MCN 2024

Since 2020, MoMA no longer offers print materials such as maps and brochures to onsite visitors. In their place, the Digital Product team at MoMA developed a Digital Visitor Guide to provide these and other onsite resources, such as audio, to visitors. The first iteration of the guide was put together quickly in the early days of the pandemic, and was a simple collection of links to existing online content and digitized versions of print materials.

Since then, user research and visitor feedback has highlighted some ongoing challenges that visitors face during their onsite experience and the ways MoMA’s digital materials fell short of alleviating them. PDF resources are difficult to use on a mobile device, and tedious to update internally. Exhibition listings are insufficient for visitors who are either not sure where to start, or looking for specific artists or works on view. The first version of the guide was also not built with accessibility standards in mind.

With these learnings, the Digital Produce team embarked on a process of designing, testing, and iterating on a number of new features and enhancements, such as an interactive map, floor-by-floor previews of exhibitions, galleries, artists and amenities, a streamlined audio experience, self-guided tours that cater to different interests, and an improved search experience for various types of onsite content.

This talk will cover the initial research that exposed these challenges, walk through the product design process of developing these new features, discuss insights and adjustments arising from rapid onsite testing that followed each iteration, and share quantitative metrics that outline the impact of all these changes. We’ll also discuss ideas for future features and improvements for the guide, as well as thornier challenges that we’re still exploring solutions for.

Though our discussion will not focus heavily on the technical aspects of our solution, we will briefly touch upon some important points such as geolocation, building a web-based onsite map without relying on an app or third-party software, and connecting the guide to our content management system to ensure exhibition, location, and artwork data is automatically kept up-to-date.

In this 15-minute presentation, Katy Long and Gabrielle Santas will offer a real-world case study of how a small "start-up" museum has been able to leverage new digital technologies to start building out meaningful experiential and immersive content via a free-to-download app (designed by Spellerberg and Associates) that allows visitors to access 5 audio-first walking tours across San Francisco and Los Angeles. They will discuss the challenges encountered in building the CalMigration app and the Migrant Footsteps tours, and consider how this type of digital-first museum offers new opportunities to connect with different less traditional museum audiences, as well as the potential for Augmented Reality to help create on-site exhibits. They will also talk briefly about their expansion into 360 video as a means to connect with remote users.

What if our museum workflows encouraged us to be caring, compassionate, intentional people? What would our emails, file folders, purchase orders, scopes-of-work, and contracts look like? Let’s start by looking at speculative examples created by the workshop hosts. These tangible objects that participants can hold and feel, read and look like they were transported from the future. Once we discuss what those design fictions imply about the future museum workplace, we’ll imagine our own present-day museums with digital workflows that operate in service of not only our institutional goals, but also our staff well-being along the way.

This session will invite participants to envision a near(ish)-future scenario in which museum workers have a sense of well-being at their jobs: they feel valued, cared for, and part of a collective, cooperative team of colleagues. We’ll walk participants through some exercises designed to stimulate creative thinking about how digital tools might be helping those museum workers maintain that well-being. Then we’ll return to the present and think about what we might do today to begin building those systems for tomorrow.

Our goal with this session is to encourage people to think optimistically and creatively about how digital platforms might be of benefit to make work a place of psychological safety and community. Working in nonprofits that are (at least nominally) focused on visitors’ experiences, many museum workers feel encouraged to put their own needs aside to ensure visitors are centered. We propose to help reorient participants at this session to approach their work centering their own well-being to pave a more sustainable path toward meaningful visitor experiences, as well.

A website redesign is never just a fresh coat of paint: a new digital home on the web provides opportunities for institutions to reintroduce themselves from the ground up. This session encompasses a series of lightning talks that explore website redesign projects across a range of American institutions and content areas. Including projects at all stages of development, the panel explores each institution’s goals for shifting their brand, expanding their audience, or solving existing problems for their users.

For Glenstone, a website redesign provides an opportunity to reintroduce the institution after the completion of a large-scale renovation. The collection will be digitized and a new content strategy will be employed to humanize the sometimes-intimidating vibes that contemporary art institutions can have.

The Smithsonian Transcription Center, undergoing the first website redesign in its decade+ history, is seeking to adjust to pandemic-initiated changes in the digital volunteering landscape, respond to the needs of a growing and diversifying volunteer community, and rebrand to reflect their status as a premier digital offering of the Smithsonian Institution.

After 10+ years of working with a custom CMS and a third party developer, the Bullock Museum is in the process of migrating and redesigning their website in an open source platform. Originally funded with very different content goals in mind, they are redesigning their website through the lens of a new mission, content strategy & sustainability plan, and a realistic look at what they can upkeep and scale long term.

When the web site for the Brooklyn Seltzer Museum launched in 2023, its goals were simple: capture emails and sell tickets. Since then, it has accumulated content: press coverage, a virtual museum, a special events calendar, and more. As the Museum approaches the start of its second year, the web site needs to offer a more seamless way for visitors to explore the Museum and a more developed “voice” that expresses its character.

