I had a (now defunct) startup in this space some years ago. Maybe I can help shed some light on why things are the way they are.
1. Money. Most museums have no money. They either run on donations, on subsidies, or at the whim of wealthy patrons. They are very costly to run, especially the big ones. They are often in prime real estate areas, many require tight climate control, many also require specialised lighting to protect art etc.
2. Curators often see "taking care" of the exhibits as more important than actually exhibiting them. Not to mention they're often art/history majors with very little clue about anything digital.
3. Because museums are often subsidised, many of them are required to go through public tender procedures to get anything done. Because this is a huge pain for everyone involved, the results are often shit, as it attracts a certain kind of company to do the work. One of the tenders my startup looked at involved not only supplying the hardware and software for an interactive exhibit, but also the lighting and reinforced glass casings for various items. This was not our cup of tea, and the tender would subtract points for using subcontractors...
Personally I'm not interested in museums that are just glass cases with stuff without any explanation. Maybe a little paper legend is sufficient, but I actually prefer a screen which offers more info in the form of adio or video in multiple languages.
Depending on the exhibit, 3D printed replicas can be great as well.
Good feedback. I wouldn't put "taking care" in quotes, however; my wife is a former museum worker and has graduate degrees in the field, and preservation is a key part of the role. Exhibits aren't just for the now, they're for the future. People would love to sit in the cockpit of the Bockscar bomber (little bit morbid, but true); allowing that would result in serious damage over time.
This is less important for educational spaces like the one the OP describes -- strictly speaking, science museums often aren't museums in the classical sense. Preservation is less important there, although not unimportant.
i'm confused. in what way is this a response to the article?
the article laments the sidelining of physical exhibits, in favor of software. you respond that the screens probably have an arduous and expensive procurement process.
This happens so many times in HN threads that it is difficult not to believe it is intentional
By "this" I mean tangent, distraction, defensive dismissal, etc.
But we cannot jump to conclusions
Assuming it is not intentional, this behaviour suggests a high level of myopia (used here metaphorically to represent an apparent inability or perhaps unwillingness to contemplate life without computers)
HN submitters routinely submit stories that challenge this myopia. These stories routinely reach the HN front page
We can enjoy the entertainment of continual efforts by HN commenters to "change the subject"
> 2. Curators often see "taking care" of the exhibits as more important than actually exhibiting them. Not to mention they're often art/history majors with very little clue about anything digital.
Museum curators used to be called keepers and this only changed in the mid-late twentieth century. The philosophy of preservation runs deep and you won't struggle to find curators whose favourite day of the week is when the museum is closed to the public.
Curators tend to make exhibits and displays that appeal to their own scholarly reference points. You need a different role - interpretation - to literally interpret this scholarship into what the public might be interested in. Few museums can afford to apply the lens of interpretation, so for the most part we are stuck with what curators think and its limited crossover with what the public want.
> The philosophy of preservation runs deep and you won't struggle to find curators whose favourite day of the week is when the museum is closed to the public.
Which gets back to the question - why does/should the public support a museum. If we can't see it why are we keeping it? Even with our best preservation things will be destroyed over/with time, some things quicker than others. So if people don't get to see it what is the point of preserving it.
Museum backrooms are filled with things that they can't afford to preserve/restore, and so they are slowly being lost without anyone even able to see them in the mean time. Curators hate this reality, but they have to priorities the important things. I want things they can never preserve anyway sold the highest bidder, at least that way one person can enjoy it, we can use the proceeds to preserve something else. Plus part of the value to a rich person is showing off so there is a better chance someone will see it. (if there is no bigger that proves we don't value it. Even if future society would it won't make it to them anyway so may as well trash it now and stop pretending)
Does one get any better sense of something from seeing the original something vs a replica of the something? Does looking at the "original" copy of the constitution under all that glass do anything different than a replica under all of that glass? Would seeing the actual David statue impart any more anything than seeing a replica of it? If you say yes, why do you think any of that is the actual thing and not a replica? Just because they say so?
I agree. If it only exists so that a select few can actually experience, it might as well not exist at all.
And don't kid yourself, those keepers and creators get full access as well as anyone they deem worthy enough. The rest of us will never be granted that access.
If it's privately funded, good. It affects me nil. But if they take public funds and lock up history or nature just so it can remain pristine for the wealthy or elite to enjoy, then I don't want to have to pay for it. Not that I have a choice in the matter either way.
> So if people don't get to see it what is the point of preserving it.
That's assuming that the only point of museums is to exhibit the collection to the public. Certain museums—especially in archeology and the natural sciences—also exist to support researchers.
> Personally I'm not interested in museums that are just glass cases with stuff without any explanation.
I am not sure why you mentioned this, because it has nothing to do with the subject article. This was a very specific article about interactive, hands-on museums replacing their exhibits with touch screens.
That being said, I have also been to countless museums of many kind and I have never once seen a museum that did not explain what the exhibits were. Have you actually seen this anywhere, or was this hyperbole?
I know of one that "doesn't explain" the exhibits (except through an app/website where you match things hanging on walls with diagrams) – the Isabella Gardner museum in Boston; this is specifically due to the wishes of Isabella Gardner herself, who was opposed to plaques.
There is one room that breaks this rule – I'm guessing it got damaged and then at that point they didn't have to follow her will.
Still worth a visit for the garden, the Titian, lots besides.
There is an incredible pressure on a lot of public facing endeavors to include digital, no matter whether it makes any sense at all or not. Take education, for instance - if it weren't such an important topic, it would be almost comical to observe how our schools are trying to jump through hoops to cram more IT into the classroom. (I wish the people responsible would take a look at Scandinavia though, where they are years ahead in that respect and have already begun taking digital devices out of the classrooms again.)
But it's not about what makes sense. It's about prestige, and about the ability to tell everyone "look at us, how forward we are!". This seems very clear to me, for instance, by the fact that the year 7 comp sci classes they teach in our local high school have what on their curriculum? Yep, that's right, you guessed it: AI. Because that's apparently the absolute basic CS that every student should start with these days.
Education is only one example, of course. But it's really creeping into everything. That museums have screen everywhere is no surprise. After all, flashing screen surely release more endorphins than non-interactive physical exhibits, so if you want to attract young folks, the pressure is on.
My wife and I toured our neighborhood public elementary school a couple years ago. Almost every classroom we passed the kids were staring at their chromebooks, even in the art room—digital art, I guess [1]. In the music room the kids were sitting at rows of desks with electronic keyboards and headphones while the teacher sat at the front of the class and gave them instructions through a microphone (to be heard through the headphones, I guess).
It was incredibly depressing. We decided to send our kids elsewhere.
[1] Nothing against digital art, but I strongly feel young kids should be working with actual physical materials.
Silly aside: "digital art" is the means by which you legally "buy" weed in DC. You pay for the "art" and they "gift" you a box of special brownies or a joint.
When my kid was going to start preschool, we went to see a relatively posh private school in the neighborhood. The first thing they showed was a photo of a 3-year-old kid solving a jigsaw puzzle in a big touchscreen. A jigsaw puzzle, you know, that thing where 80% of the challenge for a kid that age is physically inserting the pieces the right way. In a touchscreen! They also boasted about not having any books until age 8 or something like that, I don't remember exactly.
We left appalled. We sent him to a public school instead, where they use screens much less (although they do use them, sadly) and they have books. I don't know to what extent this is a voluntary choice or just because they have less money to buy gadgets, but the result is better anyway.
I wonder if there would be a market for schools or daycares offering "pre-digital" style classrooms with emphasis on books, blocks, puzzles, art, outdoor time, and policies to limit phones/screens.
On the other hand, these kids will eventually end up in a world saturated with displays and maybe even AR, so there's some argument for getting them involved with digital stuff at some point.
> the year 7 comp sci classes they teach in our local high school have what on their curriculum? Yep, that's right, you guessed it: AI. Because that's apparently the absolute basic CS that every student should start with these days.
I think, if you went back to the origin of the term "AI" and tried to teach an introduction to the very fundamentals, this could actually be a fun and inspiring class - one that might not even need a lot of computer knowledge.
There are a number of board games with "self-playing" antagonists that are governed through clever sets of game rules.
There is also the historical predecessor of computer science, cybernetics, that dealt with self-governing analogous control systems, like thermostats.
Finally, there are the classical pathfinding algorithms (Depth-First/Breadth-First, Dijkstra, A*) which I still think are some of the most "bang for the buck" algorithms in terms of "intelligent-looking" behavior vs simplicity of the algorithm.
All that stuff could be engaging for high school students in the author's "hands-on" way.
All that of course if the "AI" class is really about giving a broad introduction to the field, and not just "we have to put ChatGPT into the curriculum somehow".
> After all, flashing screen surely release more endorphins than non-interactive physical exhibits
The irony is that this might not even be true. In the article, the author observed that the physical exhibits were much more interesting to the kids than the screens.
To be devil's advocate it is really practical to develop and roll out digital experiences. You can be a lot more creative about it than the "big tablet" experience you have at McDonald's. Some friends of mine have built experiential art installations that have things like a custom coin-op video game, Pepper's Ghost style displays, a "time machine" experience using video projectors, etc.
I'd love to be able to sell location-based XR experiences to museums: like you go to the paleontology museum and put on a headset and now the museum is a mixed reality Jurassic Park. For that matter I'd love to set up a multiplayer VR park in a big clean span space. There are a lot of difficulties like the cheap headsets don't really have the right tracking capabilities for a seamless location-based experience [1] plus getting together and paying a team which can deliver that sort of thing. A museum with really robust funding could probably afford an XR experience and subsidize development that transfers to other museums but I can't see the economics working for turning an old American Eagle at the mall into a VR experience park: malls have unrealistic ideas about their spaces can earn and most of them have posts in them that player would crash into.
[1] It already knows where it is the instant you put the headset on and it doesn't have to retrain like the MQ3 would.
A significant number of people get motion sickness from VR and thus excluded. If you don't have a problem good for you, but please remember those of us excluded. Please leave some normal no electronics places for those of us who can't enjoy what you do.
If our "real world" is screens, maybe. I really hate to think that this is becoming the case, but it is happening and this only hastens it.
The article was about real analogs or actual world objects. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is a fantastic example, as is the Field Museum there. Kids are full of screen time already. Is that all there is?
I feel like half the products the tech industry comes out with aren't really useful, but they exist because of this performative trend-following. Competitor has a mobile app, we have to have a mobile app. Harvard business review says blockchain is big, we need to have blockchain. Our CEO's investor buddy said AI is the next big thing, we need to jam AI in or product.
> I wish the people responsible would take a look at Scandinavia, though, where they are years ahead in that respect and have already begun taking digital devices out of the classrooms again.
I don’t know what exactly they teach about AI, but trying out different AI tools could be very important, it’s a great learning tool if you want it to be. It can help students learn math, history, programming…
Indeed, but it's more like computer literacy not comp sci.
We also had a course in "computers" in high school. We had to know by heart the contents of "File" and "Edit" menus for Paint in Win3.1. Windows95 was just came out that year, so naturally the curiculum had not adapted yet. Anyway, guess how useful that was. The only one student who knew how to program got an F in the course :)
It was, of course, a way to teach nontechs how to use computers, as misguided as the material was. So, in that light, starting with AI makes sense. Would be nice to also include a bit more technical course, but apparently knowing where and when a poet was born is more important.
> Scandinavia though, where they are years ahead in that respect and have already begun taking digital devices out of the classrooms again
While I personally suspect that social media and by extension phones are detrimental: what you're writing here is opinion, not fact.
Just like adding tech was an experiment which seems to have been accepted all over, removing the tech again is - at least to my knowledge - in experiment phase, too.
And because a real experiment would take roughly 12-20 years (students performance from start to finish, until they're gainfully employed)... Neither of these approached have really been validated. It's all speculation, because there are so many other reasons that could explain the issues we currently have in our schools
And frankly - even though I honestly believe that social media is bad for them - I sincerely think its nowhere close to being the main reason for dropping performance, inability to take responsibilities or whatever else people are saying about the current children.
My hole point was that you cannot isolate it to phones. Phones probably are net negative, but even if you removed them: our society has changed and wherever the removal will be positive for their development is hard to isolate, hence it's purely based on opinion
> But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with.
To be fair, that's what I remember children's museums being like in the 1980s as well. A significant number of exhibits would be temporarily out of order on any given day.
I don't think screens are responsible for that. Maintaining physical exhibits that can survive constant physical contact with kids is hard.
> I don't think screens are responsible for that. Maintaining physical exhibits that can survive constant physical contact with kids is hard.
That reminds me of something I’d love to learn a bit more about: the Strong Museum of Play. It appears the Wegmans’ supermarket exhibit where kids are able to work with real point-of-sale equipment has actually gotten equipment refreshes over the years itself, and I was really amused to see how far they went to have a “fully working” setup in the exhibits for kids to play with.
The checkout counters are actual IBM/Toshiba SurePOS lanes, with actual current Datalogic scanner scales, and they’ve got a OS4690/TCxSky install and SurePOS ACE running on every single lane. (Or, at least, one of those registers has to be a controller+terminal, the other 5 lanes have to bootstrap off at least one lane, so they’re all networked, too!) They’ve also maintained enough of the store configuration so receipts look just like a store receipt and all (of course, with the Strong Museum as the “store”). And yes, you’re told to only push certain buttons and only scan stuff that’s inside the environment… ;)
Over the years they’ve swapped out the lanes from the old white to the modern Slate Grey, upgraded the scanner-scales, but the UX is still the same as it always was.
You have to keep those sort of museums up to date. As I recall the Computer History Museum in Boston, they had some interesting historical artifacts like Sage I think. But a fair bit of the museum was devoted to supposedly state of the art computing, some interactive. As a lot of the local computer companies went away, a lot of the the exhibits started looking pretty dated--and I'm sure a lot of funding dried up as well.
I was a tour guide at the National Air and Space Museum for a dozen years. I still remember seeing the exhibit plans the curators had, which called for a then 90-year old airplane (a Curtiss JN-4) to be mounted such that people could look down over it from the balcony. All of us docents who saw that immediately said "what about the kids who will drop pennies onto that precious canvas and wood thing to break it?"
Six months after the exhibit opening the Jenny was removed from that location, never to be returned to that exhibit. Because sometimes museum guests aren't just pushing things too hard, they are actively taking steps to destroy things, just to see if they can get away with it.
Because sometimes museum guests aren't just pushing things too hard, they are actively taking steps to destroy things, just to see if they can get away with it.
If there is only two troublemakers in every group of 30 children, and a museum receives 10 groups a day, that’s 20 little rascals who are all trying to do the craziest stunt they can come up with…
It's not just museum exhibits and kids, it's everything. I have some maintenance roles in my background and the rate at which things like paper towel dispensers get worn down and completely destroyed when interacted with by hundreds or thousands of people a day is eye opening.
I think mass market paperbacks in standardized sizes hold up pretty well considering everything. My collection mostly from the 1970s and 1980s held up pretty well up to 2010 but they are going yellow now because of the acid paper. Libraries rebind them and I notice they have a lot of rebound paperbacks of the same age that have the same yellowing mine have despite better storage conditions.
Some trade paperbacks are fine but because they're not really standardized quality is all over the place. I've bought some where the binding broke the minute I spread the book out. Hardcovers are more consistent than trade paperbacks but some still fail early.
Then there are just the accidents like the book I had in my backpack when I was outside in heavy rain but I think that was one book wrecked in about 300 circulations.
I guess it's because it's waaaay too expensive to buy really robust things (like paper towel dispensers). It's not like you couldn't build an indestructible paper towel dispenser, but it would cost 10x a normal one and have 100x smaller market.
