Between November and December of 2013, I had the opportunity
to visit a number of art and Smithsonian museums in Denver, Washington, DC, and
New York.
While each of the items below show one way engagement, they
are examples of curatorial techniques intended to increase viewer engagement
and enjoyment through the provision of additional digital content about the exhibit.
The use of social media to provide more information for the
public is something I typically look for. Museums are connecting the public
through Facebook and Websites, and then provide QR codes or recordings
available from mobile phones.
Some experiences were better than others. For example, I was
excited to see QR codes in the Western Art area of Denver Art Museum (DAM) at http://www.denverartmuseum.org,
but could not get them to play after I scanned them. I thought, well maybe the
network is overloaded, or maybe my phone can pull up the web inside the current
architecture, but the QR’s would not play even when I tried them at home. More
work/information/support is needed for these. In digging around on the web, I
found an app for DAM QR, but the user commented that he or she was not able to
read any of the QR’s either.
A really good experience with QR was at the National
Botanical Gardens in DC, http://www.usbg.gov. I was able to clearly listen to a
recording about plants before the development of flowers. It was short in
duration, which probably indicates attention to the average attention span, and
forwarding traffic flow through the particular exhibit.
Last in this set of observations was the Museum of Art and
Design in NY. The signage for a special exhibit, Out of Hand (digital printing)
was very good. It included information
on how to access audio remarks with mobile devices. Exhibits were numbered to
correlate with the recordings on the mobile website: http://www.madmuseum.org/media/audio?t=Out%20of%20Hand
The museum site also included videos about the exhibit.
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