Design for Mobile Workshop

Editor's Notes

• #8: * Has this ever happened to you taking an audio tour? Expresses the aim of interpretation, be it in the gallery or elsewhere: to help us connect with what we’re seeing, care about it, and thereby open up to learning about it.
• #11: Peter Samis, also, has put interpretation at the center of SFMOMA’s mobile program, guided by the belief that visitors need more help connecting with some of the things museums exhibit than others. You may be familiar with his concept of ‘visual velcro’: works that don’t have it – are visual ‘teflon’, need interpretation in order to engage audiences in unlocking and appreciating all of their rich complexity.
• #17: Some are now predicting that mobile devices will be our primary means of accessing the Internet by 2020. If that sounds like a dotcom boom kind of prediction, that’s probably a fair way to characterize the hype.In comparison to fixed web’s development history, mobile is somewhere between 1995 and 1998: a wild, wild west boom town where fortunes are going to be made and lost probably even faster than in the 20th century. But don’t get me wrong: I’m a believer!
• #28: Another way to represent this is as a multi-tiered architecture with up to three kinds of content:1. -+-+-+-+-+ The Soundtrack2. o o o o o The Soundbites3. / | / | / Links
• #34: But both the Tate & SFMOMA examples are linear media: not perhaps the best interface for accessing information on a mobile device, whether used inside the gallery or outside.ArtBabble offers a model for what could be an ideal interface for combining soundtrack, soundbites and links to third party content.It allows us to choose either to watch or hear a soundtrack overview of the exhibition or collection linearly, but also offers a notation system that can create ‘stops’ or soundbites at any point along that linear timeline.William Christenberry exampleNeed to redefine 3rd party content and think about it beyond ‘user-generated content’: e.g. SmartHistory.org
• #61: Like museums, mobile lends itself both to the extreme personalization of niche activities, and to connecting disparate, passionate subject specialists and longtail markets. There is a powerful network effect of connecting lots and lots of people who are passionate about the same niches. As some of you may be aware, the niche I’m rather passionate about is mobile in museums: interpretation, games, crowdsourcing, social media.So I have been asking myself of late: what would a mobile social media experience be that connects museums’ strengths in niche content and collections with the passion and power of niche communities in the distributed network?So I’d like to try out an idea on you. This is a very fresh and raw idea, just formed this past weekend when I was working with a team at Wyspa Art Institute in Gdansk, Poland on an upcoming contemporary art festival called Alternativa.
• #62: In this project I’d like to leverage the fact that mobile is both very social and very personal. Mobile is an ideal vehicle for niche content, experiences & audiences because both personal – intimate, even - and social.The highly personal nature of the mobile experience also makes mobile a great vehicle for the kind of niche content and experiences that museums excel at. + How many people do you let whisper in your ear?Or put content onto your personal, mobile device that is always with you, and usually carried very close to your body? Although it’s arguably the social applications that make mobile products revolutionary, it may just be the intimate, personal nature of the mobile experience that ‘makes them stick(y)’! ;-)
• #63: I’d like to think outside the audiotour box a bit to go from headphones to microphones
• #64: And I’d like to meet people where they are, and take them some place new by connecting them to a network, however, niche, of people who share their interests.
• #65: And my desire to create a mobile experience that is a social media platform, an opportunity for encounter and meaning-making of the most personal and powerful sort, is inspired by the work of Joanna Rajkowska, a Polish artist whose work I first encountered at Wyspa in Dec 2009. In her work she creates platforms and meeting spaces, “agora”…
• #66: The festival will take place in and around the Wyspa Institute of Art,
• #67: Which is located in the Gdansk Shipyard
• #68: This is where the Solidarity movement started; these are the gates behind which the striking shipyard workers barricaded themselves, and in front of which tanks waited.
• #69: It is the shipyard where Lech Walensa worked as an electrician; his workshop has been reinstalled and opened to the public as both an artwork and a tourist attraction by artist Grzegorz Klaman
• #70: The art festival will include contemporary artworks installed in and around this evocative industrial estate, which is both on the national register of historic sites and a functioning shipyard even today.
• #71: And there are ambitious urban revitalization plans to develop a ‘young city’ in the heart of the shipyard.
• #72: So I’m thinking about a way to connect on-site visitors to the festival with the past, the present, and the future of the site, as well as with the art and audiences interested in all of these who might be reached through the Internet.My proposal is to provide what is at first glance a fairly simple mobile interpretation solution for on-site visitors. It will offer images and audio, text and video about the artworks in the festival but also the locations they are place in. Augmented reality – both visual and audio – will help people glance backwards and forwards in time to consider the evolution of the shipyard. Visitors will be able to take photos of whatever interests them, but also bookmark or collect items and information of interest to them from their self-guided tour.
• #73: Elsewhere, online visitors will be able to access anonymous collections of saved items and new photos from on-site visitors. A story-writing game will encourage and help them to ‘connect the dots’ – to write a narrative that makes sense of each personal collection of photos and artifacts. It is a way for remote visitors to connect to Gdansk, the shipyard, and the Alternativa Festival at Wyspa even if they can’t visit in person.And it is a way for people interested in art, in history, in the solidarity movement, ship-building or urban renewal to find each other and connect in a Twitter-style way that permits as much or as little anonymity as participants like. Perhaps most importantly, the game foregrounds the subjectivity and the relativity of history and art history. It is, perhaps, one way to make of the experience a distributed network where the whole is much greater, and much more sustainable, than the sum of its parts.
• #74: So what do you think: will you consign my idea to the rubbish heap of conference history, or has it got legs?