Since these towel dispensers are all over schools and other locations that likely get more traffic than that museum, either they are buying the good models which everyone in the business knows about, or they are choosing to buy the cheap ones because it is a better value despite having to replace them all the time. I don't buy such things so I'm not able to tell you which. I know that there are enough of them in the world that anything not robust would be well known quickly. (there is a possibility they bought something new that turned out bad, but then replace it once and done)
It's cus all skilled workers learned they can charge insane rates. Blue collar skilled labor starts at 100$ an hour in West Virginia or Mississippi now. Most of them, like Software, have learned that it's hard to figure out if the work they did was good or not until afterwards. As such, there are tons of charlatans, grifters, scammers, and related in many industries right now. Classic cases are Dentists (Literally everything), Car Mechanics (blinker fluid scams to grandma), Plumbers, Leak Detection Companies, etc
I started to understand a whole lot of class or even guild warfare stuff from the past when I start to see what happens when skilled workers start to scheme for their gain against the common good. I also don't just accept unions as being good for everyone anymore for the same reason.
The sad reality is that skilled workers are just like the hot waitress index. When the economy is bad, it's a lot easier to get the cream of the crop for those who still have money. The fact that everything is still somehow decent for a few more months is exactly why it's insanely difficult to source any kind of labor for a reasonable price. Since no one can source this labor, they simply don't and do without.
Shit stayed open late during the recession. Good thing Trump is trying his hardest to put us into another one right now.
It's called "what the market can bear" and it's what corporations with marketing and sales professionals have always tried their best to do; charge as much as you possibly can without losing business. Of course, it only actually works when there is competition, and so the rising prices are kept in check by undercutting competition.... and then, _that_ only works when the undercutting competition is working to the same quality (by a code, ideally) and is subject to the same economic pressures so that it can level out fairly. If the competition is all fresh immigrants with lower CoL, or if the competition is cutting corners, all bets are off. You end up with a race to the bottom, where each individual is trying to be part of a race to the top at the same time... everyone wants more than they're worth, but those who are actually doing the best work still aren't getting what they deserve, lol!
A free market actually requires a lot of surrounding regulation to work, just like any other freedom. It's always been strange to me that Americanism seems to view freedom as the fundamental condition of man, hampered by law; ultimately most freedoms come from rule and order, because they can carve out space for one to enjoy freedoms with far fewer negative consequences.
> A free market actually requires a lot of surrounding regulation to work
While I am not a free market absolutist, I think your assertion is based on judging negative outcomes of a free market vs the positive intentions of regulations trying to prevent those negative outcomes, i.e. you’re not considering the negative outcomes of regulations. I don’t think any free market advocate would state categorically that they produce perfect results, merely that any attempt to prevent certain negative outcomes through law will produce different negative outcomes elsewhere.
For instance regulations tend to incentivize very large corporations to advocate for more regulation as it raises the barrier to new competition entering the market place. Another example would be over burdensome regulations that slow the production of housing which constrains supply and prices a lot of people out of the market. I would have loved to take public transit where I lived a few years ago, but they spent a decade on environmental impact studies while traffic and the environmental impact from it got significantly worse.
There’s also a time component where the effects of regulations can take decades or even generations to really play out, but people tend to only remember the well-meaning goal of the regulation if they remember it at all. This tends to be very beneficial for politicians who end up being judged not on outcomes, but intentions.
It’s a supply and demand problem. There are just not enough people pursuing these jobs to replace the retiring generation. Some of these small family businesses are quite profitable, but most owners don’t have kids interested in continuing their legacy. Private equity noticed this and went on an acquisition spree. They buy your local HVAC and plumbing company, keep the family-owned branding “since 1976”, hire people with no experience to do the job and increase the hourly rate. They recover the investment, squeeze out every dollar they can and shut it down once bad Google reviews and lawsuits start to creep in.
Recent experience: called a HVAC contractor to fix a heating furnace, they spent 1 hour convincing us to scrap the current furnace and install a new one; once we told him "no" at least 10 times, he spent 30 minutes "diagnosing" the problem while on the phone with somebody with technical knowledge; then he quoted $250 to replace a part that I could buy on Ebay for $15. Finally, I bought the part and replaced it myself.
I know a lot of shops that hire good mechanics though if you want to get some work done on your car that requires difficult diagnostics often you have to wait days or weeks to get the attention of someone who can get it done.
My father worked on a Natural Gas exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles as an emergency substitute when a contractor flaked. There was an oven that had a handle, when you opened it the narration said "don't open the oven during cooking" to save energy. Kids hung off this and immediately broke it, they replaced it with steel and it was broken the next day, then ended up having to put a Triangular metal piece that couldn't be hung off of because children are wild animals.
This museum prior to the rebuild into the California Science Center (which I love but is just different) and the Exploratorium were amazing experiences for this as a kid.
I miss the big kinetic scuplture of rolling wood balls through the electricity exhibit, the plotter that would draw out your bicycle design, the next door room full of electronic interactives of the kind that he's complaining about but early 90s style. The weird chrome McDonalds left over from the 84 Olympics. The giant ceiling mounted helmet VR exhibit (crt, no doubt)
I wish I could find better photos, there's so few.
Went to the Frost Museum of Science in Miami. They had this big (6ft x 6ft) video display and four 6-inch diameter track balls where you guided a vessel through the virtual ocean or something. These two academic minded parents asked their sons (maybe 8 and 10 years old) to try the exhibit. They ran over excitely and just started pounding on the track balls with their fists as hard as they could. They of course did not understand the exhibit at all, but they had a great time! :-)
As a parent with one of those kids, you never know which mode they will start off with, even with the right prompting. And yes, you correct them and steer them in the right direction and hope they will eventually learn how to behave.
Luckily, those track balls were rock solid and no worse for wear. The parents were very well intentioned and attentive and did quickly redirect the kids. But it was hilarious to see how much fun they were having before the parents stepped in. Like I bet they'll have great memories of the museum visit.
Yup. Tim Hunkin went for a last look around his Secret Life of the Home exhibition¹ at the London Science Museum and quite a few things were out of order; this may be because the exhibit was imminently closing, but my impression is that that's just the deal with mechanical exhibits - they break more often than the digital ones. Very likely it's one reason the screens are at the forefront.
Similar thing at This Museum is (Not) Obsolete, in Ramsgate. Just so many things that can go wrong that you expect not everything will be working on your particular visit.
Ah, it's been "modernized". I like that museum. But you had to know the history of technology to appreciate it. There's Maudslay's lathe! Now it's been dumbed down.
I think the Hunkin exhibit really did look a bit tired - I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to try something else. After all, Secret Life only got its chance because they were willing to change something back then.
If you like Tim's stuff you can always catch his Novelty Automation arcade over by Holborn. Highly recommended by me at least!
I don't know how good the information transfer was at the London Science Museum way back when I was a kid; I remember excitedly spinning all the little brass handles and pushing the brass buttons on various teak cased devices, but I'm not sure I took much science home with me. Sci Fi, a home computer, and (much later) Bill Bryson's book informed me far more.
Yes, but this is the core of what they're offering. As the son of a science museum director, I've seen exactly what it takes to keep hands on science exhibits going. I agree with the article here, although I think it's appropriate to have some screens if required for an exhibit (e.g. a thermal imaging system)
"I didn't bring my niece to a museum to look at a screen..."
I took my niece around the Natural History Museum in London recently, taking in the new 'Darwin' extension first. It was a liminal space of sorts with lots of broken screens. The tech had not been updated in a decade or more so you had Adobe Flash Player running, complete with the crash pop-up messages to let you know what version of Flash they were updated to.
The idea generally was to have a large touch table with a projector in the ceiling showing an image that could be interacted with. My 8 year old crash test dummy still enjoyed the screens, which was no surprise given that she is addicted to her tablet.
The touch table (however it worked) was not quite registered to the image projected on it. Some exhibits (screens) had a 'tell a friend' feature where you could enter an email address. However, all of the 'keys' were off, so you press 'Q' and you get 'W', or 'N' and you get 'M'. I persisted and entered my sister's email address.
Did she get the email?
What do you think!!!
Some of the screens had the toughest armour I have ever seen. ATMs are soft targets by comparison. I had never seen whole keyboards made of stainless steel before and found the level of vandal-proofing to be absurd.
Admittedly the throughput of the museum is absurd, in the UK every person gets to go there at least five times, once with mum and dad, another time with one set of grandparents, then with the school, then, as they have their own kids, they have to go again, then it is rinse/repeat when they are a grandparent.
The reason for going is dinosaurs. But they got rid of 'dippy' from the entrance hall.
Before you get to the entrance hall there is the begging chicane. This is a ridiculous entrance route back and fore between a dozen different begging bowls to support them financially. If you choose not to pay up, then you can then spend the next six hours not speaking or interacting with any humans apart from the ones you arrived with, except for maybe at the giftshop.
There were no annexes with staff doing talks, nobody apart from the beggars to greet you, but plenty of screens.
The brief for the new wing was to have scientists doing classification of specimens in such a way that they were on show, a 'working museum'. But nobody wanted to work in goldfish bowl conditions under the gaze of hordes of kids.
I don't want to dismiss the place in its entirety, the gardens outside were lovely even though they have a motorway-sized road next to you with considerable noise pollution. That's right, the place we send all our kids to for the big memorable day is made toxic with the filth of car dependency. The air is utterly disgusting there just because of car dependency. The whole area is full of museums and the whole lot needs to just be pedestrianised, but no, it is clogged up with those cheesy 'status symbol' cars people buy in London.
So there is this wall of cars outside and this wall of screens inside. Then the daylight robbery in the gift shop.
We didn't do the full tour, got to save some for the parents and school trip. But we did go to the earthquake room. It is modelled on a Japanese shop and shakes every few minutes. Shakes is being kind. A garden swing or any wheeled vehicle does a better simulation, clearly the hydraulics have lost some of their zest.
The 'climate change' room was also a little off. Maybe this is a leftover from when they had the likes of BP sponsor the place.
I was not going to let anything spoil my perfect day out with my niece, so I wasn't miserable about the place when I was there. However, on reflection, the dilapidation was a glimpse of the future, a future where museums have screens to interact with but no staff to interact with.
I think you're mistaken if you got the impression that the museum once had guides. This isn't a recent trend, so far as I know it's been delightfully free from tour guides since 1881.
You had to buy tickets prior to 2001, so that's changed. (Was entry free in its early history too? Not sure.) That used to be your greeting, the ticket desk.
They had an earthquake machine in 1985, it must be the same one.
The NHM is free to enter, some special exhibitions charge for entry and I think some require free booking to manage crowds. There is a very strong encouragement to make a donation though.
As a tangent, I find it a bit annoying that so many UK museums advertise free pretty aggressively and then provide such "very strong encouragement" as you put it to attend. Mind you, there's less direct pressure than there is in some places. The Met in NYC used to have an optional but not really optional policy for museum admission as you got your pin though it now not optional at all for non-NYC residents.
Free to enter since 2001. Which means now they have (more) donation boxes.
My local museum started charging for entry a few years ago, along with a refurbishment, new exhibits, a bigger gift shop and a push to attract more tourists. So now it's horrible. I'm not sure what the unifying mistake is in both models, free entry and ticketed. I think the error might be in trying to serve the public.
One of my longstanding peeves is that art museums are treated as serious places for grown-ups but science museums and zoos are treated as places for kids.
I think that science museums being places for kids is a good thing. The are the ones who benefit the most. If you want science for grownups, you have conferences. Also, that it is for kids doesn't make it impossible to enjoy as an adult, especially if it is about things you are unfamiliar with.
Now, if you go to a science museum and think "only a kid can enjoy that". Then the problem is not that it is a place for kids, it is that it is just bad. It is a thing Disney understood very well, its classics may look like they are for kids, but they are actually enjoyable by everyone, and it is a big reason for their success.
As for art museums, the problem is that they are usually just exhibitions, and to be honest, that's boring, especially if you are a kid. That's unlike a science museum where they actually try to teach you science. It is only interesting if you are already well into that kind of art, and most kids aren't (yet?).
History museums are kind of a middle ground as they can do the double duty of teaching history (mostly for kids) and showing off artefacts to people who are already into that (mostly for grownups).
My company has a tech convention every year. Last time I went I played spot the tech person - most people there failed the test (they were former engineers now in management trying to pretend they were still technical). I'm a staff engineer and I was the lowest position person I saw there - not even senior engineers much less the low or mid level engineers that would benefit from talking to the seniors at a tech conference.
I'd categorize both those groups as being "in tech." Even if they're not active developers, they're certainly tech-adjacent especially in the software space.
There are probably counter-examples, but I'm not sure where I'd go if I were, say, an enthusiastic amateur physics or chemistry enthusiast of some sort that would be especially accessible.
> There are historical, thematic and philosophical aspects to art that make it beautiful beyond the aesthetic.
Sure, but 80% of the words in that sentence are indecipherable to my 7 year old. Just like an art museum. We can absolutely go there, as long as we are prepared to hear “I’m bored” about 10 minutes in.
Personally I enjoy seeing him run around marveling and experimenting with physics a lot more.
> There are historical, thematic and philosophical aspects to art that make it beautiful beyond the aesthetic.
Those are in the eye of the beholder though. In many cases they are things I still don't care about after learning about them. An ugly painting doesn't become any more interesting to me when I learn about the struggles the artist went through - a lot of people do find it more interesting - good for them, but it isn't for me. (then again the paintings I'm thinking of most people thought were nice even before they learned about the artist...)
> An ugly painting doesn't become any more interesting to me when I learn about the struggles the artist went through
Personal struggles? Sure. An ugly painting that opens the door to me learning about a war or revolution or system of government I was previously unaware of? Or a style or medium enabled by a new technology of the time? That can be fun.
I live near a large collection of wildlife art. I can't say many of them are beautiful. But noting how wolves have been portrayed over millenia, and across cultures, was a genuinely interesting exhibit. (In America, they went from ferocious creatues to essentially dogs. Most wolves in art today are not physiologically wolves. Akin to how most butterflies in art are dead.)
That can happen, but often the story isn't interesting (at least to me). It is the same story: someone decides the world is out to get them and they won't "sell out". I don't care, I don't agree with their world view, and in any case they are not unique. If anything they need mental help - but they are plenty of other people around who also need such help who didn't paint.
Do not mistake what I said for some claim that all art is bad/ugly. There is a lot of art I do enjoy. What I enjoy is personal. I do not fault someone else for enjoying art that I don't enjoy in general.
I saw Da Vinci's drawings and smaller paintings and they were fun, with the investigation of flowing water and (illicit?) anatomy and various devices with wooden cogs in. Not exactly educational, but historically interesting and oddly aesthetic. Does that count? I mean, art galleries can show lots of different kinds of art. It doesn't have to be monotonous self-expression.
I have no idea how your replp fits in with my comment. I find some 'art' ugly and knowing about the artist doesn't change a thing.
I find Da Vinci the engineer makes things I find nice to look at, but he did many other paintings and I would need to see each to make a judgement on it. Knowinghis issues just makes me wish he lived with modern medicine where we might be able to treat him - and wonder what he could have done if he had modern training - many of his machines have obvious flaws that his day was not advanced enough to know about. That is me though, maybe you are different - this is a personal thing and so it is hard to call anyone wrong.
As a museum professional, I don't agree with a couple of points:
If you want science for grownups, you have conferences.
I work at a history museum, and we serve both students and adults: whole range of people. Conferences aren't designed to communicate science (or any specialized topic) to a wide audience.
Also, that it is for kids doesn't make it impossible to enjoy as an adult, especially if it is about things you are unfamiliar with.
This can be true, but children and adults learn differently. We have lessons and interactives that are designed for both, and activities that are geared towards kids. The way we write information for children in our programming is very different from what you'd see with adults, because of how we have to break the information down in ways that is understandable to them.
