Category: Notes

Today is Christmas eve 2013 and became my first experience working the floor of the Places Gallery at our M Shed museum.

For ninety minutes I was covering lunch breaks and had control of the radio in the gallery. Ever since I started back in July I have been trying to find out more about each of the locations and staff roles. This served as my introduction to one of the most important roles in the service, helping the public with enquires and keeping everything safe. In my role, if the wifi falls over or a computer fails, the museum continues to tick over. If there are not enough visitor assistants to safely manage the museum, we close. Digital technology roles are critical, but no single point of failure should close the doors (unless the doors fail!).

I took the time to explore the gallery in greater detail and being a biker, my favourite object is the Douglas Motorcycle  which I discovered was founded and made in Bristol. I was asked a few questions; How old is the giant floor map of Bristol and where is slug number 8 hiding (had to radio for the answer). During my patrols of the gallery I made sure to listen to the conversations by the public and watched them interact with the objects and most importantly for me, the technology.

From my observations it was clear to see that the computer kiosks are popular for short periods of time and that they are too high for very small children. Questions I then asked myself were: How can we make the kiosks work for even our smallest audiences? are they only used briefly as their task was complete or do they give up? Do we have analytics for every device to measure usage? What replacement process would we be considering for both hardware and software?

We have a mixture of screens that automatically play video on a loop, audio telephones, touch screens, and button triggered media. Those keyboards are already dated, not so much in function but the world has moved on and everybody tries to touch the screen instead of using the keyboard these days. I kept thinking about what I might change if I had the opportunity to refine and improve what we offer.

What became very obvious and clear during my stint was that the technology solutions we employ shouldn’t be considered in isolation. The public aren’t using these touch-points at home, on a bus or at work. They are sitting or standing in a large multifunction environment. When designing for gallery uses we should consider this context. Many of the public I saw were in small groups and small single person computers are not very helpful to this context. I can only guess that most gallery technology is an after-thought, rushed or makes assumptions that are never tested. I hope to change this for Bristol Museums. Our team has the remit, the will and a lot of the expertise in this area to design compelling public user experiences. If we team up with the visitor assistance staff , curators and the public we should hopefully raise the bar.

Now back to my office I go!

Most folks were wrapping up for the year this week and our director is off to Sunny Australia. The focus was ensuring I had agreements and sign-off from anybody who wouldn’t be around during the holidays.

• I spent a fair chunk of the week at the Bristol Records Office as two of the team are there and it is usual a good quiet place to do planning. The highlight here was exploring our building plans collection which we hope will form a great digital HLF proposal
• During the final management team meeting I think we came away with a consensus  about our direction of travel as a service
• I met the folks of Bristol Regional Environmental Records Centre (BRERC) and we had a chat about improving their website and general IT infrastructure requirements
• Moved the Commonwealthonline website back to our server as part of my retiring costly service agreements with third parties
• Mark P gave me a demo of his solution of using Dropbox to run daily updates to our Egypt gallery. One step closer to decommissioning that server, Hurrah.
• Continued to work on the Nesta bid with Aardman
• Spoke via the magic of Skype with a group of museum types about delivering training for the South West
• Got the green light to host two events in 2014 for local gov and museum digital types
• We finally got two TVs setup at our main site which we’ll be using for way finding and whats on type information for the public
• Got the green light to run the discovery and Alpha phases of our website improvement project – web design agencies can holla until 6th January
• prepared a service wide plan of attack for the digital strategy which now needs to go out to the teams for feedback and refinement

This week was super packed and organised around several major events. I have my head in our web strategy so here are the highlights.

• Planned and delivered a communicating on the web mini 90min workshop which essentially said that Google is our homepage and content strategy is key.
• Met a critical friend from the Arts Council and waxed lyrical about innovation and digital engagement
• Discussed in more detail the digital requirements for next years Moved by Conflict exhibition
• Progressed with 1 of our student project teams
•  Attended the private view for the launch of the refurbished galleries five and six
• Learned about budget forecasting
• Attended the private view for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year which included our experiment with motion tracking and ghost slugs which I urge you to see for yourself and THANK YOU to Stef Goodchild

If I had to use one word to describe this week it would be Choices. I have choices, you have choices and 2014 is ready for us to start making choices. This was how I kicked off my team meeting on Monday. We have much to accomplish next year and at the moment the calendar is pretty empty. Yes we could just copy out the 2013 calendar and get back to work, doing all the things we did this year but I don’t think that 2014 should be the same. Yes there is plenty of work that will be similar – temporary exhibitions to build and destroy (i mean take down but that hip hop reference stays!), repairing computers, shooting objects, digitising moving image collections, reacting and a gang of other expected tasks. But we also need to evolve our team, our Team Digital. Our team not only needs to cope with the expectations from 2013 but also to grow with our audiences, funders and peer demands for the next 5 years or so. This means making dozens of tiny changes to how we work and importantly what we work on. Change is largely incremental and we can work to that tune or pretend things are the same until they are not and drown at the shock. What this really means for me and the team is that we may have to say no to current activities in order to find time for new fledgling activity such as Bring Your Own Device, sensors, user experience design, revenue generation, refreshing setup and working more closely with other organisations. To that end, I sent a request to all managers asking them to submit their requests for Team Digital and some have started to roll in. Once we have these requests we can make those choices we always put off.

• The City Council Budget review was made public for consultation
• Advised on several databases that are pretty fundamental to teams that need more than a few plasters
• Introduced Stefan Goodchild to the audio visual team. Stef has kindly offered to produce a demo at the private view for Wildlife Photographer of the year. The interactive will use an xbox kinnect to motion track people as they walk pass it and draw a trail on the wall using a projector. My hope is that this will demo the usefulness of the technology to various teams and can be used next year.
• Began to write our web strategy for 2014
• Took a tour of the University interaction and graphics lab with Peter Bennet. It was like being a kid in sweet shop and I really hope we can work together on the future of interaction design in a museum space.
• Talked to the Records Office about their storify project for The Dreadnought journal and hopes for wikipedia.