Copper Hewitt museum is a constantly innovative place which always gives me surprise. During this visit, the new exhibition content has brought me new information experience. The first step after entering the museum is to purchase admission tickets. The museum staff gave me an interactive pen and asked me if I have been here before. Since this is my second visit, I had understood the functionality of the pen and felt excited and looked forward to the actual use of it.
The current exhibitions is inclusive of Nature by Design, Rebeca Méndez Selects, Moustiers ceramics, Iridescence, Immersion Room, Models & Prototypes Gallery and Scholten & Baijings in the Process lab (“Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum”). The innovative exhibits in museum brings people brand-new feelings in all the aspects of sense, hearing and touch.
The installation in Process lab invites visitors to explore the design process of contemporary industrial design studios by themselves. The lab shows some industrial crafts and a number of interesting details about the making process of tableware, furniture, and textiles. Some objects from collection are available for touch and two interactive tables are offered for color experiment.
Immersion Room is a creative space where visitors can draw their own wallpaper designs and experience the full-scale projection of pattern on the walls around them. At the same time, visitors can select wallpapers from museum’s extraordinary collection and see them projected on the walls, accompanied by audio clips about the information of that particular design or designer. Multiple types of information give visitors immersive experience, which helps them find inspiration and learn to create.
There is a new project at the second floor “How was your commute to the museum?” which analyzing the commuting process of visitors. Visitor can pick a small red or green ball and put it into one of the transparent buckets which corresponding to a certain type of commuting. The green ball means “good” experience while the red one means “not so good”. The commuting types including pedestrian, bicycle, motorized vehicle, bus and subway. These soft color balls arouse interest of visitors to participate the project, which provides statistical data for future strategies on enhancing museum experience.
Copper Hewitt has made some intriguing digital innovations in the field of interaction, among which interactive Pen and touchscreen table are the two major innovative features of museum. Both interactive pen and touchscreen table give visitors the new experience compared with traditional museum experience.
Interactive pen gives visitors the opportunities to immerse in the process of seeing and feeling exhibits instead of taking pictures busily or using traditional museum App. By aligning and pressing the flat end of the Pen to any object labels, visitors can collect and save objects from around the galleries. Then all the saved exhibits information will be accessible online for future read. Meanwhile, the pen is also used to explore and manipulate the objects that visitors have collected on the touchscreen table. Copper Hewitt converted the pen to a piece of consumer hardware by cooperating with an international team, as stated on the museum site, “Like so many of the objects in the museum’s galleries, it is the product of a collaborative, international industrial design process, exemplifying how designers solve real-world problems.”
According to the introduction of interactive table on museum website, touchscreen tables uses projected capacitive touch technology, offering the same resolution as tablets and smart phones, which enables visitors clearly observe the details of exhibits and get inspiration. This visitor technology emphasized the play experience and displays the specificities of a design museum. Interactive table is not only a “collection browser”, but also a “play designer” that offers various materials, modes and object scenes for drawing three-dimensional model types by visitors themselves.
Copper Hewitt Museum’s innovation on digital experience shows that it attaches great importance to the interactive experience between visitors and exhibits. By building interactive digital entity space, it transforms the traditional one-way display platform into an interactive space for public participation. More broadly, it reflects a digital transformation trend of cultural institutions. With the rapid development of information technology, especially the coming of big data era, our social lifestyle is facing the situation of being changed profoundly by IT, and so does people’s cultural life. As the closest cultural contact with the public, cultural institutions can no longer meet people’s requirements change and diversity according to existing service mode. Therefore, many cultural institutions around the world have been exploring and practicing digital construction in recent years, such as innovating institute website and mobile app or creating virtual experience projects.
Digital and emerging media is helping cultural institutions successfully meet their missions by various digital strategies. According to Xingya Wang, being more accessible, engaging content and generating revenue are what museums are focusing on based on their strategies, and digital innovations give museums these possibilities.
In order to be more accessible, museums are providing audience with more open access to collections and making museums websites more accessible. Take National Portrait Gallery as an example. In recent years, National Portrait Gallery is not only extending the range and methods of viewing digital images of their collections and addressing the importance of open and sharable sources, but also prioritizes investment in redesign of its website to create seamless user experience. To enrich the content, there are many museums have embraced digital media as a creative method. Among them the Metropolitan Museum of Art is one standout. The Met is regarded as a potent, full-fledged media company because its digital achievement (Baker, 2015). Begin from 2011, the Met has been working closely with industrial organizations to develop apps, 3D print interactive objects and virtual reality experience for the museum. The Met also built a 70-person digital media team in order to formulate and implement effective content strategies in media-saturated landscape. Experimental initiatives including content creation and content distribution. Besides, using digital methods to generate revenue and funding of museum is another trend. Digital activities or products including digital funding model, better UX design, online courses, paid onsite multimedia tour, self-serving ticketing and so on.
Meanwhile, many cultural institutions are also involved in the field of digital technology education for public. For example, Tate, an institution that houses the United Kingdom’s national collection of British art in a network of four art museums (“Tate”), has built a Digital Learning Studio to increase participation and attraction. As a multi-use space for making and learning about digital technology, the studio offers a wide range of learning programs including courses, workshops and development projects.
The digital transformation of cultural institutions is a digital practice which redefines the interaction between public and institutions. According to Dalbello, “Public conversation is at the core of heritage practices involving artifacts and their digital representations”. In this sense, through digital transformation, cultural institutions are extending their role to become participates in a broader discourse with the public.
Reference:
“Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum”. Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, 2019, https://www.cooperhewitt.org/.
“Tate”. En.Wikipedia.Org, 2019, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate.
Wang, Xingya. “Review Of Different Museum Digital Strategies”. Museums And Digital Culture – Pratt Institute, 2018, https://museumsdigitalculture.prattsi.org/review-of-different-museum-digital-strategies-6ec009d2f80b.
Baker, Dillon. “Museums, The Next Media Companies: Why The Met Built A 70-Person Media Team”. Contently, 2015, https://contently.com/2015/05/12/museums-the-next-media-companies/.
Dalbello, Marija. (2009). “Digital Cultural Heritage: Concepts, Projects, and Emerging Constructions of Heritage.” Proceedings of the Libraries in the Digital Age (LIDA) conference, 25-30 May, 2009.