If you go to a science museum and think "only a kid can enjoy that". Then the problem is not that it is a place for kids, it is that it is just bad. It is a thing Disney understood very well, its classics may look like they are for kids, but they are actually enjoyable by everyone, and it is a big reason for their success.
I don't understand this line of reasoning: if a science museum appears to be designed for kids, there's likely a reason for that: they're working to communicate science to kids. That doesn't make it bad: it might just mean that they've put a lot of focus on their primary audience. Disney isn't designed for kids: it's designed for families, and they put a lot of time and energy and resources into that design. (Museums can take a leaf from their book and strategies!)
As for art museums, the problem is that they are usually just exhibitions, and to be honest, that's boring, especially if you are a kid. That's unlike a science museum where they actually try to teach you science. It is only interesting if you are already well into that kind of art, and most kids aren't (yet?).
History museums are kind of a middle ground as they can do the double duty of teaching history (mostly for kids) and showing off artefacts to people who are already into that (mostly for grownups).
I think both of these points are overly broad, and every institution and every exhibition is different: it all comes down to how well they design their programs and exhibitions. There are plenty of art museums that go beyond a mere exhibition.
As for history museums being a middle ground, I don't agree with that at all: kids are fascinated by physical objects! Adults love to learn about the history behind those objects! These aren't mutually exclusive things. It ultimately comes down to intent and installation and implementation.
It drives me absolutely bananas that the "interpretation" (fancy museum word for "signs") at science museums is so parsimonious. Some fascinating device vital to the history of an important branch of science will have a brief paragraph about the person who invented it, nothing about what it's for, and then just a date and the device name.
Often there's little or nothing further even in the museum shop. It's a crying shame.
Art museums are even worse.
"Portrait of Duke von Duke (London, 1841). Oils."
Who is this guy in the painting?! How did he merit a painting? What's unique about the style/composition/whatever?
Conversely, I went to an exhibit of Napoleonic Art and they had a whole breakdown of the symbolism. For example, Napolean liked bees as a symbol of hard work and order, apparently, and they were snuck into most depictions of him as little Easter Eggs.
Then there are the “artist statement” ladies on some exhibits where artist get to describe their work on self-aggrandizing terms that only make sense to people with a graduate degree in the field
Most likely, there is no special backstory and the painting was simply commissioned. And most likely, there no super special composition in that portrait and the style is exactly the same as the style of surrounding paintings.
Most paintings dont have a cool backstories. They are just paintings. Art student can see technical details of how they were done, but those are not really interesting if you are not trying to learn to paint.
My favorite example of this is an exhibit that I saw at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh many years ago. There was a diorama of several forest animals, and an interface that shined lights on animals with different features. The "lays eggs" light shined on an assortment of animals including a Rabbit. Rabbits don't lay eggs, they only deliver them to good boys and girls.
We pointed this out to a worker that day. Several years later, we went back to see that the exhibit had not changed. I'm not sure if it's still there today.
I don't remember the big Kensington museums being like that when I was a kid. There was a kids' section or two, but the rest was clearly for adults (and has stuck in my memory just as much, if not more than, the kids' sections).
Seeing the real Apollo 10 (I don't remember which module) sticks very clearly in my memory.
I also rode on a "heritage" train recently, and what struck me the most was that the interior decor of the passenger cars looked as though it had been designed for and by grown-ups.
I'm not sure which way you're going with this, but the Philadelphia Museum of Art, down the street from the Franklin Institute, isn't specifically geared towards adults and has lots of programming specifically for kids. Seeing Rubens' Prometheus Bound there as a child as part of such a program left me in awe. I remember the feeling to this day. Every time I go, I see families with young children or even just groups of teens there.
The Philadelphia Zoo also has events planned specifically for adults. My girlfriend and I went to one a few months ago. I'm not sure what specifically about the Philadelphia zoo, the Bronx zoo, the Shedd aquarium, etc. is for specifically geared towards kids, though.
Largely agreed, with one exception. If you're ever in Boston/Cambridge MA, check out the MIT museum. I've always told people that its a science museum but for adults. The Harvard museums are worth visiting as well, but the MIT museum really impressed me with their content.
The MIT museum isn't very good. It is a science museum for adults, but it is too passive an experience for the patron. I recommend the Exploratorium in San Francisco instead as the science museum for adults.
I've only been to a play (staged reading) at the new one but, in general, I'm not sure how interested most adults are in interactivity. I've been to the Exploratorium for an event and it was fun. (Having those sort of distractions are nice when you're tired of feeling like you need to speak to people at an event.) But not sure I'd have made a trip there otherwise.
The Christmas lectures are probably the most famous thing they do, and these have definitely moved in a more 'child' focussed direction. If you were attending the Christmas lectures in the 1850s however, the audience would have been middle class victorioans, and you'd have had Michael Faraday telling you about electricity, forces, chemistry etc.
I would recommend attending one of their lectures if you happen to find yourself in London, just to be in the building, and to sit in the lecture theatre!
Art museums could be made friendlier for kids, but they would need significant design and maintenance effort. In particular: many kids need a lot of running around, want to play with things with their hands, and get quickly bored just standing and looking at artworks. It would be nice if there were better art museums for kids though.
(For what it's worth, there are plenty of non-interactive and thus boring-for-kids science, technology, history, etc. museums if you look around.)
I took my 6 and 8 year old to SFMOMA and they loved it, to the point that they’ve asked to go (and have gone) to several more “boring” art museums since. We had a talk about ground rules (quiet voices, hands to self, no running, no exceptions) beforehand, and the mood of the place helped enforce those rules. A big, crowded space can be powerful in its quietness.
A lot of the weird, experimental, and experiential pieces seemed to scratch the novelty itch that they might otherwise get by running around or touching stuff. We were all ready to leave at the same time … or actually, I wanted to leave before they were ready, so it wasn’t like they got bored quickly. They are not uniquely quiet or well behaved kids, either—quite chaotic a lot of the time, really. I think a lot of people don’t give kids a chance to experience these kinds of places because they assume the kids won’t do well, which is too bad.
I took my 6 and 9 year olds to SFMOMA and they played along for about 20 minutes and then started rolling all over the furniture and complaining about being bored, despite my best efforts to engage them in discussions about the art pieces. I got them to settle for a while by playing pencil-and-paper games with them, but then I couldn't look at the art either.
A more extensive talk about ground rules wouldn't have helped. Kids aren't all the same, and most art museums aren't really designed to meet their needs.
(By comparison, they would be happy to spend all day every day at the Exploratorium, and the hardest part there is occasionally pulling one away from some exhibit so that the next kid can get a turn.)
The top floor of Copenhagen Contemporary gallery is primarily for children.
The current exhibition is "where visitors are invited into the artist’s imaginative world and encouraged to participate in a process of transformation — quite literally — through hats, masks, and performative gestures. The shelves overflow with peculiar faces and twisted creatures, and on the green monster stage, anyone can step into a new version of themselves."
"The exhibition marks the first chapter of CC Create, a three-year educational and exhibition initiative that transforms Hall 4 into an open studio for play, learning, and co-creation. Specially trained hosts are on hand to guide visitors in exploring their own creative potential in dialogue with Chetwynd’s art."
Last time I went, the interactive kids bit had a huge wall and a massive bucket of darts and visitors would contribute to the artwork by throwing additional darts at the wall. This is very kid-friendly if the kid is Danish.
Yeah, this must be a negotiated market at this point... Kids not being interested in art museums, and thus art museums not bothering making it family friendly.
However, I have to say the computer history museum in Mountain View was nice and felt serious. So I think placing all science museums under one umbrella is a bit harsh.
The Art Institute of Chicago goes out of its way to be family friendly and not take itself too seriously [1], and it is consistently seen as one of the best art museums in the world.
PS - the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis is ridiculously good for kids.
The Exploratorium had a few speakers at the adult night that I went to. It was definitely on the pop-sci end of the spectrum, but it was definitely not dumbed down to kid levels. Heck, even during normal operations, I'd say the Exploratorium walks a fair line between "approachable to children" and "teaching more science topics than we expect most adults to know".
Agreed. They make it into a space for adults by simply removing kids and adding beer. It’s good for a casual date, but you don’t actually get adult level content.
I want the actual exhibits and content to be able to teach things to adults and not just signs with “wacky trivia” meant to engage kids for two seconds while they sprint to the next thing that has a button for them to push (e.g., one of the worst genre of “wacky facts” are stupid size comparisons about how things are bigger than X football fields or Y school busses).
Tl;dr You could get drunk while you’re watching Zoboomafoo, but that doesn’t suddenly make it it for adults the way that an Attenborough documentary is.
I do recall a "late" at the London Science Museum where you could collect wristbands with the names of STDs to win prizes. Ok, still not very educational, but it was quite amusing to hear people trading gonorrhea for genital lice etc.
On a more serious note they do or did offer free lectures that were much more in-depth; one of the things I rather miss now that I live abroad.
In depth science lectures would definitely be a step in the right direction. I think those are gone though:
"Our evening events cover everything from cult film screenings and live performances to gripping panel discussions and exclusive premieres—we’ve got something for everyone."
What you need if you really want an education is a tour by a curator that can dive into the exhibits in age appropriate levels (and maybe even answer some questions).
It often seems like these adult themed exhibits are generally just a bunch of signs which are copy/pasted from wikipedia.
I really soured on the whole “wow can you believe this crazy science fact” targeted for adults kind of media when Instagram and Subreddits like “I Fucking Love Science” got massively popular. Which of course led to them enshitifying, then being worthwhile conduits for propaganda.
“SCIENCE FACT! Republican voters are known to be morons who don’t want to learn anything! Like and subscribe!”
I soured on science media when I learned just how terrible the "journalists" and editors are.
"Scientists find super duper magic unobtanium which does mystical things that will revolutionize the world!" Click through and "Bob found a conductor with slightly lower resistance than a previous material. It's created by a 500 step process which results in an organic chain that breaks down in temps above -40C."
The issue with the medium is every day needs an exciting headline. So they make them up rather than waiting for them to come.
Everyone suffers because you believe that stereotype instead of getting to know republicans and discovering it is false - many of them love science (who you vote for is a compromise - nobody will support everything you want them to)
I do know republicans, I am from more of conservative environment. I still semi regularly read conservative journals. It is currently what it is. Trying to idealise that word serves no one.
They dont like science. They used to like cosplay liking science, when it felt more manly or when they thought it sticks it to feminists. That interest ends long before any real science starts and have nothing to do with it.
The most fun I've ever had in a museum was at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas. The exhibits are interactive, educational, fun... mostly for kids...
I was 33 years old... I'd love to go back and do it all again.
I didn't understand art as a kid. You need experience, culture, history, and often at least a cursory understanding of religion to understand art. Art is an expression by the artist. It is necessary to understand the milieu of the artist first.
Science is universal. It crosses time and language barriers. The underlying physical principles are immutable. Kids can be expected to understand science museum exhibits after a few minutes of explanation. You can't explain the historical and social context behind a painting in just a few minutes to a kid.
But back in the 70's, OP's museum -- Franklin Institute (fi.edu) -- used to have serious lectures, classes, and even some research. Upstairs there used to be lecture rooms, a library, and classrooms.
One science museum that is not like that is the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, at least when I was there (shudder) about a decade ago.
It was a museum that was designed for parents to explain to children. The written material for any given piece in an exhibit went into sufficient detail and successive sections of writing would build on each other without necessarily requiring that the previous section had been read.
Back then the museum had an exhibition on the longitude problem and time keeping, precision, drift, etc. that walked you through the development of increasingly accurate chronometers, the practical reasons why, etc. It was an absolute masterwork exhibit, and it expected the adults to be actively engaged with helping digest the material with the kids.
Quite agree with the sentiment, and the presentation of science to the public in general. However, that probably also reflects a rather accurate assessment of scientific literacy in the general population on the part of planners.
Anyway, among US museums of natural history & science, a prominent exception is the AMNH in NYC: yes there are things for kids, but also things for "grownups". After dozens of visits I still learn something new every time.
There's an interactive Leondardo da Vinci museum in Firenze that does a good job of appealing to both. It's full of kids, because it's interactive, but you could fill it with adults just as easily.
If you ever get a chance, the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow has a permanent display of some of Lord Kevlin's instruments. You can look at the actual tools used to characterize the volt, the amp, and the electro-static forces.
I've seen a few different science museums and the like have a special day of the week where they stay open later and are 21+. Booze is involved. I've never been, but it seems like it could be a fun time.
Exploratorium and Academy of Sciences in SF have adult nights I believe. I remember attending a Yelp Elite event back in the day at the Exploratorium at night and it was pretty fun.
Back when big tech did Christmas parties but before they had hired so many people they wouldn’t all fit in a museum (thus requiring the renting of hangars), we booked this whole place for the night. It was great as everyone was dressed to the nines and drinking while the staff taught us about fish and quasars or something.
Visiting my parents this summer with my kids, I was excited to find that the zoo served beer. That definitely wasn't an option for my dad when I was growing up.
Just for clarification, are you upset that art museums tend to be less kid-focused, or that science museums and zoos tend to be overly kid focused? Both seem to be things to be potentially concerned about IMO.
I visited part of the Smithsonian recently (the natural history museum) and the level of patronizing displays is truly incredible. It seems pretty clear that if you're more than 10 years old, you're not supposed to be in there. But that feels like a development of recent decades.
On the other hand, zoos seem to have become more adult-oriented and less children-oriented over time.
That's disappointing. I liked to believe it would remain an example of a good museum after other places followed this trend. But on the west coast, I've had no reason to visit the Smithsonian in many decades.
I'm still unsure whether changes I see are all about the facility or partially about my changed perspective. I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the La Brea Tar Pits in the past decade, and I found neither of them stands up to my memory of them from 1980s school field trips.
Our science museum has dumbed everything down to where truly only a child could enjoy it and they don’t even seem to like it much. When I was a child the exhibits were so different and really interesting to both ages. Now it’s the most homogenized crap imaginable. Something only Blippi (the lobotomized) could love. I donate blood there and I’m never even tempted to go look at an exhibit. A lot of this happened in just the past few years, maybe they are just matching their reading and science impaired audience, I don’t know.
Vindication! I’ve spent over a decade of my life putting physical interactives into museums. I have preached (sold) many museums on the stance that they should put unique experiences into museums that can’t happen on an iPad at home, to varying degrees of success. The museums that have listened are the ones that continue to be wildly successful to this day.
They are hard to do right though. I used to compete in combat robotics and the stresses put on museum exhibits is higher. I tell my new engineers that if their exhibit can be dropped into a gorilla enclosure and survive, they are about half way strong enough. Little makes up for raw experience in the art of building bomb proof exhibits, and many companies have failed before getting good. The amateur hour exhibits from the low bid newcomers that inevitably fail and/or need a lot of expensive maintenance has left a sour taste in a lot of museum’s mouths. A lot of those museums have knee jerk reactioned the opposite direction to touchscreen exhibits, only to see their ticket sales slowly drop. Thankfully, i’m seeing the pendulum of the industry swinging back towards physical interactives again.
THANK YOU for fighting this fight. I hope the responses here might add some empirical weight to your arguments — some people apparently do care about this.
And I believe you on how hard the reliability/durability challenges must be in engineering these things — I've seen what the kids do to them.
BTW, I think the mechanisms themselves are no small part of the interest; kids don't just get to see whatever phenomenon is being demonstrated by the device, they get to poke at the thing that does it and try to figure out how it works, and that's a lot of fun for a curious kid; there are layers there.
I think they say that because screens are really easy to make bomb proof. You just lock them in a big metal case. Even more points if you interact with them through Kinect because you can now make the layer of hardened glass in front of them a full centimeter thick.
