Nice post. My company specializes in musem and culture apps so it’s interesting to read about your experiences. These kind of social features that the brooklyn museum app has are something that we also implement. The thing is that as a community, one specific museum app is probably not enough to create meaningful dialogue about the items on display.

The basic idea is solid: visitors comment about items for other visitors to comment back because they all have the same context (they’ve seen and experience the item first hand). The problem is in the medium; mobile phones are not the most pleasant devices to write your thoughts. Especially when you’re on the move in a museum. We believe the solution is to take these user inputs from that narrow setting to a more wider context and share them in other social media services (twitter, facebook etc.) to gain more traction. People who see your thoughts from their home computers might have meaningful things to say about them although they might not have visited the museum personally.

The dialogue moves from the app community to the more larger social media community and the app merely serves as the input tool.

I think that’s one aspect of why museums want to offer people the chance to comment on objects or experiences in museums. Offering them a voice is one way to empower them – but only if the museums respond or do something with the information they get back from visitors. You can easily argue, as Rothstein did, that the comments aren’t meaningful per se, but I agree with Shelly – we’re at the beginning of a process, the R&D phase.

And of course, everywhere you turn people are talking about “socializing” every type of experience imaginable and there’s huge pressure to jump on the bandwagon and to connect the physical experience with a virtual social one, on the spot, which usually means via mobile phone.

Museums rightly feel the need to offer mobile experiences because that’s where a lot of the action is. So it comes back to designing virtual social experiences that are at least fun, even if they don’t accomplish something useful.

So even if we really want the conversations and experiences to happen in the galleries, that shouldn’t exclude the possibility of creating great experiences that happen with our content but outside of our walls.

I do believe you’ve got to meet people where they are so you can begin to bring them along to the place where you are. But I know it’s one thing to describe it, and another thing altogether to do it successfully.

Like others, we have been thinking about how to use mobile apps. We’ve started a project as part of the Macarthur Learning Network to get kids out into the streets to measure pollutant levels using nexus one and some bluetooth enabled sensors and some pretty cool location enabled visualization software. Its going pretty well, we can share more about it if people are interested.

We found a long time ago that people do what they want to do in museums. While it seems self evident, that’s one of the pleasures of museums, a pleasure rarely found elsewhere in the public sphere. I have been eavesdropping on museum conversations for decades and I have a general sense that we are not following people’s own desires in creating these “rating/favoriting/commenting” apps but rather trying to encourage them to do what *we* want them to do. We map the relatively few successful examples of ratings (amazon, netflix, yelp) onto the museum experience and hope that people will respond. They don’t, by and large (though both Shelly and Peter have created experiences which are exceptions.)

Two questions: why should they? and why should we want them to? Is it not more than sufficient that they have these conversations with their friends in real space in real time while they are actually in front of the artifacts/experiences? Or even, as Nina is so eloquent about, with strangers in the museum? Why do we hope that these conversations will proliferate away from the actual nub and locus of the museum experience which is the social encounter with objects and phenomena?

Place is so important, the physical experience is so important, I am not surprised that people do not carry that into the disembodied social sphere of apps and the net.

There is a book by John Seely Brown and a few others called “from push to pull” which I think addresses this issue well…www.johnseelybrown.com/pushpull.pdf

Thanks for starting this conversation, Robin.

You’re right. Mia’s proposal to allow visitors to take their “likes” home with them could happily help to solve the problem. The point isn’t necessarily to add meaningful comments when you’re in front of the object, but more to be able to see others’ insights when you’re there, and/or be prompted to reflect on why you “liked” an object in the post-visit environment you describe. It seems like everyone in this thread agrees that the museum itself needs to be involved in the exchange.

Recently a colleague and I tried out the AMNH Explorer app – it tracks objects you’ve visited and allows you to bookmark ones you like and email the links to yourself, but it doesn’t have the component we’re talking about here. It was designed to promote wayfinding, rather than communities of interest. I wonder if it’s too early to compare the apps out there and see if anyone is having success with getting visitors to comment, either on the fly or later.

We briefly thought Twitter might be a solution, but I think the Museum itself needs to be involved and structuring/incentivizing the exchange for it to rise above the level of a string of “Cool” and “Awesome” comments. Very few people will spontaneously erupt with profound insights when standing in front of a museum object, even if they are stirred by it. After all, you can be vaguely stirred–which is a not yet articulated state–or profoundly stirred, which might be a more complex state even harder to parse into words!

The Eliasson responses–both the plethora of “cools” and the longer, more thoughtful ones–were composed at a kiosk in the museum or online from home after the visit. For that reason, Mia’s idea of taking a list of “likes” (aka favorites) home from a show might open up an interesting space where it’s less about gaining additional information online from your bookmarks than participating in a post-visit conversation in the tranquility of reflection and with access to a full keyboard.

Showing people how their comments will be used and valued can help increase participation rates, but there’s still so much to learn about encouraging participation. I wonder if it’s more difficult in art museums or other places where people feel less expert?

Personally I think there’s some value in other people’s ‘likes’ – it makes me wonder how and why my tastes differ from theirs. Ideally it’d also be possible for me to take my list of liked objects back home with me, as a souvenir or a reminder to look up the object again in more detail, but that’s a whole other wish list.