Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

sethpurcell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 404 posts

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

#181

Post by jmkd »

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…

> 2. Curators often see "taking care" of the exhibits as more important than actually exhibiting them. Not to mention they're often art/history majors with very little clue about anything digital.

Museum curators used to be called keepers and this only changed in the mid-late twentieth century. The philosophy of preservation runs deep and you won't struggle to find curators whose favourite day of the week is when the museum is closed to the public.

Curators tend to make exhibits and displays that appeal to their own scholarly reference points. You need a different role - interpretation - to literally interpret this scholarship into what the public might be interested in. Few museums can afford to apply the lens of interpretation, so for the most part we are stuck with what curators think and its limited crossover with what the public want.

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

#182

Post by incone123 »

card_zero wrote: post #167
Theodores wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

The NHM is free to enter, some special exhibitions charge for entry and I think some require free booking to manage crowds. There is a very strong encouragement to make a donation though.

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

#183

Post by Aunche »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #127
Aunche wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It doesn't really have to cost that much. You're mostly paying real estate and a professional waiting for business. Framing material, UV glass, and acid free paper are quite cheap. Anti-glare Tru Vue museum glass costs maybe a couple hundred dollars for a medium sized work, but a lot of museums don't even use it because art framers mark it up like crazy.

>You're mostly paying real estate and a professional waiting for business. Are these optional? If not, I don't see how this makes sense: >It doesn't really have to cost that much.

Gallerists always act like having a professional framer is given, but maybe their typical clientele are rich enough to just treat that as a mandatory tax. I framed my art with a diy LevelFrames kit for 10x cheaper which took less than an hour. The frame itself isn't particularly good quality, so for now, boutique framers have a strictly superior product, but this advantage could easily be commoditized away.

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

#184

Post by tgbugs »

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.

One science museum that is not like that is the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, at least when I was there (shudder) about a decade ago.

It was a museum that was designed for parents to explain to children. The written material for any given piece in an exhibit went into sufficient detail and successive sections of writing would build on each other without necessarily requiring that the previous section had been read.

Back then the museum had an exhibition on the longitude problem and time keeping, precision, drift, etc. that walked you through the development of increasingly accurate chronometers, the practical reasons why, etc. It was an absolute masterwork exhibit, and it expected the adults to be actively engaged with helping digest the material with the kids.

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

#185

Post by IshKebab »

c22 wrote: post #62
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…

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.

I guess it's because it's waaaay too expensive to buy really robust things (like paper towel dispensers). It's not like you couldn't build an indestructible paper towel dispenser, but it would cost 10x a normal one and have 100x smaller market.

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

#186

Post by ghaff »

devmor wrote: post #162
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…

Yes. Especially a lot of older and mustier museums have very little in the way of explanation related to the exhibits.

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

#187

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

CrazyStat wrote: post #157
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…

My wife and I toured our neighborhood public elementary school a couple years ago. Almost every classroom we passed the kids were staring at their chromebooks, even in the art room—digital art, I guess [1]. In the music room the kids were sitting at rows of desks with electronic keyboards and headphones while the teacher sat at the front of the class and gave them instructions through a microphone (to be heard throug…

When my kid was going to start preschool, we went to see a relatively posh private school in the neighborhood. The first thing they showed was a photo of a 3-year-old kid solving a jigsaw puzzle in a big touchscreen. A jigsaw puzzle, you know, that thing where 80% of the challenge for a kid that age is physically inserting the pieces the right way. In a touchscreen! They also boasted about not having any books until age 8 or something like that, I don't remember exactly.

We left appalled. We sent him to a public school instead, where they use screens much less (although they do use them, sadly) and they have books. I don't know to what extent this is a voluntary choice or just because they have less money to buy gadgets, but the result is better anyway.

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

#188

Post by Nition »

CrazyStat wrote: post #157
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…

My wife and I toured our neighborhood public elementary school a couple years ago. Almost every classroom we passed the kids were staring at their chromebooks, even in the art room—digital art, I guess [1]. In the music room the kids were sitting at rows of desks with electronic keyboards and headphones while the teacher sat at the front of the class and gave them instructions through a microphone (to be heard throug…

For the first few years of let's-make-school-digital it was even worse, all iPads instead of chromebooks. Not even a keyboard to type on.

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

#190

Post by ghaff »

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…

You have to keep those sort of museums up to date. As I recall the Computer History Museum in Boston, they had some interesting historical artifacts like Sage I think. But a fair bit of the museum was devoted to supposedly state of the art computing, some interactive. As a lot of the local computer companies went away, a lot of the the exhibits started looking pretty dated--and I'm sure a lot of funding dried up as well.
Post reply on HN