I totally agree with the authors point. The Franklin Institute at its core is a place that teaches science through tactile experience and the special exhibits don’t reflect that.
Some context as a local though, the Franklin Institute’s special exhibit space rotates every couple of months and I imagine they’re put on by outside vendors who move the exhibit from venue to venue. The special exhibits for better or for worse more akin to Disney World or the pop culture museum in Seattle. I’ve been to a bunch of them and they’re usually quite good, but they don’t represent that tactile learning experience at all.
Many of us Philadelphians really lament that the place isn’t as well maintained as it should be. It was the field trip destination for so many kids and I’m sorry OP wasn’t able to recreate that same level of magic for their kids.
My biggest gripe is that art museums, especially modern art museums, play documentary/clips from documentary that last anywhere from 2 minutes to 30 minutes. Those films are not accessible anywhere else.
I would be very willing to watch them in full, but like most other visitors, I have limited time, especially when visiting a new museum in a different city. If you say observing a painting/sculpture in person is different from looking at a picture, fine, whatever, but making these videos only available in museums is sad.
This has also been going in in Libraries in Australia.
Go to the library - toddlers Rush to play on the computer.
I wouldn't mind so much if it was available for those who wanted it but in my experience it tends to be central and noisy - difficult to avoid if that's not what you're after.
The rest of the stuff that is basically just a lame tablet app is a waste of my ( and my kids )time and, well, money.
That said, and I offer it merely as a defense, if the goal is to interest kids, you want to meet them where they are at. Apps is where they are at. Granted, thanks to parents, but still.
If you have a change to visit the Tokyo Science Museum, it's quite good in this respect - it has a lot of interactive displays, many of which are very hands on, and some are application based - focused on how the science concepts are used in industry (with some occasional corporate tie-ins, which weren't too over the top). It's fairly kid focused, as others have mentioned - most of your competition for seeing the exhibits will be school student groups.
Incidentally, the building is featured near the end of the Shin Godzilla movie.
Are you talking about the one in Kitanomaru park, or the Miraikan, on Daiba?
The Miraikan, in particular, is a fantastic science museum. I think it suffers a bit from what the OP is describing -- and also, a lack of English -- but for the most part it's interactive and uses technology in a really innovative way that goes beyond iPad fluff (an interactive seismograph room comes to mind, where you could move around and see the systems detect your movements in real time).
Ah, the first one is where I went - 科学技術館 (Kagakukijutsukan) in Kitanomaru park between the imperial palace and budoukan. It has some english (but, as always in Japan, knowing a little Japanese greatly helps), and the exhibits are fairly self-explanatory.
Good to know that there's another nice place to go.
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in the 1970s had a real submarine periscope you could use, a manned space capsule you could look into, a DC-3 airplane you could go into, and a variety of whirring/buzzing physical things to interact with. In the late 90s, I escorted a school group there and it was all screens. It had gone from being a destination worth driving across the state for to being an experience less interesting than a decent web site.
It's not a museum, unless there's a dark room with a bunch of mostly empty chairs lined up in front of a projection screen showing a slide show or documentary (or really both at the same time) with an overly enthusiastic narration covering the history of the subject.
Sometimes you can't even get to the displays, without first at least walking through the room.
Whenever I walk by the vaguely muffled sounds of someone watching a movie in another room, I get nostalgic for childhood visits to museums.
A little too cold. Stimulating but also lulling you to sleep with it's proto ASMR. Your parents slightly frustrated that this is the point your choose to have an attention span.
I’m going to call out the science museum in Manchester, and the one in Osaka (Japan) as two of the best ones I’ve been to. Manchester had a whole section of old machines, and a working mainframe computer, and Osaka had a planetarium that was nearly the height of the entire building.
I have personally made several interactive displays/exhibits for work. Yeah there are plenty of poorly made ones out there, but speaking from experience a good one truly does turns a museum into something a child is excited to visit. There is a reason why children's museums are made the way they are. Even children that are interested in learning, want to play. A great digital experience at a museum does wonders to bridge the gap between a regular museum and a children's museum. If a child has fun at a museum they are going to want to go back. If they keep having fun and keep wanting to go back, eventually they are going to start paying attention to substance of the museum. I agree great physical experiences are missing from many museums, but I'll happily continue to trick children into wanting to learn any way I can
The museum of science here in Boston got a lot less interactive and a lot more screens after Covid. I get that it’s cheaper to develop new exhibits when they are all digital, but my kids aren’t even interested in it. They want to get their hands on stuff.
> And where it looks like the budget has been going are the screen rooms. They occupy the huge central spaces on the main floor of the museum, and I’m sure a lot of time, money, and passion went into these things. But it’s misguided.
It reminds me of a Reddit thread about if someone should divorce their spouse because they significantly overdid it with smarthome tech. They (the other spouse) insisted that controlling everything with phones was "the future" and did things like drill out locks so they could only get in with a smartphone, and update the toilets so they would only flush from a smartphone.
I was an exhibit designer there in the early 2010s (the last exhibit I worked on was "Your Brain"); we had an incredible in-house design team that did all of the design and interactive prototyping, but unfortunately everyone was let go in ~2016 in favor of outsourcing much of the design work.
The truth is that the traveling exhibits (Body Worlds, Harry Potter, etc.) make a lot more money for them and do not require the ongoing maintenance burden. They have a reduced ability to design the exhibits as precisely as they used to and the physical stuff takes a tremendous amount of work and expertise to do well.
That said, the museum is run by people who care deeply about science education and the proliferation of touch screens is something they are sensitive to. The type of content has a lot to do with it (a physics exhibit has no excuse not to be 99% physical interactives), as does the fact that they tailor exhibits to many different styles of learning so that there's something for everyone.
Author here, thanks for your comment. I'm really sad to hear that everyone was let go; as I said, I loved TFI like nothing else when I was a kid.
I completely understand the incentives re: Body Worlds, Harry Potter (I've even seen an Angry Birds exhibit). But there's a fine line between a non-profit doing what it must to survive, and drifting so far from its mission that it no longer deserves to survive. TFI is still far from that point, but the trajectory is worrisome to me, so I called it out.
Yeah I hear you, and fwiw I largely agree with your article. Whether the presence of screens and software-based experiences means they are drifting from their mission is definitely up for debate, but your point is taken! Similar to you I had a hugely impactful trip to TFI in 5th grade, and much later on it was a dream to work there. And now I get to take my 5 year old. It's a special place and it's nice to see people feeling protective of it :)
My favourite museums are those that are a huge pile of old shit with some labels telling you what you are looking at. This whole "hundreds of screens with some odd artifact inbetween" style is just boring.
I had similar experiences seeing WWII artifacts and museums in Romania, Hungary, London, Brussels, and Berlin.
In the first 4 I had the most immersive experiences seeing memorabilia and artifacts from the Allies and Axis. Things like uniforms, cars, letters, tanks, jets, war trophies, and so on.
Everything was highly curated, and from the outside, the infrastructure was not so expensive to run. In terms of quality, the military museums of Romania, London, and Brussels are great.
Those places are to feel and have immersion.
In Berlin, there are only a few screens, but they have only some sort of "small billboards" in a version in German and some rough translation to English. Most of the time it is a picture of someone and some legend only.
However in Berlin and Munich, they have something, in my opinion, better than museums that we call as Documentation Centers. In Berlin there is the _Das Dokumentationszentrum Topographie des Terrors_ (Topography of Terrors), and for me the best documentation center is in Munich, called _NS-Dokumentationszentrum München_, which gets into the roots of the regime via the whole buildupand actual documents from leadership, political party meeting minutes, political discussions, and so on.
Feels like you could write the same article about theme parks nowadays too. Okay, there are still a fair few physical attractions there, but the likes of Universal Studios were infamous for having 'rollercoaster' like rides which were just simulators on a screen rather than relying on physical scenery, animatronics, etc.
Feels like there's a lot of attempts to integrate smartphones into the parks too, like through activities that involve using a mobile app instead of a physical prop or console.
I worked at disney when they were developing what became "Avatar Flight of Passage" where you ride a dragon wearing 3d headset. The ride vehicle moved in sync so it was pretty immersive.
On the other side "Toy Story Midway Mania" totally sucks
You can say the same thing of the long text that are often next to the exhibit in museums. I don't get the point of trying to read some essay while standing in the middle of a crowd pushing. You might as well read the wiki page in the comfort of your home and focus on the actual exhibit in the museum.
I'll take this opportunity to suggest some great places I've found.
The Corning Glass Museum is free (!!) and has both great art and great science, several interactive exhibits, and lots of information about glass and its history and application.
Interactive art exhibits like Otherworld! (and Meowwolf maybe? I have not been to it, but I hear it is a similar idea) It has a whole storyline, various rooms with different 'exhibits'. Classic physical art, puppets, electronics, a space invaders arcade game that is broken but then you realize you can climb under the arcade game and through a tunnel into a room where you can play _for real_ while space invaders drop from the ceiling, etc.
Seconding Meowwolf! The one I went to in Santa Fe was very hands on and physical, requiring lots of object manipulation as well as crawling through very tight spaces. Absolute delight.
Less so for the one in Colorado, which had more of an interactive back story done through an app; but I understand the Colorado one was also meant to be more ADA-friendly, and it was still pretty good.
I work in a museum, so I'll add in a couple of cents. Seth isn't entirely wrong here: museums are good opportunities for hands-on activities and to see things in a real sensory way that you can't in other places. "I believe museums exist to present the real thing for the visitor to experience with their own senses" rings really true to me.
That said: iPads and screens do have their place and it really depends on how well they're implemented.
First up: "But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with."
This is probably the key reason why there are so many screens in this particular museum: he answers his own question. Physical items, especially things with motion, will degrade with time and use, and maintenance can get really expensive. Physical models like a human heart aren't something that you can generally buy off the rack: museums and similar institutions will work with a company to produce something like that (I'm guessing fiberglass?) These are things that can run thousands and thousands of dollars to repair or outright replace.
But here's the other thing with a physical static or interactive display: once they're in, they're in. You can't really update them without actually replacing the entire thing.
Here's an example: at the museum where I work, we have a section about the Civil War: it had some uniforms, weapons, and a whole bunch of other items that told the story as it related to our mission. The panel that outlined everything stretched across the room -- it was about 20 feet long. When we pulled everything out to update it, we had to replace that entire panel. It was a good fix, because the room hadn't been updated in like 15-20 years, but if we had wanted to pull out any one item, we'd still have to replace the entire panel. That sort of thing can be an impediment to updates, because it requires a lot of work. We ended up putting in three panels, which will allow us to switch out objects more easily.
We also put in an interactive with an iPad that allows visitors to explore a painting in the exhibit in a lot more depth.
We've done a handful of these sorts of interactives, and as I noted up above, the experience really depends on the audience and how well it's presented. In our case, we aim for ours to be usable for a wider range, which means that we have to keep things fairly simple, so adults and children can use them.
"My wife — a science writer who used to be the only staff writer covering space for New Scientist and before that, worked at NASA — poked at one of these with my son, added too many boosters to their launch vehicle, and were told it failed “for reasons” in a way she found totally unhelpful and pointless." That doesn't entirely surprise me, because she's an expert and is really knowledgeable in the field! But you have to make sure that you're calibrating for your audience: most of the people using that likely won't have her experience or knowledge, and digging deeper and deeper into detail might be lost on most of their audience. (Not having seen it, I can't tell for sure.) It is good to have that depth of knowledge be available, if you have audience members who do want to go further, but it could come down to limitations or be an exception that they didn't account for.
Digital interactives can also be swapped out quite a bit more quickly: if you have a new exhibit that you're putting in for a short amount of time, it might make more sense to have something that doesn't cost a lot if it's only going to run for months, rather than years. (Or if you find an error, there's new research, new updates, etc. -- a digital interface is easier to update than a static panel.)
On top of all that: cultural institutions are facing real crunches right now. There's a lot of uncertainty (and outright lack of support) from federal funding sources (which in turn impacts the willingness of private/state/NPO donors), and staff shortages that means everyone has fewer resources and fewer people to utilize them with. From where I sit, if we have to implement more digital content, we'll be able to repurpose the screens that we've already purchased to new exhibits and interactives.
Finally, there's nostalgia at play here: I have a ton of fond memories of visiting museums with interactives and huge displays, and I'm glad that I can take my kids to them as well. But I'm also happy to see that these museums aren't stuck in the past and the only thing that they're doing is rehabilitating old exhibits that are decades old or out of date: they still have some of those things, but they're also making sure to bring in new interactives, looking at new scholarship and best practices for museums (because museums aren't static organizations or fields!) to change as audiences change. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who use screens as a way to take in information: museums have to keep abreast of those trends, because if we don't deliver information to people in familiar and accessible ways, they probably won't come in.
> But you have to make sure that you're calibrating for your audience: most of the people using that likely won't have her experience or knowledge, and digging deeper and deeper into detail might be lost on most of their audience.
I think this is a really key point; I've definitely felt slightly disappointed at certain exhibits, and had to remind myself that these things are designed for everyone. It would be lovely if every exhibit was pitched at exactly your own level, but as an adult, there are definitely areas where you are more knowledgeable than the general public, and so that's not possible.
Something I've noticed with academics of all stripes is that they don't always recognize that not everybody shares their assumptions / views / insights / knowledge, and that's not a good mindset to go into building an exhibit or interactive.
You have to understand your audience, not design them. I frequently hear from folks who stop by our museum who tell me that they haven't been to ours since they were a kid, and they're generally not someone who keeps up with the field. I don't like the phrase "dumbing down", but it's something that we need to do in order to reach patrons.
A bit of a tangent, but has modern maker culture made it easier to make and maintain exhibits? Things like 3D printing, version control, Arduinos, etc.
It's situational. It's helpful to us that our executive director is a carpenter: he makes and fabricates a lot of things that end up in displays.
As far as 3D printing, we haven't dabbled with it, but we have had folks come in to scan our objects, which is pretty cool. But we're also a small staff that doesn't have the time to really dig into the tech as much as we could.
I think "physical exhibits are awkward and expensive so we use screens instead" is kind of a cop-out. Yes they are more expensive and difficult, but they're what you're supposed to have!
Imagine if you went to a zoo and they just had photos of animals. "But it's so much cheaper and easier!"
Author here. Thank you for this comment, you make so many great points. I'd like to respond to some of them.
> First up: "But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with."
> This is probably the key reason why there are so many screens in this particular museum: he answers his own question. Physical items, especially things with motion, will degrade with time and use, and maintenance can get really expensive. Physical models like a human heart aren't something that you can generally buy off the rack: museums and similar institutions will work with a company to produce something like that (I'm guessing fiberglass?) These are things that can run thousands and thousands of dollars to repair or outright replace.
You may be right that this is the answer to my unstated question of "Why are these exhibits not in perfect working order?" However, I reject it as an excuse, because, for instance, the building also requires maintenance, and this maintenance is apparently kept up with: it was clean, the doors opened and closed without squeaking, the elevators function.
Both the building and the exhibits are required to serve TFI's mission and need maintenance to perform their functions. If an exhibit is worth conceiving, building, and housing in the museum, it deserves maintenance, just as the museum building does. So I'm inferring that adequate exhibit maintenance is just not being prioritized either in the cash budget or the "volunteer effort budget". Emotionally, it feels terrible to walk my son over to a thing and be excited to show it to him, and have it not work. I'd rather the thing not be there.
> We also put in an interactive with an iPad that allows visitors to explore a painting in the exhibit in a lot more depth.