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History was prompted by a need to replatform an aging Drupal website, and undertook a two-year project to revisit aspects of the site which reflected 20 years of piecemeal web development. The museum re-evaluated the site’s architecture, design, and features and improved communication of the museum’s newly-articulated mission and values, along with strategic content and branding updates.

The Huntington is currently undergoing an iterative process to reskin and develop a series of priority new features and integrations to update its flagship website, huntington.org. This exciting project follows on the heels of The Huntington’s adoption of a new five-year strategic plan and updated mission statement, along with a comprehensive brand and brand strategy project, resulting in recommendations related to voice and tone, messaging guidelines, a style guide, graphic design, and overall look and feel.

Getty developed Quire, an open-source, multiformat publishing tool, to solve our institution’s digital publishing challenges and to help smaller, less resourced museums solve theirs. From the beginning, the Quire team has collaborated closely with our Getty Publications colleagues to achieve publishing goals and gain insight into how non-technical staff use and understand the tool. This is helpful, as a large percentage of Quire’s community is made up of editors, curators, academics, designers, and others who don’t possess deep knowledge of coding or web development.

As a tool, Quire was designed to be flexible, extensible, and sustainable, which necessitates a more exposed work environment. Rather than an intuitive GUI, Quire users are confronted with navigating the command line, working in Markdown and YAML, and sometimes even using (gasp!) GitHub. While this might feel like second nature for developers, it represents a very different and often intimidating way of working for content creators.

In this 15-minute case study, we’ll talk about the lessons we’ve learned using a technologically nuanced tool like Quire with a Getty Publications book editor. Using a 600-object collection catalogue as an example, we’ll discuss the drawbacks and benefits of switching to a digital toolbox and how that change impacts departmental workflows. We’ll also share how the Quire team seeks to make the challenges of working digitally more approachable to non-technical users and discover what it means to find a common language in the process.

Exploring AI and machine learning in art museums often feels like an exercise in separating hype, achievable near-term value, and potential long-term game-changers. In this presentation, the National Gallery of Art will share how that pursuit is playing out after 18 months of pilots with cross-functional teams in two priority use cases, with lessons learned to date and plans for the way ahead. First: after initial work to scan, run optical character recognition (OCR), and analyze exhibition response wall cards and visitor comments, the team found that an AI-powered chatbot built within the network helped quickly find insights among thousands of comments, unlocking new value from qualitative data. Second: as a part of ongoing transformation in exhibition planning and operations, machine learning helped mine a decade of data to predict attendance curves and gauge what drives audience engagement. The data science team will present data visualizations, predictive modeling techniques, and methods for natural language processing and chatbot development, while members of visitor experience and evaluation will share findings, time savings, and future plans from these two initiatives. Recognizing that the value of analytics projects is measured by the decisions and outcomes they inform, the session will address how the results are used and future plans for plugging into business processes, with relevance to any museum and an invitation to participate in ongoing analysis, benchmarking, and collaborative data culture across museums.

Imagine museum interactives that combine the durability and flexibility of digital with the satisfaction and tactile learning of physical objects. Today’s museums have learned to rely on the ease and content flexibility that digital platforms offer but interactive screens have become ubiquitous and an analog dial telephone is suddenly strange and intriguing. How could we ever go back to the traditional diorama? This session will explore “phygital”: what happens when we combine digital and physical interfaces for museum engagement. Phygital includes AI overlays but it also includes alt controllers where visitors can use physical objects to control digital environments. You’ll hear from designers and creators using digital/physical interfaces to wash digital boats, play the digital drums and redirect digital water. Join us as we explore the possibilities of combining digital and physical into engaging interactive experiences.

The Kansas City Museum aims to be the “Home of the Whole Story.” But what does that mean when you design interactive media experiences? Since 2022, KCM and G&A have been working together to meet this challenge.

KCM engaged G&A to design a suite of experiences specifically aimed at youth: one welcomes them to discover the lesser told stories of the former mansion throughout time; another shifts their perspective on Kansas City’s development to see it through the lens of those who inhabited it; a third takes students on first-person narrated journeys through generations of marginalized groups and neighborhoods to understand how Kansas City has been shaped both by structural forces and the communities who live there.

The process of developing these pieces has been beautifully humbling and non-linear. We have had extensive conversations with representatives of communities that have experienced historical harm and exclusion–and those conversations have upended our assumptions about our design goals. We have conducted onsite user testing with our target audience–which has compelled us to think about their needs in new ways. And we are doing deep research to inform the pixels that create the collective visuals to ensure they properly convey the perspectives we are trying to represent. We have asked ourselves questions like: How do you design a map when the very understanding of a map differs by group? How can a virtual tour make a Gilded-era mansion feel more welcoming? How do you create a composite character to stand in for a group’s diverse experiences while remaining authentic?

This session will focus on three areas:
Why the Kansas City Museum has made a commitment to using restorative practices and it embeds the methodology in its everyday operations, exhibits and programs
How G&A approaches restorative design through all of its capabilities - content, visual design, user experience and creative technology
The critical role of user testing

We will also invite the audience to provide feedback on our work.