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Road Trip Screen Shot

It’s very exciting to announce that the video we created for our Road Trip Exhibition won the Gold award in the category of Public Relations and Development at this years MUSE awards. The MUSE awards are given out by the Media and Technology committee, part of the American Association of Museums, for excellence in the area of museums and technology. The jury that voted in our category, led by Dana Allen-Greil, Project Manager for New Media, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, said this about our video:

This quirky video was produced in-house by San Jose Museum of Art staff armed with only a sense of humor, a video camera, and some crazy Japanese high-heels. The short clip depicts a journey to the fabulous Giant Artichoke restaurant, where a postcard is purchased and sent to the museum for inclusion in the “Road Trip” exhibition. Viewers are then prompted to send their own iconic, unusual, and hilarious postcards to supplement the museum’s “Road Trip” exhibition.” The judges were impressed with the innovative, low-cost, and appropriate use of technology to reach a large audience and engage people with the exhibition beyond the walls of the museum. Both the idea and the execution are fun, creative, and playful and show that the museum is both scrappy and savvy about engaging with visitors and successfully integrating experiences between online and offline presences.

When we created the video we knew that we were making something that was fun and special. It was definitely a new direction for us and it felt good to be pushed and challenged by our Director of Marketing.

Road Trip Heels Screenshot

As with most projects this was not a solo effort. I want to thank my partner in crime at SJMA Lucy Larson, Manager of Interpretation, for being a great and fun person to work with and an outstanding springboard for ideas (we can volley ideas back and forth with great ease). Additional thanks go out to Nicole Mcbeth, Director of Marketing, for her advice and up front criticisms which helped to fine tune the video in the editing process and also to Kristen Evangelista, Associate Curator, for creating an inspiring exhibition to work from.

Also, I want to thank AAM’s Media and Technology Committee and the jury that selected our piece.  It’s great to be recognized for our efforts and to be in the company of so many great organizations!

SJMA Wins Gold @ MUSE Awards from Chris Alexander on Vimeo.

A few months back during a team meeting at the San Jose Museum of Art we had a discussion about including a timeline in our exhibition Prints of Andy Warhol. The idea was quickly tossed out because it can cost a few thousand dollars to do a timeline right. However, around May of last year I had heard about a great new online service on my favorite podcast Net at Night called Dipity that made it simple to create dynamic interactive timelines online. Users can drag the timeline from left to right to scan through different years or days. Clicking on an event will open up a window to display more information including text, video or images.

Additionally, in November a timeline created on Dipity was referenced on one of my favorite blogs Kottke.org. After finding out more about the service I started looking for an opportunity to utilize Dipity in an exhibition setting and didn’t realize the opportunity would come so quickly.

I ran back to my office space, grabbed my laptop and brought it back to the meeting to show everyone the timeline that was referenced on Kottke. The timeline was a history of different types of cereals and when they were introduced over the past century. My suggestion to the group was to create a timeline in Dipity for Andy Warhol and project it on a wall in the gallery using Dipity’s built in full screen mode. Everybody was intrigued and I promised to investigate the possibility further.

Our new director at the San Jose Museum of Art had recently worked at the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art (SMoCA) where they had just mounted a different Andy Warhol exhibit. The staff at SMoCA were kind enough to let us use the timeline events that they had assembled for their show. To experiment a little, I entered in a few of these events into a Dipity timeline that I created and found the service to be extremely easy to use. You can enter in individual events separately or you can import information from a “source.” Sources include – Flickr, YouTube, RSS, and other social media platforms.

Warhol Digital Timeline in Gallery

One of the keys to make this work in a gallery is to utilize kiosk software to lock out the visitors from surfing the internet or doing a variety of other tasks you don’t want them to do in public sight. I started looking around and found wKiosk for the Mac. It’s pretty straight forward to use and after some tweaking finally had a working model to show everybody back at the exhibition team meeting.

The reception of the timeline was positive and it was determined that we would proceed with it being in the exhibition so I set out to enter all 135 events on the timeline. Each event is assigned one of four icons which references a legend to guide users to the four different topics presented – Warhol’s personal life, news events during his life, info about his subjects, and concurrent art world events.

Installation was easy. We utilized an old PowerMac G4 tower that we set-up with the wKiosk software to display the timeline. I would recommend a faster computer, such as a Mac Mini, for delivery because it adds more fluidity to the nice motion effect the timeline has when you scroll from side to side. Our installation department installed a projector to display it on a large wall. Additionally, they built a nice little pedestal where users interact with the timeline using a mouse.

Timeline Pedestal for Interaction

We had some challenges early on with implementing the timeline. None of the problems that came up were the fault of Dipity. We are using their product in an unconventional way where it is running for up to 8 hours in a day. In a typical situation the user would go to the Dipity website and spend much less time than that.

Early on we had some issues with IP addresses being cached on our in-house DNS which would cause the timeline to not load – a white screen displayed instead. A clearing out of the cache would help until something would cause another bad IP address. Finally our IT person set up the internet connection to scan three different external DNS servers instead of our one internal. This helped immensely. If something was wrong on one DNS it would go to the next one, and so on, providing a back-up plan.

Dipity is a fast growing company that is seeing their product take off. They are constantly adding great new features that I’m sure are on their company roadmap. The addition of some of these features did not play too well with our kiosk software because of the settings I had for it. For example, the wKiosk software can allow and disallow certain urls and keywords. This keeps the visitor where we want them to be. If there are any changes to those urls through the web service it will affect how the timeline works. Seemingly, this scenario played out which caused the timeline to reload itself and not allow the visitor to explore the different events. The problem was easily correctable by changing some kiosk settings.