I have no problem with that because it's adding something to the experience of the artifacts on display. My problem is with the exhibit itself being a touchscreen. I would say there is very little point to visiting a museum in this case, because the web can distribute software more cheaply. My complaint is that a touchscreen does not count as being "hands-on", and TFI is all about being hands-on; that's what makes it so special, and to me, wonderful and worth fighting for.
> Finally, there's nostalgia at play here: I have a ton of fond memories of visiting museums with interactives and huge displays, and I'm glad that I can take my kids to them as well. But I'm also happy to see that these museums aren't stuck in the past and the only thing that they're doing is rehabilitating old exhibits that are decades old or out of date: they still have some of those things, but they're also making sure to bring in new interactives, looking at new scholarship and best practices for museums (because museums aren't static organizations or fields!) to change as audiences change. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who use screens as a way to take in information: museums have to keep abreast of those trends, because if we don't deliver information to people in familiar and accessible ways, they probably won't come in.
This, right here, is the rub. Because to my mind there is a fine line between meeting people where they are, and pandering to perceived preferences or limitations of our audience, and in the process, losing sight of the mission.
If we know kids are on screens a lot, or worse, believe that kids "need screens to be engaged", and thus proceed to skew our museum exhibits toward screens, are we doing right by them? I would argue, vociferously, that we are not. When we try to serve everyone, even those with little interest in our mission, by diluting our fidelity to our mission, then we end up serving poorly those who really are interested in our mission. There's probably a term for this phenomenon, but I don't know it.
There's also a fine line between doing what must be done to survive, and bending the mission in the interest of cashflows to the degree the organization is no longer serving its mission. TFI needs cashflow to survive and there are doubtless many ways for it to boost revenue and reduce costs that I would argue go against its mission. I'm arguing that the touchscreen-based exhibits are so far outside its mission that they need to go. The Kinect exhibits are on the edge for me, but I think those can stay.
> I believe museums exist to present the real thing for the visitor to experience with their own senses. Here’s the sculpture — the actual piece of stone, two thousand years old, Greek sculptor unknown — now go ahead and form your impressions.
When I'm in a museum with ancient sculptures, ironically, I don't want to see them as-is. Instead, I want to walk into a room that attempts to emulate how the sculptures looked in the context that they were originally displayed in, often with original paint that's been lost over the millennia since they were made.
Even cooler would be a projector that could "turn on and off" what the sculpture looked with original paint and possibly other decorations that have long since decayed.
The franklin institute hosted yearly robot fights for a long time, which I was going to present as evidence that they aren't completely screen-pilled but it looks like that has ended sometime in the last 5 years. It's a shame- I competed one year and it was an all time favorite museum experience.
What I don't understand is why science museums aren't more geared toward adults. For me, it's hard to tell the difference between a children's museum and a science museum.
* Fewer adults interested in science than children. Children are learning new things. Magnets! Pulleys! Not many adults (outside HN) are going to get excited about a pulley.
* The people making the museums don't have sufficient scientific knowledge to do science for grown ups.
* Exhibits for children are much easier to make robust, and probably cheaper to make.
That said I do think it would be really cool if there was a science museum for adults. There's all sorts of things you could show.
I generally agree with the thesis of the blog post.
I'd like to add that I feel frustrated when try out a screen at a museum and it not working (malfunctioning). I have been to NASA's Kennedy's Space Center (KSC) many times (like 5-6). Although they have got most of the exhibits working in good order, some of them are broken or not functioning well anymore. I still appreciate KSC (am an annual member), but I wish there is some philanthropist or the government fund to renovate these museums periodically...
Absolute irony: Pittsburgh has a privately-owned museum of computers (actually in New Kensington, a suburb). A HUGE amount of big old boxes. PDPs, Cray, some early home computers and printers. Some have been actively used by the owner/maintainer, so we know they work.
But there's no digital displays. There are screens - that are off.
The owner can barely make rent, even in that desolated section of real estate, so there's not going to be any snappy big screens or interactive software. But it's literally a museum of computers where no computers are computing.
Same thing at Science World, luckily they have a lot of tangible artifacts, but a ton of computers/displays. Last time I went (<6mo ago) a bunch of displays/stations in the most-hyped exhibit were non-functional due to hardware faults. :\
The Franklin Institute was in dire straits during COVID (as many similar institutions were), but has by all accounts recovered nicely financially. It felt pretty dumpy the last few times I've been there, with broken exhibits and the aforementioned screen-based exhibits. Hopefully they'll loosen those purse-strings eventually and put some money into the more expensive but much more tactile physical exhibits that had always been one of their big strengths.
Before reading the article, I was going to talk about my very disappointing visit to the Franklin Institute a few months ago. Then I read the article and discovered that it's about the disappointment of visiting the Franklin Institute. My strongest impression of that museum is that it mostly consists of corporate sponsorship displays and a few neglected lessons in how things actually work.
I did enjoy walking around the enormous steam loco in the basement. That one room, where they seem to have stuffed all the old 'museum' stuff was the highlight of my visit.
The best science museum I've been to in years is in Glasgow. Walking across the I-beam compared to the sheet (or was it a bar?) of steel actually taught my kids something.
It costs a lot of money to create a frame! You need skilled people to make one, get the proper archival glass to protect whatever you're displaying. There's a lot of work and field best practices that goes into this.
It doesn't really have to cost that much. You're mostly paying real estate and a professional waiting for business. Framing material, UV glass, and acid free paper are quite cheap. Anti-glare Tru Vue museum glass costs maybe a couple hundred dollars for a medium sized work, but a lot of museums don't even use it because art framers mark it up like crazy.
Gallerists always act like having a professional framer is given, but maybe their typical clientele are rich enough to just treat that as a mandatory tax. I framed my art with a diy LevelFrames kit for 10x cheaper which took less than an hour. The frame itself isn't particularly good quality, so for now, boutique framers have a strictly superior product, but this advantage could easily be commoditized away.
And then you visit nearly any museum in Europe, and walls are absolutely covered in paintings with almost none of the wall itself visible and most of the paintings not even behind any sort of glass. It's kind of funny.
(b) They only pulled that stunt on art that was already behind suitably-protective covers. (Whether the stunt is effective or not, they weren't putting artwork at risk: just temporarily disrupting the operation of galleries, and getting themselves arrested.)
Archival preservation materials, anti-reflective glass, and a person who knows what they heck they're doing around artifacts is expensive. Just getting the thing onsite can cost thousands.
When I was in 5th grade (I think?) we went to the nation's capitol as a field trip. My mom volunteered to be a chaperone, as a result over the following years, we would go back. We would go into every museum, if you get a room at the right hotel (I forget which one we stayed at back to back) you can walk to any and all the museums, you can spend all day in several different museums. I highly recommend anyone to take such a trip if you've never been to DC. The city is full of so much history that we all have been taught, its something else to see it in person.
I am from Philly but don't live there any more and was a little bit sad when I took my kid to the Franklin Institute and she didn't want to go in the giant heart. It scared her. I'm hoping we can go again next time we visit and she won't be scared.
If you want to take your kid to a museum then...go to a museum. The Franklin Institute, which they went to, is not a museum. I have the Liberty Science Center near me, which is also not a museum. They have interactive exhibits, planeteriums, and yes, screens. All this is by design, and it is great.
A museum here plays an inaudible voice recording on a 30 min loop with the speaker persistently building on previous context. It was like browsing an unfamiliar code base.
I admit to not being a museum head myself. Now that I'm a parent though, I've gone to them all, multiple times. Before that, I'd not gone to any of them unless they're world famous.
If it wasn't for kids, nobody would go to most museums (non-famous ones especially)
Kids are simply the demographic, because every parent is looking for activities to entertain the kids every day.
Interactive non-screen based exhibits that are designed for kids are the best, but if you can't have that for cost/know-how reasons interactive multi-media exhibits are a good second on the "it did a good job entertaining my kid" spectrum.
Actually learning anything is a secondary demand from the consumer when it comes to museums unfortunately. Entertaining the kids is number one, bonus points if it also managed to entertain the parents.
Agree a lot of “museums” are turning into less of cool items and more of a lot of text and visuals and electronic displays. I could just do that at home and skip the inconvenience, cost, and exposure.
I’m inclined to believe that this happens because there are strong incentives to being able to add to your resume “Directed digital modernization of Museum of Note”.
Exactly. It's easier and cheaper for the museum to change exhibits when they just update the screen vs swapping out a hands on exhibit. Screens also use less floor space and are easier to maintain.
On the other hand, an app for your phone, or digital display placed by an artifact, it a bar code: could have as much detail as possible, with more and more in depth lessons that you can investigate depending on your own level of curiosity. (Or age.)
A fantastic museum of the world - natural and human history in Ottawa, was great.
But imagine, they have a diorama depicting a historical scene...
Then there is a display counter in front where you can read what's going on in the diorama. Also a few selected elements from the display, shown behind that glass, but visible up close for us to admire.
What is the description of a brass ring, in the display:
"A brass ring."!
We can see that!
WTF? But we want to know: where was it found, what was it's purpose, why is this down here not something else. What era is it from? You could dig deeper: how was it made? Who made it? Where? With what technology? Brass? How did they blend the raw materials? Who wore it? Etc etc etc.
A little electronic display could have that,
It a link for everyone to follow - bar code for example we could scan.
It could even link to a Wikipedia page, whatever. But, something!
More than:
"A brass ring"
It's disappointing to see but it feels as if to keep a futuristic theme and to provide almost an "edutainment" environment that a museum feels as though it must implement screens to keep up with the times. I think this might almost be comparable to how places like McDonalds that had themed play areas for kids have been wiped away. We aren't really designing many places where kids can be kids and when we do, we try to put more screens in there to connect with a younger technology savvy generation?
> It's disappointing to see but it feels as if to keep a futuristic theme and to provide almost an "edutainment" environment that a museum feels as though it must implement screens to keep up with the times.
And you just know that in board meetings of plenty of museums, someone is saying "We NeEd To MaKe ThE mUsEuM Ai-NaTiVe."
And the wonderful hands-on physical stuff that I loved as a kid? Jammed into out-of-the-way spaces in the Sir Isaac’s Loft and Air Show rooms. These rooms are terrific, and I was delighted to see they were absolutely packed with kids playing with stuff.
I'm really not sure what the problem is, given that these exhibits are there, popular and obviously accessible. Ok, the author has an issue with screens, but, hey, a lot of real science is done on screens today...
I think a lot of the time, museums really want to be "immersive" and give kids (and adults) something interactive. The problem is that "interactive" defaults to a touchscreen because it's easy to implement and maintain and looks flashy, even if it doesn't actually teach anything or spark curiosity the way a hands-on exhibit does. Honestly though, I think these kids do want to interact with the real world but lack the chance to. Screens are seductive and safe, but nothing beats the thrill of making something move with your own hands and actually seeing the physics happen.
As an example, one exhibition I found pure joy in that doesn’t involve screens is the Museum of Illusions. It's hands-on, mind-bending, and utterly delightful.
As a parent, I agree 100% with the sentiments expressed by the author.
But even judging digital exhibits on their own merits, I have yet to see one in a museum (or similar location) that was actually "wow" or that really captured my kids' attention or sparked any discussion (like other "real" stuff we saw). Most were, as my 9 year old would say, "mid" (==crappy in genAlpha speak). Very blah. Very low effort, and sometimes didn't even work properly. Think of your typical crappy software experience that just barely works.
The places that do have physical hands-on exhibits do catch my kids' attention, and we return multiple times. For example, one has a lab where you can do chemistry experiments (which they rotate) -- 100x better than doing some digital simulation (which 1) is very quickly boring, and 2) I'll just do it at home and we can close the museum (sad).
I used to love visiting museums to press buttons and turn dials as a kid. That's the funnest part. Anything in a museum that's just a screen is usually dumb.
In the UK it comes off the back of "decolonize this" and "imperialism bad that".
Frankly I'm fed up of it over here and it's a shame this is being replicated in countries built a lot more strongly on actual modern scientific progress.
There's plenty of affordable interactive exhibits (the cost of crayons and paper hasn't inflated that much since the 90s!), but there's this false b$ that interactive digital media or 3d VR wish-wash is what people want. This mostly comes from asking the wrong people, the great unwashed who you were never going to attract away from the latest Disney flop.
As is being played out en-masse within hollywood and the wider entertainment industry. Ask the people who were your strongest supporters and original fans what they liked about your thing and you'll cut through all the noise and know where your priorities should be. Stop tyring to please everyone and focus on doing what you do well, growth and expansion numbers are good for one place the valley, and lets look where that got social media...
>poked at one of these [design a rocket apps] with my son, added too many boosters to their launch vehicle, and were told it failed “for reasons” in a way she found totally unhelpful and pointless.
This is tripping my bullshit-o-meter. If it just failed "for reasons" how do you know it failed because there were too many boosters? Kinda sounds like the game explained that to them.
IMO, the geyser exhibit in the Exploratorium is one of best demonstrations I've seen in a museum. Far more impressive than a tesla coil, and contains a really good explanation of how it works (unlike the vast majority of tesla coil exhibits).
Sure, a tesla coil is flashy and a pretty awesome (in the biblical sense) demonstration of man's harnessing of electricity, but they don't really tell you much about how electricity works. A simple snap-together circuit with a battery, some wires, and some incandescent light bulbs does a much better job of that.
I had a (now defunct) startup in this space some years ago. Maybe I can help shed some light on why things are the way they are.
1. Money. Most museums have no money. They either run on donations, on subsidies, or at the whim of wealthy patrons. They are very costly to run, especially the big ones. They are often in prime real estate areas, many require tight climate control, many also require specialised lighting to protect art etc.
2. Curators often see "taking care" of the exhibits as more important than actually exhibiting them. Not to mention they're often art/history majors with very little clue about anything digital.
3. Because museums are often subsidised, many of them are required to go through public tender procedures to get anything done. Because this is a huge pain for everyone involved, the results are often shit, as it attracts a certain kind of company to do the work. One of the tenders my startup looked at involved not only supplying the hardware and software for an interactive exhibit, but also the lighting and reinforced glass casings for various items. This was not our cup of tea, and the tender would subtract points for using subcontractors...
Personally I'm not interested in museums that are just glass cases with stuff without any explanation. Maybe a little paper legend is sufficient, but I actually prefer a screen which offers more info in the form of adio or video in multiple languages.
Depending on the exhibit, 3D printed replicas can be great as well.
Good feedback. I wouldn't put "taking care" in quotes, however; my wife is a former museum worker and has graduate degrees in the field, and preservation is a key part of the role. Exhibits aren't just for the now, they're for the future. People would love to sit in the cockpit of the Bockscar bomber (little bit morbid, but true); allowing that would result in serious damage over time.
This is less important for educational spaces like the one the OP describes -- strictly speaking, science museums often aren't museums in the classical sense. Preservation is less important there, although not unimportant.
Oh I didn't put it in quotes out of disdain or anything, more because I couldn't think of a better description. Preservation sounds better indeed.
So what you’re saying is, curators should be less conservators and more exhibitionists?
i'm confused. in what way is this a response to the article?
the article laments the sidelining of physical exhibits, in favor of software. you respond that the screens probably have an arduous and expensive procurement process.
what's going on here?
I inferred that a museum exhibit setup might be a package put together by a contractor.
And the contract selection process might put a relatively low priority on amount of screen tech in the package.
Museum might get locked into a vendor tech support package after procuring a digital-display-heavy exhibit. Oh joy.
This happens so many times in HN threads that it is difficult not to believe it is intentional
By "this" I mean tangent, distraction, defensive dismissal, etc.
But we cannot jump to conclusions
Assuming it is not intentional, this behaviour suggests a high level of myopia (used here metaphorically to represent an apparent inability or perhaps unwillingness to contemplate life without computers)
HN submitters routinely submit stories that challenge this myopia. These stories routinely reach the HN front page
We can enjoy the entertainment of continual efforts by HN commenters to "change the subject"
> 2. Curators often see "taking care" of the exhibits as more important than actually exhibiting them. Not to mention they're often art/history majors with very little clue about anything digital.
