

sethpurcell wrote: post #144

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…

Yeah I hear you, and fwiw I largely agree with your article. Whether the presence of screens and software-based experiences means they are drifting from their mission is definitely up for debate, but your point is taken! Similar to you I had a hugely impactful trip to TFI in 5th grade, and much later on it was a dream to work there. And now I get to take my 5 year old. It's a special place and it's nice to see people feeling protective of it :)

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

#162

Post by devmor » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:16 PM UTC

elric wrote: post #86

I had a (now defunct) startup in this space some years ago. Maybe I can help shed some light on why things are the way they are. 1. Money. Most museums have no money. They either run on donations, on subsidies, or at the whim of wealthy patrons. They are very costly to run, especially the big ones. They are often in prime real estate areas, many require tight climate control, many also require specialised lighting to…

> Personally I'm not interested in museums that are just glass cases with stuff without any explanation.

I am not sure why you mentioned this, because it has nothing to do with the subject article. This was a very specific article about interactive, hands-on museums replacing their exhibits with touch screens.

That being said, I have also been to countless museums of many kind and I have never once seen a museum that did not explain what the exhibits were. Have you actually seen this anywhere, or was this hyperbole?

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

#163

Post by quantified » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:16 PM UTC

PaulHoule wrote: post #142

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 lo…

If our "real world" is screens, maybe. I really hate to think that this is becoming the case, but it is happening and this only hastens it.

The article was about real analogs or actual world objects. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is a fantastic example, as is the Field Museum there. Kids are full of screen time already. Is that all there is?

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

#164

Post by elric » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:17 PM UTC

BryantD wrote: post #154

elric wrote: post #86

I had a (now defunct) startup in this space some years ago. Maybe I can help shed some light on why things are the way they are. 1. Money. Most museums have no money. They either run on donations, on subsidies, or at the whim of wealthy patrons. They are very costly to run, especially the big ones. They are often in prime real estate areas, many require tight climate control, many also require specialised lighting to…

Good feedback. I wouldn't put "taking care" in quotes, however; my wife is a former museum worker and has graduate degrees in the field, and preservation is a key part of the role. Exhibits aren't just for the now, they're for the future. People would love to sit in the cockpit of the Bockscar bomber (little bit morbid, but true); allowing that would result in serious damage over time. This is less important for educ…

Oh I didn't put it in quotes out of disdain or anything, more because I couldn't think of a better description. Preservation sounds better indeed.

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

#165

Post by jack_h » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

mikestorrent wrote: post #87

Der_Einzige wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's cus all skilled workers learned they can charge insane rates. Blue collar skilled labor starts at 100$ an hour in West Virginia or Mississippi now. Most of them, like Software, have learned that it's hard to figure out if the work they did was good or not until afterwards. As such, there are tons of charlatans, grifters, scammers, and related in many industries right now. Classic cases are Dentists (Literally ev…

>learned they can charge insane rates It's called "what the market can bear" and it's what corporations with marketing and sales professionals have always tried their best to do; charge as much as you possibly can without losing business. Of course, it only actually works when there is competition, and so the rising prices are kept in check by undercutting competition.... and then, _that_ only works when the undercut…

> A free market actually requires a lot of surrounding regulation to work

While I am not a free market absolutist, I think your assertion is based on judging negative outcomes of a free market vs the positive intentions of regulations trying to prevent those negative outcomes, i.e. you’re not considering the negative outcomes of regulations. I don’t think any free market advocate would state categorically that they produce perfect results, merely that any attempt to prevent certain negative outcomes through law will produce different negative outcomes elsewhere.

For instance regulations tend to incentivize very large corporations to advocate for more regulation as it raises the barrier to new competition entering the market place. Another example would be over burdensome regulations that slow the production of housing which constrains supply and prices a lot of people out of the market. I would have loved to take public transit where I lived a few years ago, but they spent a decade on environmental impact studies while traffic and the environmental impact from it got significantly worse.

