Category Archive for Design

ExhibitFiles is live!

For the past year we’ve been working with the Association of Science – Technology Centers in desiging and developing the ExhibitFiles, a community site for exhibit designers. (The image here is from the CB Radio exhibition which opened in 1978 and is part of the ExhibitFiles). The concept behind the site is simple, too often the exhibit and exhibition development process isn’t recorded for future designers and developers. As a community, we sometimes redesign the wheel as there is no central…

Real Science 2.0: Interacting with Scientific Imagery and Live Data

Today I’m conducting two half-day workshops at the Museums and the Web Conference in San Francisco. This blog post contains the workshop description and the course materials for Real Science 2.0, there’s another post for Museum Mashups. In case you’re wondering, the colorful image of the Pacific Ocean on the left comes from NASA’s SeaWIFS and MODIS/Aqua missions. The bright colors show chlorophyll concentrations in the water. Workshop Description Originally developed as tool to help scientists share information,…

Museum Mashups

Today I’m conducting two half-day workshops at the Museums and the Web Conference in San Francisco. This blog post contains the workshop description and the course materials for Museum Mashups, there’s another post for Real Science 2.0: Interacting with Scientific Imagery and Live Data. The image on left is a termite “catherdral” mound, an example of the theory of emergence in nature. I decided to use this image after rading Alex Iskold’s article on Yahoo! Pipes, where he talks about emergence (part of…

ExhibitFiles: BETA on April 23rd

Three weeks from today the ExhibitFiles website will be publicly available. This National Science Foundation-sponsored Website will allow exhibit developers to “connect with colleagues, find out about exhibits, and share experiences.” For over a year now we’ve been working with our partners at the Association of Science-Technology Centers and Independent Exhibitions to design this community site. We’ve had a great group of advisors and we’ve also received helpful comments through the ExhibitFiles Development blog. The site is being…

Online video editors and a quick survey of Web 2.0 video sites

Earlier in the month, we launched The American Image: The Photographs of John Collier Jr., one of the activities included was the Propaganda Filmmaker. This custom version of our own experimental online Flash video editor, allows visitors to make their own short, 40 second films, which can then be embedded or emailed. Some work on the server-side keeps track of the latest videos and the top rated ones. It is an interesting activity in that the visitor is given creative control and can…

Museums in Transition

Gyroscope, an exhibit design firm based in Oakland, CA has just released a report on how museums are using “new communication technologies to enhance and extend the visitor experience.” The paper Museums in Transition: Emerging Technologies as Tools for Free-Choice Learning was commissioned by the Science Museum of Virginia. Based on reviewing available publications along with interviews of twenty-four museum professionals (including myself), the report takes a comprehensive look at how museums are using Web 2.0 technologies, handheld devices, and other innovations. Museums in…

National Digital Forum: Day 2 – Opening the gates: new opportunities in online collections

In the afternoon of Day 2, Seb Chan from the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney presented on their innovative collections database. Seb started out by taking about visitor expectations have changed when comes to what they might be able to find on museum website and how they might browse collections. Seb cited Amazon and Last FM as examples of sites that provide visitors with “recommended” items, assisting users to browse materials within a collection as influential sites in developing their own collections database.

National Digital Forum: Day 2 – Let’s see what happens if…

A packed day today at the National Digital Forum in Wellington, NZ. Here’s the first of probably a couple of posts as I’m going through my notes. This morning’s keynote was delivered by Toby Travis from the Victoria and Albert Museum entitled, Let’s see what happens if … Experimenting with emerging technologies on the V&A website. Toby presented the story behind many of the innovative things the museum has been up to over the last few years. Perhaps the most compelling part of this…

Our new (Beta) bookshelf on Shelfari

Shelfari (Beta, of course) is “a virtual shelf to show your books” and “connect with your friends.” It’s an interesting concept and parts of it are well done, although some the limitations in organizing your shelf became apparent soon after I began to add books. It would be great to be able to reorder, or otherwise create categories (in ways other than using opinions or star ratings), but perhaps this is in the works as this site only launched this month. Our shelf…

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