Museum curators used to be called keepers and this only changed in the mid-late twentieth century. The philosophy of preservation runs deep and you won't struggle to find curators whose favourite day of the week is when the museum is closed to the public.
Curators tend to make exhibits and displays that appeal to their own scholarly reference points. You need a different role - interpretation - to literally interpret this scholarship into what the public might be interested in. Few museums can afford to apply the lens of interpretation, so for the most part we are stuck with what curators think and its limited crossover with what the public want.
> The philosophy of preservation runs deep and you won't struggle to find curators whose favourite day of the week is when the museum is closed to the public.
Which gets back to the question - why does/should the public support a museum. If we can't see it why are we keeping it? Even with our best preservation things will be destroyed over/with time, some things quicker than others. So if people don't get to see it what is the point of preserving it.
Museum backrooms are filled with things that they can't afford to preserve/restore, and so they are slowly being lost without anyone even able to see them in the mean time. Curators hate this reality, but they have to priorities the important things. I want things they can never preserve anyway sold the highest bidder, at least that way one person can enjoy it, we can use the proceeds to preserve something else. Plus part of the value to a rich person is showing off so there is a better chance someone will see it. (if there is no bigger that proves we don't value it. Even if future society would it won't make it to them anyway so may as well trash it now and stop pretending)
> If we can't see it why are we keeping it?
Does one get any better sense of something from seeing the original something vs a replica of the something? Does looking at the "original" copy of the constitution under all that glass do anything different than a replica under all of that glass? Would seeing the actual David statue impart any more anything than seeing a replica of it? If you say yes, why do you think any of that is the actual thing and not a replica? Just because they say so?
Those are all things we can see. I'm asking about the many things that are forever locked in a backroom and you won't be allowed to see it.
I agree. If it only exists so that a select few can actually experience, it might as well not exist at all.
And don't kid yourself, those keepers and creators get full access as well as anyone they deem worthy enough. The rest of us will never be granted that access.
If it's privately funded, good. It affects me nil. But if they take public funds and lock up history or nature just so it can remain pristine for the wealthy or elite to enjoy, then I don't want to have to pay for it. Not that I have a choice in the matter either way.
> So if people don't get to see it what is the point of preserving it.
That's assuming that the only point of museums is to exhibit the collection to the public. Certain museums—especially in archeology and the natural sciences—also exist to support researchers.
> Personally I'm not interested in museums that are just glass cases with stuff without any explanation.
I am not sure why you mentioned this, because it has nothing to do with the subject article. This was a very specific article about interactive, hands-on museums replacing their exhibits with touch screens.
That being said, I have also been to countless museums of many kind and I have never once seen a museum that did not explain what the exhibits were. Have you actually seen this anywhere, or was this hyperbole?
I know of one that "doesn't explain" the exhibits (except through an app/website where you match things hanging on walls with diagrams) – the Isabella Gardner museum in Boston; this is specifically due to the wishes of Isabella Gardner herself, who was opposed to plaques.
There is one room that breaks this rule – I'm guessing it got damaged and then at that point they didn't have to follow her will.
Still worth a visit for the garden, the Titian, lots besides.
Yes. Especially a lot of older and mustier museums have very little in the way of explanation related to the exhibits.
> prefer a screen which offers more info
yes, this is a good use of digital; it enhances the physical exhibit rather than replace it
There is an incredible pressure on a lot of public facing endeavors to include digital, no matter whether it makes any sense at all or not. Take education, for instance - if it weren't such an important topic, it would be almost comical to observe how our schools are trying to jump through hoops to cram more IT into the classroom. (I wish the people responsible would take a look at Scandinavia though, where they are years ahead in that respect and have already begun taking digital devices out of the classrooms again.)
But it's not about what makes sense. It's about prestige, and about the ability to tell everyone "look at us, how forward we are!". This seems very clear to me, for instance, by the fact that the year 7 comp sci classes they teach in our local high school have what on their curriculum? Yep, that's right, you guessed it: AI. Because that's apparently the absolute basic CS that every student should start with these days.
Education is only one example, of course. But it's really creeping into everything. That museums have screen everywhere is no surprise. After all, flashing screen surely release more endorphins than non-interactive physical exhibits, so if you want to attract young folks, the pressure is on.
My wife and I toured our neighborhood public elementary school a couple years ago. Almost every classroom we passed the kids were staring at their chromebooks, even in the art room—digital art, I guess [1]. In the music room the kids were sitting at rows of desks with electronic keyboards and headphones while the teacher sat at the front of the class and gave them instructions through a microphone (to be heard through the headphones, I guess).
It was incredibly depressing. We decided to send our kids elsewhere.
[1] Nothing against digital art, but I strongly feel young kids should be working with actual physical materials.
Silly aside: "digital art" is the means by which you legally "buy" weed in DC. You pay for the "art" and they "gift" you a box of special brownies or a joint.
Whoa I had not heard this. I'm really surprised that holds up legally.
When my kid was going to start preschool, we went to see a relatively posh private school in the neighborhood. The first thing they showed was a photo of a 3-year-old kid solving a jigsaw puzzle in a big touchscreen. A jigsaw puzzle, you know, that thing where 80% of the challenge for a kid that age is physically inserting the pieces the right way. In a touchscreen! They also boasted about not having any books until age 8 or something like that, I don't remember exactly.
We left appalled. We sent him to a public school instead, where they use screens much less (although they do use them, sadly) and they have books. I don't know to what extent this is a voluntary choice or just because they have less money to buy gadgets, but the result is better anyway.
I wonder if there would be a market for schools or daycares offering "pre-digital" style classrooms with emphasis on books, blocks, puzzles, art, outdoor time, and policies to limit phones/screens.
On the other hand, these kids will eventually end up in a world saturated with displays and maybe even AR, so there's some argument for getting them involved with digital stuff at some point.
For the first few years of let's-make-school-digital it was even worse, all iPads instead of chromebooks. Not even a keyboard to type on.
> the year 7 comp sci classes they teach in our local high school have what on their curriculum? Yep, that's right, you guessed it: AI. Because that's apparently the absolute basic CS that every student should start with these days.
I think, if you went back to the origin of the term "AI" and tried to teach an introduction to the very fundamentals, this could actually be a fun and inspiring class - one that might not even need a lot of computer knowledge.
There are a number of board games with "self-playing" antagonists that are governed through clever sets of game rules.
There is also the historical predecessor of computer science, cybernetics, that dealt with self-governing analogous control systems, like thermostats.
Finally, there are the classical pathfinding algorithms (Depth-First/Breadth-First, Dijkstra, A*) which I still think are some of the most "bang for the buck" algorithms in terms of "intelligent-looking" behavior vs simplicity of the algorithm.
All that stuff could be engaging for high school students in the author's "hands-on" way.
All that of course if the "AI" class is really about giving a broad introduction to the field, and not just "we have to put ChatGPT into the curriculum somehow".
> After all, flashing screen surely release more endorphins than non-interactive physical exhibits
The irony is that this might not even be true. In the article, the author observed that the physical exhibits were much more interesting to the kids than the screens.
To be devil's advocate it is really practical to develop and roll out digital experiences. You can be a lot more creative about it than the "big tablet" experience you have at McDonald's. Some friends of mine have built experiential art installations that have things like a custom coin-op video game, Pepper's Ghost style displays, a "time machine" experience using video projectors, etc.
I'd love to be able to sell location-based XR experiences to museums: like you go to the paleontology museum and put on a headset and now the museum is a mixed reality Jurassic Park. For that matter I'd love to set up a multiplayer VR park in a big clean span space. There are a lot of difficulties like the cheap headsets don't really have the right tracking capabilities for a seamless location-based experience [1] plus getting together and paying a team which can deliver that sort of thing. A museum with really robust funding could probably afford an XR experience and subsidize development that transfers to other museums but I can't see the economics working for turning an old American Eagle at the mall into a VR experience park: malls have unrealistic ideas about their spaces can earn and most of them have posts in them that player would crash into.
[1] It already knows where it is the instant you put the headset on and it doesn't have to retrain like the MQ3 would.
A significant number of people get motion sickness from VR and thus excluded. If you don't have a problem good for you, but please remember those of us excluded. Please leave some normal no electronics places for those of us who can't enjoy what you do.
If our "real world" is screens, maybe. I really hate to think that this is becoming the case, but it is happening and this only hastens it.
The article was about real analogs or actual world objects. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is a fantastic example, as is the Field Museum there. Kids are full of screen time already. Is that all there is?
I feel like half the products the tech industry comes out with aren't really useful, but they exist because of this performative trend-following. Competitor has a mobile app, we have to have a mobile app. Harvard business review says blockchain is big, we need to have blockchain. Our CEO's investor buddy said AI is the next big thing, we need to jam AI in or product.
> I wish the people responsible would take a look at Scandinavia, though, where they are years ahead in that respect and have already begun taking digital devices out of the classrooms again.
Yes, Sweden was doing so as discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42715841
I don’t know what exactly they teach about AI, but trying out different AI tools could be very important, it’s a great learning tool if you want it to be. It can help students learn math, history, programming…
Indeed, but it's more like computer literacy not comp sci.
We also had a course in "computers" in high school. We had to know by heart the contents of "File" and "Edit" menus for Paint in Win3.1. Windows95 was just came out that year, so naturally the curiculum had not adapted yet. Anyway, guess how useful that was. The only one student who knew how to program got an F in the course :)
It was, of course, a way to teach nontechs how to use computers, as misguided as the material was. So, in that light, starting with AI makes sense. Would be nice to also include a bit more technical course, but apparently knowing where and when a poet was born is more important.
> Scandinavia though, where they are years ahead in that respect and have already begun taking digital devices out of the classrooms again
While I personally suspect that social media and by extension phones are detrimental: what you're writing here is opinion, not fact.
Just like adding tech was an experiment which seems to have been accepted all over, removing the tech again is - at least to my knowledge - in experiment phase, too.
And because a real experiment would take roughly 12-20 years (students performance from start to finish, until they're gainfully employed)... Neither of these approached have really been validated. It's all speculation, because there are so many other reasons that could explain the issues we currently have in our schools
And frankly - even though I honestly believe that social media is bad for them - I sincerely think its nowhere close to being the main reason for dropping performance, inability to take responsibilities or whatever else people are saying about the current children.
> removing the tech again is - at least to my knowledge - in experiment phase, too.
Do you not consider the period prior to the tech? It was a significant amount of time.
but so much has changed since
My hole point was that you cannot isolate it to phones. Phones probably are net negative, but even if you removed them: our society has changed and wherever the removal will be positive for their development is hard to isolate, hence it's purely based on opinion
Relevant:
https://news.utexas.edu/2017/06/26/the-mere-presence-of-your...
Honestly, getting a class on AI and its dangers is probably a perfectly reasonable thing to have in your elementary school right now.
> But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with.
To be fair, that's what I remember children's museums being like in the 1980s as well. A significant number of exhibits would be temporarily out of order on any given day.
I don't think screens are responsible for that. Maintaining physical exhibits that can survive constant physical contact with kids is hard.
> I don't think screens are responsible for that. Maintaining physical exhibits that can survive constant physical contact with kids is hard.
That reminds me of something I’d love to learn a bit more about: the Strong Museum of Play. It appears the Wegmans’ supermarket exhibit where kids are able to work with real point-of-sale equipment has actually gotten equipment refreshes over the years itself, and I was really amused to see how far they went to have a “fully working” setup in the exhibits for kids to play with.
https://www.museumofplay.org/exhibit/wegmans-super-kids-mark...
The checkout counters are actual IBM/Toshiba SurePOS lanes, with actual current Datalogic scanner scales, and they’ve got a OS4690/TCxSky install and SurePOS ACE running on every single lane. (Or, at least, one of those registers has to be a controller+terminal, the other 5 lanes have to bootstrap off at least one lane, so they’re all networked, too!) They’ve also maintained enough of the store configuration so receipts look just like a store receipt and all (of course, with the Strong Museum as the “store”). And yes, you’re told to only push certain buttons and only scan stuff that’s inside the environment… ;)
Over the years they’ve swapped out the lanes from the old white to the modern Slate Grey, upgraded the scanner-scales, but the UX is still the same as it always was.
You have to keep those sort of museums up to date. As I recall the Computer History Museum in Boston, they had some interesting historical artifacts like Sage I think. But a fair bit of the museum was devoted to supposedly state of the art computing, some interactive. As a lot of the local computer companies went away, a lot of the the exhibits started looking pretty dated--and I'm sure a lot of funding dried up as well.
The Museum of Play and Wegmans are really class acts.
My kids just use the actual self checkout machines / lanes.
I was a tour guide at the National Air and Space Museum for a dozen years. I still remember seeing the exhibit plans the curators had, which called for a then 90-year old airplane (a Curtiss JN-4) to be mounted such that people could look down over it from the balcony. All of us docents who saw that immediately said "what about the kids who will drop pennies onto that precious canvas and wood thing to break it?"
Six months after the exhibit opening the Jenny was removed from that location, never to be returned to that exhibit. Because sometimes museum guests aren't just pushing things too hard, they are actively taking steps to destroy things, just to see if they can get away with it.
Because sometimes museum guests aren't just pushing things too hard, they are actively taking steps to destroy things, just to see if they can get away with it.
Can confirm.
If there is only two troublemakers in every group of 30 children, and a museum receives 10 groups a day, that’s 20 little rascals who are all trying to do the craziest stunt they can come up with…
My wife worked in an aerospace museum for quite some time; I've heard a lot of similar stories.
It's not just museum exhibits and kids, it's everything. I have some maintenance roles in my background and the rate at which things like paper towel dispensers get worn down and completely destroyed when interacted with by hundreds or thousands of people a day is eye opening.
Physical books in libraries is another example: They can typically last just a few dozen circulations.
Some books are well made but others are crap.
I think mass market paperbacks in standardized sizes hold up pretty well considering everything. My collection mostly from the 1970s and 1980s held up pretty well up to 2010 but they are going yellow now because of the acid paper. Libraries rebind them and I notice they have a lot of rebound paperbacks of the same age that have the same yellowing mine have despite better storage conditions.
Some trade paperbacks are fine but because they're not really standardized quality is all over the place. I've bought some where the binding broke the minute I spread the book out. Hardcovers are more consistent than trade paperbacks but some still fail early.
Then there are just the accidents like the book I had in my backpack when I was outside in heavy rain but I think that was one book wrecked in about 300 circulations.
I guess it's because it's waaaay too expensive to buy really robust things (like paper towel dispensers). It's not like you couldn't build an indestructible paper towel dispenser, but it would cost 10x a normal one and have 100x smaller market.
Since these towel dispensers are all over schools and other locations that likely get more traffic than that museum, either they are buying the good models which everyone in the business knows about, or they are choosing to buy the cheap ones because it is a better value despite having to replace them all the time. I don't buy such things so I'm not able to tell you which. I know that there are enough of them in the world that anything not robust would be well known quickly. (there is a possibility they bought something new that turned out bad, but then replace it once and done)
It's cus all skilled workers learned they can charge insane rates. Blue collar skilled labor starts at 100$ an hour in West Virginia or Mississippi now. Most of them, like Software, have learned that it's hard to figure out if the work they did was good or not until afterwards. As such, there are tons of charlatans, grifters, scammers, and related in many industries right now. Classic cases are Dentists (Literally everything), Car Mechanics (blinker fluid scams to grandma), Plumbers, Leak Detection Companies, etc
I started to understand a whole lot of class or even guild warfare stuff from the past when I start to see what happens when skilled workers start to scheme for their gain against the common good. I also don't just accept unions as being good for everyone anymore for the same reason.