There’s also a time component where the effects of regulations can take decades or even generations to really play out, but people tend to only remember the well-meaning goal of the regulation if they remember it at all. This tends to be very beneficial for politicians who end up being judged not on outcomes, but intentions.

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

#166

Post by rob_c » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:19 PM UTC

In the UK it comes off the back of "decolonize this" and "imperialism bad that".

Frankly I'm fed up of it over here and it's a shame this is being replicated in countries built a lot more strongly on actual modern scientific progress.

There's plenty of affordable interactive exhibits (the cost of crayons and paper hasn't inflated that much since the 90s!), but there's this false b$ that interactive digital media or 3d VR wish-wash is what people want. This mostly comes from asking the wrong people, the great unwashed who you were never going to attract away from the latest Disney flop.

As is being played out en-masse within hollywood and the wider entertainment industry. Ask the people who were your strongest supporters and original fans what they liked about your thing and you'll cut through all the noise and know where your priorities should be. Stop tyring to please everyone and focus on doing what you do well, growth and expansion numbers are good for one place the valley, and lets look where that got social media...

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

#167

Post by card_zero » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

Theodores wrote: post #109

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 didn't bring my niece to a museum to look at a screen..." I took my niece around the Natural History Museum in London recently, taking in the new 'Darwin' extension first. It was a liminal space of sorts with lots of broken screens. The tech had not been updated in a decade or more so you had Adobe Flash Player running, complete with the crash pop-up messages to let you know what version of Flash they were updated…

I think you're mistaken if you got the impression that the museum once had guides. This isn't a recent trend, so far as I know it's been delightfully free from tour guides since 1881.

You had to buy tickets prior to 2001, so that's changed. (Was entry free in its early history too? Not sure.) That used to be your greeting, the ticket desk.

They had an earthquake machine in 1985, it must be the same one.

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

#168

Post by djmanning » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

jacobolus wrote: post #8

parpfish wrote: post #4

One of my longstanding peeves is that art museums are treated as serious places for grown-ups but science museums and zoos are treated as places for kids.

Art museums could be made friendlier for kids, but they would need significant design and maintenance effort. In particular: many kids need a lot of running around, want to play with things with their hands, and get quickly bored just standing and looking at artworks. It would be nice if there were better art museums for kids though. (For what it's worth, there are plenty of non-interactive and thus boring-for-kids s…

There is such a place at the Cleveland Museum of Art: https://www.clevelandart.org/artlens-gallery The Studio part of the gallery has several kid-sized interactives.

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

#169

Post by gwbas1c » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:22 PM UTC

> And where it looks like the budget has been going are the screen rooms. They occupy the huge central spaces on the main floor of the museum, and I’m sure a lot of time, money, and passion went into these things. But it’s misguided.

It reminds me of a Reddit thread about if someone should divorce their spouse because they significantly overdid it with smarthome tech. They (the other spouse) insisted that controlling everything with phones was "the future" and did things like drill out locks so they could only get in with a smartphone, and update the toilets so they would only flush from a smartphone.

It's too bad the content was deleted, but you can get the jist from reading the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmITheAngel/comments/1lv1t0r/aita_f...

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

#170

Post by mattkrause » Wed, Sep 10, 2025, 7:24 PM UTC

dcminter wrote: post #33

parpfish wrote: post #4

One of my longstanding peeves is that art museums are treated as serious places for grown-ups but science museums and zoos are treated as places for kids.

It drives me absolutely bananas that the "interpretation" (fancy museum word for "signs") at science museums is so parsimonious. Some fascinating device vital to the history of an important branch of science will have a brief paragraph about the person who invented it, nothing about what it's for, and then just a date and the device name. Often there's little or nothing further even in the museum shop. It's a crying…

Art museums are even worse. "Portrait of Duke von Duke (London, 1841). Oils."

Who is this guy in the painting?! How did he merit a painting? What's unique about the style/composition/whatever?

Conversely, I went to an exhibit of Napoleonic Art and they had a whole breakdown of the symbolism. For example, Napolean liked bees as a symbol of hard work and order, apparently, and they were snuck into most depictions of him as little Easter Eggs.