Additionally, Dipity implemented a subscription model where a monthly payment will remove ads from the timeline (they obviously need to make money!). We were unaware that they were implementing this and some ads showed up one day. I contacted the company to see about options for removing them and they were quick and kind enough to help us out and were very intrigued about our use of their product in a museum setting.

We were fortunate enough to have Zack, one of the founders and CTO, visit us to see it in action. He is very interested in helping make it more museum friendly for uses similar to ours or in an actual kiosk format. You can read about his visit to the San Jose Museum of Art at http://blog.dipity.com/2009/03/11/dipity-kiosk-at-sjma/.

The timeline has been a success and we are already trying to think of future uses. Dipity is an outstanding, easy to use service that will only grow more in its capabilities over the years. I can see it being used in schools, museums and libraries. Our use of the Dipity service is obviously unconventional at this point, however, there are some additional benefits. One being that we are able to embed the timeline into our webpage for the Prints of Andy Warhol exhibition allowing for visitors who visit our website the opportunity to prepare for their visit or reflect on it afterwards. Also, it extends the SJMA brand into another area of the burgeoning social media world we are currently in and allows our users to interact with one another.

Dipity do it!

I recently had the pleasure of addressing two groups of students at two different universities. One, at San Francisco State University, was a class was being taught by my friend Karen Kienzle who recently became the director at the Palo Alto Art Center. The other was a class being taught by artist Kathy Aoki at Santa Clara University. The presentation (below) focused of a broad overview of technology in museums cover aspects of in-house content creation, mobile tours, and social media. There was an additional focus on the cell phone tour company Guide by Cell because both will be using the service for exhibitions later this spring. Both classes were engaged and had some good questions afterwards.

On February 27, 2009, I had the distinct honor of presenting with Dave Ashiem from Guide by Cell and Suzanne Isken from MoCA at the California Association of Museums. The title of our session was Reach Out and Touch Your Visitors…with Technology! It was a great crowd with a lot of great questions!

Normally I talk about actual things that I’ve produced, but here I talked more from a hypothetical approach and in the process tried to be a little more philosophical and sociological. A lot of the ideas of this presentation came from a book that I’ve been reading called Grown Up Digital by Don Tapscott combined with discussions happening in blogs, on twitter and via email amongst museum people. In his book Don Tapscott discusses the large shift currently taking place between older baby boomers and the younger “Net Generation”. This younger generation has not known a world without computers and technology. These Net Geners are also going to be museum visitors and hopefully new donors. What are they expecting and what should you be offering them?

Today, technology is pushing us at a rapid pace. The new quickly replaces the “old” in an online world. A younger generation is entering the workforce and has very different ways of thinking and communicating – much different than their elders. They are making advancements to the internet that are slowly bringing an end to many of the things that are comfortable to older generations – museums included! In the past, visitors would passively view artwork and occasional take a docent led tour or an audio tour with an awkwardly designed device. Today , young adults demand more interaction and engagement. They are doing these activities both with their mobile device and through online social media tools.

Is your museum prepared?

I recently implemented a feature on our tour at the San Jose Museum of Art which I have been wanting to do for quite a while. We are currently only offering a small tour at the museum so I figured it would be a great time to try it out. If you read this site regularly you are familiar with the WiFi driven iPhone/iPod Touch tour that we have been offering since May of 2008. If not, please read the previous link!

The feature I added was full screen mode which has been sporadically mentioned on the web and is not a well known feature. It’s basic purpose is to make a web based application act more like an installed app. It does this by removing the URL and navigation bars from the top and bottom of the Safari Mobile Web Browser window – virtually locking a user to your site. It does come with some quirks which I wish to document here. First here is a demonstration of how it works:

SJMA iPod Touch Tour Full Screen Mode from Chris Alexander on Vimeo.

Apple has documentation of full screen mode (free developer’s account required) available on their developers website. To implement this feature you need the following bit of code in the header of your tour or app:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=320; initial-scale=1.0; maximum-scale=1.0; user-scalable=0;"/>
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-capable" content="yes" />
<meta name="apple-mobile-web-app-status-bar-style" content="black" />

Web Clip Icon

So, here are the quirky things about this. In order for it to work the viewer of the site must add a “web clip” icon to their home screen. If the museum is offering iPod Touches for check out or has them tethered to the wall or shelf this can easily be done in-house. Patrons using their own device might like the full screen feature or might not. It’s up to them to add the icon themselves if they would like full screen mode.

Additionally, if there are any links that lead the visitor away from the root URL the full screen mode will revert back to regular mode. This will bring back the URL bar at the top and the navigation bar at the bottom. I have not found any way to eliminate this problem yet.

SJMA iPod Touch Tour full screen mode

The obvious benefit of full screen mode is that it basically keeps the visitor on your tour and prevents them from surfing the web using a museum device. While a tech savvy visitor could still figure out a way to get into the apps and settings, it puts us one step closer to a type of Notes-Only mode (pdf download from Apple) for the iPod Touch that is only available for the non-touch screen iPods. Also known as “Museum-mode,” Notes-only helps to lock users out of all the settings of the iPod. We are using full screen mode paired with special cases that we had made by Coutour which help prevent access to the Home Button thus preventing users access to other applications on the device or access to the settings. The set-up works extremely well and we have had few incidents of visitors tinkering with settings.

Full screen mode has been implemented for a few weeks now and has been successful and trouble free.