The sad reality is that skilled workers are just like the hot waitress index. When the economy is bad, it's a lot easier to get the cream of the crop for those who still have money. The fact that everything is still somehow decent for a few more months is exactly why it's insanely difficult to source any kind of labor for a reasonable price. Since no one can source this labor, they simply don't and do without.
Shit stayed open late during the recession. Good thing Trump is trying his hardest to put us into another one right now.
>learned they can charge insane rates
It's called "what the market can bear" and it's what corporations with marketing and sales professionals have always tried their best to do; charge as much as you possibly can without losing business. Of course, it only actually works when there is competition, and so the rising prices are kept in check by undercutting competition.... and then, _that_ only works when the undercutting competition is working to the same quality (by a code, ideally) and is subject to the same economic pressures so that it can level out fairly. If the competition is all fresh immigrants with lower CoL, or if the competition is cutting corners, all bets are off. You end up with a race to the bottom, where each individual is trying to be part of a race to the top at the same time... everyone wants more than they're worth, but those who are actually doing the best work still aren't getting what they deserve, lol!
A free market actually requires a lot of surrounding regulation to work, just like any other freedom. It's always been strange to me that Americanism seems to view freedom as the fundamental condition of man, hampered by law; ultimately most freedoms come from rule and order, because they can carve out space for one to enjoy freedoms with far fewer negative consequences.
> A free market actually requires a lot of surrounding regulation to work
While I am not a free market absolutist, I think your assertion is based on judging negative outcomes of a free market vs the positive intentions of regulations trying to prevent those negative outcomes, i.e. you’re not considering the negative outcomes of regulations. I don’t think any free market advocate would state categorically that they produce perfect results, merely that any attempt to prevent certain negative outcomes through law will produce different negative outcomes elsewhere.
For instance regulations tend to incentivize very large corporations to advocate for more regulation as it raises the barrier to new competition entering the market place. Another example would be over burdensome regulations that slow the production of housing which constrains supply and prices a lot of people out of the market. I would have loved to take public transit where I lived a few years ago, but they spent a decade on environmental impact studies while traffic and the environmental impact from it got significantly worse.
There’s also a time component where the effects of regulations can take decades or even generations to really play out, but people tend to only remember the well-meaning goal of the regulation if they remember it at all. This tends to be very beneficial for politicians who end up being judged not on outcomes, but intentions.
It’s a supply and demand problem. There are just not enough people pursuing these jobs to replace the retiring generation. Some of these small family businesses are quite profitable, but most owners don’t have kids interested in continuing their legacy. Private equity noticed this and went on an acquisition spree. They buy your local HVAC and plumbing company, keep the family-owned branding “since 1976”, hire people with no experience to do the job and increase the hourly rate. They recover the investment, squeeze out every dollar they can and shut it down once bad Google reviews and lawsuits start to creep in.
Recent experience: called a HVAC contractor to fix a heating furnace, they spent 1 hour convincing us to scrap the current furnace and install a new one; once we told him "no" at least 10 times, he spent 30 minutes "diagnosing" the problem while on the phone with somebody with technical knowledge; then he quoted $250 to replace a part that I could buy on Ebay for $15. Finally, I bought the part and replaced it myself.
Sounds like sociopaths being allowed to do sociopath things problem, rather than supply and demand problem.
>>> Blue collar skilled labor starts at 100$ an hour in West Virginia or Mississippi now
Why should they charge less? Would you want to pay 50$ for unskilled worker instead?
I know a lot of shops that hire good mechanics though if you want to get some work done on your car that requires difficult diagnostics often you have to wait days or weeks to get the attention of someone who can get it done.
My father worked on a Natural Gas exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles as an emergency substitute when a contractor flaked. There was an oven that had a handle, when you opened it the narration said "don't open the oven during cooking" to save energy. Kids hung off this and immediately broke it, they replaced it with steel and it was broken the next day, then ended up having to put a Triangular metal piece that couldn't be hung off of because children are wild animals. This museum prior to the rebuild into the California Science Center (which I love but is just different) and the Exploratorium were amazing experiences for this as a kid. I miss the big kinetic scuplture of rolling wood balls through the electricity exhibit, the plotter that would draw out your bicycle design, the next door room full of electronic interactives of the kind that he's complaining about but early 90s style. The weird chrome McDonalds left over from the 84 Olympics. The giant ceiling mounted helmet VR exhibit (crt, no doubt) I wish I could find better photos, there's so few.
Went to the Frost Museum of Science in Miami. They had this big (6ft x 6ft) video display and four 6-inch diameter track balls where you guided a vessel through the virtual ocean or something. These two academic minded parents asked their sons (maybe 8 and 10 years old) to try the exhibit. They ran over excitely and just started pounding on the track balls with their fists as hard as they could. They of course did not understand the exhibit at all, but they had a great time! :-)
Maybe the parents shouldn't let their offspring go feral on the exhibits?
As a parent with one of those kids, you never know which mode they will start off with, even with the right prompting. And yes, you correct them and steer them in the right direction and hope they will eventually learn how to behave.
Luckily, those track balls were rock solid and no worse for wear. The parents were very well intentioned and attentive and did quickly redirect the kids. But it was hilarious to see how much fun they were having before the parents stepped in. Like I bet they'll have great memories of the museum visit.
They shouldn't but they do.
Yup. Tim Hunkin went for a last look around his Secret Life of the Home exhibition¹ at the London Science Museum and quite a few things were out of order; this may be because the exhibit was imminently closing, but my impression is that that's just the deal with mechanical exhibits - they break more often than the digital ones. Very likely it's one reason the screens are at the forefront.
¹ https://youtu.be/cqpvl-YGFD4
Similar thing at This Museum is (Not) Obsolete, in Ramsgate. Just so many things that can go wrong that you expect not everything will be working on your particular visit.
That's a one-man passion project, isn't it? I follow Look Mum No Computer on YouTube.
Ah, it's been "modernized". I like that museum. But you had to know the history of technology to appreciate it. There's Maudslay's lathe! Now it's been dumbed down.
I think the Hunkin exhibit really did look a bit tired - I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to try something else. After all, Secret Life only got its chance because they were willing to change something back then.
If you like Tim's stuff you can always catch his Novelty Automation arcade over by Holborn. Highly recommended by me at least!
I don't know how good the information transfer was at the London Science Museum way back when I was a kid; I remember excitedly spinning all the little brass handles and pushing the brass buttons on various teak cased devices, but I'm not sure I took much science home with me. Sci Fi, a home computer, and (much later) Bill Bryson's book informed me far more.
Yes, but this is the core of what they're offering. As the son of a science museum director, I've seen exactly what it takes to keep hands on science exhibits going. I agree with the article here, although I think it's appropriate to have some screens if required for an exhibit (e.g. a thermal imaging system)
Great observation.
And it might even bigger than that: the wonder of the digital world may be retrospectively giving us unfair expectations of meatspace uptime.
"I didn't bring my niece to a museum to look at a screen..."
I took my niece around the Natural History Museum in London recently, taking in the new 'Darwin' extension first. It was a liminal space of sorts with lots of broken screens. The tech had not been updated in a decade or more so you had Adobe Flash Player running, complete with the crash pop-up messages to let you know what version of Flash they were updated to.
The idea generally was to have a large touch table with a projector in the ceiling showing an image that could be interacted with. My 8 year old crash test dummy still enjoyed the screens, which was no surprise given that she is addicted to her tablet.
The touch table (however it worked) was not quite registered to the image projected on it. Some exhibits (screens) had a 'tell a friend' feature where you could enter an email address. However, all of the 'keys' were off, so you press 'Q' and you get 'W', or 'N' and you get 'M'. I persisted and entered my sister's email address.
Did she get the email?
What do you think!!!
Some of the screens had the toughest armour I have ever seen. ATMs are soft targets by comparison. I had never seen whole keyboards made of stainless steel before and found the level of vandal-proofing to be absurd.
Admittedly the throughput of the museum is absurd, in the UK every person gets to go there at least five times, once with mum and dad, another time with one set of grandparents, then with the school, then, as they have their own kids, they have to go again, then it is rinse/repeat when they are a grandparent.
The reason for going is dinosaurs. But they got rid of 'dippy' from the entrance hall.
Before you get to the entrance hall there is the begging chicane. This is a ridiculous entrance route back and fore between a dozen different begging bowls to support them financially. If you choose not to pay up, then you can then spend the next six hours not speaking or interacting with any humans apart from the ones you arrived with, except for maybe at the giftshop.
There were no annexes with staff doing talks, nobody apart from the beggars to greet you, but plenty of screens.
The brief for the new wing was to have scientists doing classification of specimens in such a way that they were on show, a 'working museum'. But nobody wanted to work in goldfish bowl conditions under the gaze of hordes of kids.
I don't want to dismiss the place in its entirety, the gardens outside were lovely even though they have a motorway-sized road next to you with considerable noise pollution. That's right, the place we send all our kids to for the big memorable day is made toxic with the filth of car dependency. The air is utterly disgusting there just because of car dependency. The whole area is full of museums and the whole lot needs to just be pedestrianised, but no, it is clogged up with those cheesy 'status symbol' cars people buy in London.
So there is this wall of cars outside and this wall of screens inside. Then the daylight robbery in the gift shop.
We didn't do the full tour, got to save some for the parents and school trip. But we did go to the earthquake room. It is modelled on a Japanese shop and shakes every few minutes. Shakes is being kind. A garden swing or any wheeled vehicle does a better simulation, clearly the hydraulics have lost some of their zest.
The 'climate change' room was also a little off. Maybe this is a leftover from when they had the likes of BP sponsor the place.
I was not going to let anything spoil my perfect day out with my niece, so I wasn't miserable about the place when I was there. However, on reflection, the dilapidation was a glimpse of the future, a future where museums have screens to interact with but no staff to interact with.
I think you're mistaken if you got the impression that the museum once had guides. This isn't a recent trend, so far as I know it's been delightfully free from tour guides since 1881.
You had to buy tickets prior to 2001, so that's changed. (Was entry free in its early history too? Not sure.) That used to be your greeting, the ticket desk.
They had an earthquake machine in 1985, it must be the same one.
The NHM is free to enter, some special exhibitions charge for entry and I think some require free booking to manage crowds. There is a very strong encouragement to make a donation though.
As a tangent, I find it a bit annoying that so many UK museums advertise free pretty aggressively and then provide such "very strong encouragement" as you put it to attend. Mind you, there's less direct pressure than there is in some places. The Met in NYC used to have an optional but not really optional policy for museum admission as you got your pin though it now not optional at all for non-NYC residents.
Free to enter since 2001. Which means now they have (more) donation boxes.
My local museum started charging for entry a few years ago, along with a refurbishment, new exhibits, a bigger gift shop and a push to attract more tourists. So now it's horrible. I'm not sure what the unifying mistake is in both models, free entry and ticketed. I think the error might be in trying to serve the public.
One of my longstanding peeves is that art museums are treated as serious places for grown-ups but science museums and zoos are treated as places for kids.
I think that science museums being places for kids is a good thing. The are the ones who benefit the most. If you want science for grownups, you have conferences. Also, that it is for kids doesn't make it impossible to enjoy as an adult, especially if it is about things you are unfamiliar with.
Now, if you go to a science museum and think "only a kid can enjoy that". Then the problem is not that it is a place for kids, it is that it is just bad. It is a thing Disney understood very well, its classics may look like they are for kids, but they are actually enjoyable by everyone, and it is a big reason for their success.
As for art museums, the problem is that they are usually just exhibitions, and to be honest, that's boring, especially if you are a kid. That's unlike a science museum where they actually try to teach you science. It is only interesting if you are already well into that kind of art, and most kids aren't (yet?).
History museums are kind of a middle ground as they can do the double duty of teaching history (mostly for kids) and showing off artefacts to people who are already into that (mostly for grownups).
> If you want science for grownups, you have conferences.
Adults outside a field do not go to conferences.
> As for art museums, the problem is that they are usually just exhibitions, and to be honest, that's boring, especially if you are a kid.
Some kids are interested in art. It can be well presented. You can have guided tours aimed at kids.
Go to a big city art museum and they're swarming with school groups.
If there are tech conventions, why not science conventions?
Do people not in tech go to tech conventions?
My company has a tech convention every year. Last time I went I played spot the tech person - most people there failed the test (they were former engineers now in management trying to pretend they were still technical). I'm a staff engineer and I was the lowest position person I saw there - not even senior engineers much less the low or mid level engineers that would benefit from talking to the seniors at a tech conference.
I think tech aficionados and media types do. Tech conventions are more consumer-friendly than the scientific equivalent.
I'd categorize both those groups as being "in tech." Even if they're not active developers, they're certainly tech-adjacent especially in the software space.
There are probably counter-examples, but I'm not sure where I'd go if I were, say, an enthusiastic amateur physics or chemistry enthusiast of some sort that would be especially accessible.
There are. But there are mostly attended by people working in the field.
> science museums being places for kids is a good thing. The are the ones who benefit the most
I'm not sure how you can look at the current state of scientific literacy in America and conclude this.
> art museums, the problem is that they are usually just exhibitions, and to be honest, that's boring, especially if you are a kid
There are historical, thematic and philosophical aspects to art that make it beautiful beyond the aesthetic.
> There are historical, thematic and philosophical aspects to art that make it beautiful beyond the aesthetic.
Sure, but 80% of the words in that sentence are indecipherable to my 7 year old. Just like an art museum. We can absolutely go there, as long as we are prepared to hear “I’m bored” about 10 minutes in.
Personally I enjoy seeing him run around marveling and experimenting with physics a lot more.
> There are historical, thematic and philosophical aspects to art that make it beautiful beyond the aesthetic.
Those are in the eye of the beholder though. In many cases they are things I still don't care about after learning about them. An ugly painting doesn't become any more interesting to me when I learn about the struggles the artist went through - a lot of people do find it more interesting - good for them, but it isn't for me. (then again the paintings I'm thinking of most people thought were nice even before they learned about the artist...)
> An ugly painting doesn't become any more interesting to me when I learn about the struggles the artist went through
Personal struggles? Sure. An ugly painting that opens the door to me learning about a war or revolution or system of government I was previously unaware of? Or a style or medium enabled by a new technology of the time? That can be fun.
I live near a large collection of wildlife art. I can't say many of them are beautiful. But noting how wolves have been portrayed over millenia, and across cultures, was a genuinely interesting exhibit. (In America, they went from ferocious creatues to essentially dogs. Most wolves in art today are not physiologically wolves. Akin to how most butterflies in art are dead.)
That can happen, but often the story isn't interesting (at least to me). It is the same story: someone decides the world is out to get them and they won't "sell out". I don't care, I don't agree with their world view, and in any case they are not unique. If anything they need mental help - but they are plenty of other people around who also need such help who didn't paint.
Do not mistake what I said for some claim that all art is bad/ugly. There is a lot of art I do enjoy. What I enjoy is personal. I do not fault someone else for enjoying art that I don't enjoy in general.
I saw Da Vinci's drawings and smaller paintings and they were fun, with the investigation of flowing water and (illicit?) anatomy and various devices with wooden cogs in. Not exactly educational, but historically interesting and oddly aesthetic. Does that count? I mean, art galleries can show lots of different kinds of art. It doesn't have to be monotonous self-expression.
I have no idea how your replp fits in with my comment. I find some 'art' ugly and knowing about the artist doesn't change a thing.
I find Da Vinci the engineer makes things I find nice to look at, but he did many other paintings and I would need to see each to make a judgement on it. Knowinghis issues just makes me wish he lived with modern medicine where we might be able to treat him - and wonder what he could have done if he had modern training - many of his machines have obvious flaws that his day was not advanced enough to know about. That is me though, maybe you are different - this is a personal thing and so it is hard to call anyone wrong.
> when I learn about the struggles the artist went through
The comment you responded to was about "historical, thematic and philosophical aspects to art". Which is something entirely different.
This really reads like someone knee jerk dismissing something they never bothered took at, but just assume it's stupid.
I have looked just enough to know that my dissmissal is correct for me. I do not find those parts of interest.
you can enjoy them that is okay. Just don't think I'm wrong for not.
> If you want science for grownups, you have conferences.
So if I want to learn more about electricity which conference is a good one to attend?
As a museum professional, I don't agree with a couple of points:
If you want science for grownups, you have conferences.
I work at a history museum, and we serve both students and adults: whole range of people. Conferences aren't designed to communicate science (or any specialized topic) to a wide audience.
Also, that it is for kids doesn't make it impossible to enjoy as an adult, especially if it is about things you are unfamiliar with.
This can be true, but children and adults learn differently. We have lessons and interactives that are designed for both, and activities that are geared towards kids. The way we write information for children in our programming is very different from what you'd see with adults, because of how we have to break the information down in ways that is understandable to them.
If you go to a science museum and think "only a kid can enjoy that". Then the problem is not that it is a place for kids, it is that it is just bad. It is a thing Disney understood very well, its classics may look like they are for kids, but they are actually enjoyable by everyone, and it is a big reason for their success.
I don't understand this line of reasoning: if a science museum appears to be designed for kids, there's likely a reason for that: they're working to communicate science to kids. That doesn't make it bad: it might just mean that they've put a lot of focus on their primary audience. Disney isn't designed for kids: it's designed for families, and they put a lot of time and energy and resources into that design. (Museums can take a leaf from their book and strategies!)
As for art museums, the problem is that they are usually just exhibitions, and to be honest, that's boring, especially if you are a kid. That's unlike a science museum where they actually try to teach you science. It is only interesting if you are already well into that kind of art, and most kids aren't (yet?).
History museums are kind of a middle ground as they can do the double duty of teaching history (mostly for kids) and showing off artefacts to people who are already into that (mostly for grownups).
I think both of these points are overly broad, and every institution and every exhibition is different: it all comes down to how well they design their programs and exhibitions. There are plenty of art museums that go beyond a mere exhibition.
As for history museums being a middle ground, I don't agree with that at all: kids are fascinated by physical objects! Adults love to learn about the history behind those objects! These aren't mutually exclusive things. It ultimately comes down to intent and installation and implementation.
It drives me absolutely bananas that the "interpretation" (fancy museum word for "signs") at science museums is so parsimonious. Some fascinating device vital to the history of an important branch of science will have a brief paragraph about the person who invented it, nothing about what it's for, and then just a date and the device name.
Often there's little or nothing further even in the museum shop. It's a crying shame.
Art museums are even worse. "Portrait of Duke von Duke (London, 1841). Oils."
Who is this guy in the painting?! How did he merit a painting? What's unique about the style/composition/whatever?
Conversely, I went to an exhibit of Napoleonic Art and they had a whole breakdown of the symbolism. For example, Napolean liked bees as a symbol of hard work and order, apparently, and they were snuck into most depictions of him as little Easter Eggs.
Then there are the “artist statement” ladies on some exhibits where artist get to describe their work on self-aggrandizing terms that only make sense to people with a graduate degree in the field
Most likely, there is no special backstory and the painting was simply commissioned. And most likely, there no super special composition in that portrait and the style is exactly the same as the style of surrounding paintings.
Most paintings dont have a cool backstories. They are just paintings. Art student can see technical details of how they were done, but those are not really interesting if you are not trying to learn to paint.
But even that basic context is useful and interesting: "in this era it was common for wealthy people to commission portraits." Etc
I have a hobby of photographing scientifically incorrect explanations on placards at science museums. Usually found in smaller towns.
My favorite example of this is an exhibit that I saw at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh many years ago. There was a diorama of several forest animals, and an interface that shined lights on animals with different features. The "lays eggs" light shined on an assortment of animals including a Rabbit. Rabbits don't lay eggs, they only deliver them to good boys and girls.
We pointed this out to a worker that day. Several years later, we went back to see that the exhibit had not changed. I'm not sure if it's still there today.
Been to the Ark Encounter in Kentucky yet?
I want to see these!
I don't remember the big Kensington museums being like that when I was a kid. There was a kids' section or two, but the rest was clearly for adults (and has stuck in my memory just as much, if not more than, the kids' sections).
Seeing the real Apollo 10 (I don't remember which module) sticks very clearly in my memory.
I also rode on a "heritage" train recently, and what struck me the most was that the interior decor of the passenger cars looked as though it had been designed for and by grown-ups.
> Seeing the real Apollo 10 (I don't remember which module) sticks very clearly in my memory.
The only part that made it back to Earth was the Command Module, so if you saw something from the actual Apollo 10 mission, it was the CM.
Yep, makes sense, and looks like they still have it:
https://collection.sciencemuseumgroup.org.uk/objects/co40509...
I have taken my kids to them at various ages (from five upwards). I think lots for both adults and children.
The National Gallery used to do great guided tours for kids, explaining paintings in a fun way.
I'm not sure which way you're going with this, but the Philadelphia Museum of Art, down the street from the Franklin Institute, isn't specifically geared towards adults and has lots of programming specifically for kids. Seeing Rubens' Prometheus Bound there as a child as part of such a program left me in awe. I remember the feeling to this day. Every time I go, I see families with young children or even just groups of teens there.
The Philadelphia Zoo also has events planned specifically for adults. My girlfriend and I went to one a few months ago. I'm not sure what specifically about the Philadelphia zoo, the Bronx zoo, the Shedd aquarium, etc. is for specifically geared towards kids, though.
Largely agreed, with one exception. If you're ever in Boston/Cambridge MA, check out the MIT museum. I've always told people that its a science museum but for adults. The Harvard museums are worth visiting as well, but the MIT museum really impressed me with their content.
The MIT museum isn't very good. It is a science museum for adults, but it is too passive an experience for the patron. I recommend the Exploratorium in San Francisco instead as the science museum for adults.
I've only been to a play (staged reading) at the new one but, in general, I'm not sure how interested most adults are in interactivity. I've been to the Exploratorium for an event and it was fun. (Having those sort of distractions are nice when you're tired of feeling like you need to speak to people at an event.) But not sure I'd have made a trip there otherwise.
It's good. Not that big though. But what there is, is worth seeing.
There are exceptions - here in the UK we have the RI: https://www.rigb.org/
The Christmas lectures are probably the most famous thing they do, and these have definitely moved in a more 'child' focussed direction. If you were attending the Christmas lectures in the 1850s however, the audience would have been middle class victorioans, and you'd have had Michael Faraday telling you about electricity, forces, chemistry etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Institution_Christmas_Le...
I would recommend attending one of their lectures if you happen to find yourself in London, just to be in the building, and to sit in the lecture theatre!
Listening to the Christmas lectures was a high point of my childhood, and everyone in my family still remembers and talks about the ones we watched.
Art museums could be made friendlier for kids, but they would need significant design and maintenance effort. In particular: many kids need a lot of running around, want to play with things with their hands, and get quickly bored just standing and looking at artworks. It would be nice if there were better art museums for kids though.
(For what it's worth, there are plenty of non-interactive and thus boring-for-kids science, technology, history, etc. museums if you look around.)
I took my 6 and 8 year old to SFMOMA and they loved it, to the point that they’ve asked to go (and have gone) to several more “boring” art museums since. We had a talk about ground rules (quiet voices, hands to self, no running, no exceptions) beforehand, and the mood of the place helped enforce those rules. A big, crowded space can be powerful in its quietness.
A lot of the weird, experimental, and experiential pieces seemed to scratch the novelty itch that they might otherwise get by running around or touching stuff. We were all ready to leave at the same time … or actually, I wanted to leave before they were ready, so it wasn’t like they got bored quickly. They are not uniquely quiet or well behaved kids, either—quite chaotic a lot of the time, really. I think a lot of people don’t give kids a chance to experience these kinds of places because they assume the kids won’t do well, which is too bad.
I took my 6 and 9 year olds to SFMOMA and they played along for about 20 minutes and then started rolling all over the furniture and complaining about being bored, despite my best efforts to engage them in discussions about the art pieces. I got them to settle for a while by playing pencil-and-paper games with them, but then I couldn't look at the art either.
A more extensive talk about ground rules wouldn't have helped. Kids aren't all the same, and most art museums aren't really designed to meet their needs.
(By comparison, they would be happy to spend all day every day at the Exploratorium, and the hardest part there is occasionally pulling one away from some exhibit so that the next kid can get a turn.)
The top floor of Copenhagen Contemporary gallery is primarily for children.
The current exhibition is "where visitors are invited into the artist’s imaginative world and encouraged to participate in a process of transformation — quite literally — through hats, masks, and performative gestures. The shelves overflow with peculiar faces and twisted creatures, and on the green monster stage, anyone can step into a new version of themselves."
"The exhibition marks the first chapter of CC Create, a three-year educational and exhibition initiative that transforms Hall 4 into an open studio for play, learning, and co-creation. Specially trained hosts are on hand to guide visitors in exploring their own creative potential in dialogue with Chetwynd’s art."
Last time I went, the interactive kids bit had a huge wall and a massive bucket of darts and visitors would contribute to the artwork by throwing additional darts at the wall. This is very kid-friendly if the kid is Danish.
https://copenhagencontemporary.org/en/cc-create-x-monster-ch...
Yeah, this must be a negotiated market at this point... Kids not being interested in art museums, and thus art museums not bothering making it family friendly.
However, I have to say the computer history museum in Mountain View was nice and felt serious. So I think placing all science museums under one umbrella is a bit harsh.
The Art Institute of Chicago goes out of its way to be family friendly and not take itself too seriously [1], and it is consistently seen as one of the best art museums in the world.
PS - the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis is ridiculously good for kids.
[1] https://www.artic.edu/visit/whos-visiting/families-2
There is such a place at the Cleveland Museum of Art: https://www.clevelandart.org/artlens-gallery The Studio part of the gallery has several kid-sized interactives.
There are some art museums around the DC area where kids can paint and draw things, but those are indeed a minority
A lot of them have kid areas now where they have art classes and the like now.
I get the economics of it for science museums, but at least science museums in major cities tend to have adults-only nights now.
Where the adults get to act like kids and drink.
They don't add substance to the exhibits, they don't attempt to educate, they just attempt to tap an adjacent market for the same dumbed down slop.
(Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the _idea_, just a huge critic of the _implementation_.)
The Exploratorium had a few speakers at the adult night that I went to. It was definitely on the pop-sci end of the spectrum, but it was definitely not dumbed down to kid levels. Heck, even during normal operations, I'd say the Exploratorium walks a fair line between "approachable to children" and "teaching more science topics than we expect most adults to know".
Agreed. They make it into a space for adults by simply removing kids and adding beer. It’s good for a casual date, but you don’t actually get adult level content.
I want the actual exhibits and content to be able to teach things to adults and not just signs with “wacky trivia” meant to engage kids for two seconds while they sprint to the next thing that has a button for them to push (e.g., one of the worst genre of “wacky facts” are stupid size comparisons about how things are bigger than X football fields or Y school busses).
Tl;dr You could get drunk while you’re watching Zoboomafoo, but that doesn’t suddenly make it it for adults the way that an Attenborough documentary is.
I do recall a "late" at the London Science Museum where you could collect wristbands with the names of STDs to win prizes. Ok, still not very educational, but it was quite amusing to hear people trading gonorrhea for genital lice etc.
On a more serious note they do or did offer free lectures that were much more in-depth; one of the things I rather miss now that I live abroad.
In depth science lectures would definitely be a step in the right direction. I think those are gone though:
"Our evening events cover everything from cult film screenings and live performances to gripping panel discussions and exclusive premieres—we’ve got something for everyone."
https://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/see-and-do/halloween-lates
What you need if you really want an education is a tour by a curator that can dive into the exhibits in age appropriate levels (and maybe even answer some questions).
It often seems like these adult themed exhibits are generally just a bunch of signs which are copy/pasted from wikipedia.
I really soured on the whole “wow can you believe this crazy science fact” targeted for adults kind of media when Instagram and Subreddits like “I Fucking Love Science” got massively popular. Which of course led to them enshitifying, then being worthwhile conduits for propaganda.
“SCIENCE FACT! Republican voters are known to be morons who don’t want to learn anything! Like and subscribe!”
I soured on science media when I learned just how terrible the "journalists" and editors are.
"Scientists find super duper magic unobtanium which does mystical things that will revolutionize the world!" Click through and "Bob found a conductor with slightly lower resistance than a previous material. It's created by a 500 step process which results in an organic chain that breaks down in temps above -40C."
The issue with the medium is every day needs an exciting headline. So they make them up rather than waiting for them to come.
Sounds correct about republican voters tho. And everyone suffers because of it.
Everyone suffers because you believe that stereotype instead of getting to know republicans and discovering it is false - many of them love science (who you vote for is a compromise - nobody will support everything you want them to)
I do know republicans, I am from more of conservative environment. I still semi regularly read conservative journals. It is currently what it is. Trying to idealise that word serves no one.
They dont like science. They used to like cosplay liking science, when it felt more manly or when they thought it sticks it to feminists. That interest ends long before any real science starts and have nothing to do with it.
They dont think much of actual scientists.
Individual republicans may well love science, but the Republican party is and has been anti-science for a long time, and aggressively so.
The most fun I've ever had in a museum was at the Perot Museum of Nature and Science in Dallas. The exhibits are interactive, educational, fun... mostly for kids...
I was 33 years old... I'd love to go back and do it all again.
I didn't understand art as a kid. You need experience, culture, history, and often at least a cursory understanding of religion to understand art. Art is an expression by the artist. It is necessary to understand the milieu of the artist first.
Science is universal. It crosses time and language barriers. The underlying physical principles are immutable. Kids can be expected to understand science museum exhibits after a few minutes of explanation. You can't explain the historical and social context behind a painting in just a few minutes to a kid.
Nothing about a science museum filled with kids precludes you from playing with the exhibits yourself.
Certainly now, yes.
But back in the 70's, OP's museum -- Franklin Institute (fi.edu) -- used to have serious lectures, classes, and even some research. Upstairs there used to be lecture rooms, a library, and classrooms.
One science museum that is not like that is the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, at least when I was there (shudder) about a decade ago.
It was a museum that was designed for parents to explain to children. The written material for any given piece in an exhibit went into sufficient detail and successive sections of writing would build on each other without necessarily requiring that the previous section had been read.
Back then the museum had an exhibition on the longitude problem and time keeping, precision, drift, etc. that walked you through the development of increasingly accurate chronometers, the practical reasons why, etc. It was an absolute masterwork exhibit, and it expected the adults to be actively engaged with helping digest the material with the kids.
Quite agree with the sentiment, and the presentation of science to the public in general. However, that probably also reflects a rather accurate assessment of scientific literacy in the general population on the part of planners.
Anyway, among US museums of natural history & science, a prominent exception is the AMNH in NYC: yes there are things for kids, but also things for "grownups". After dozens of visits I still learn something new every time.
I agree with you but I also think it’s hard for kids to appreciate art without life experience. At least in a full way.
And history, until you've had some life experience and seen the world change, which is a lot of what makes art and science museums more interesting.
There's an interactive Leondardo da Vinci museum in Firenze that does a good job of appealing to both. It's full of kids, because it's interactive, but you could fill it with adults just as easily.
If you ever get a chance, the Hunterian Museum at Glasgow has a permanent display of some of Lord Kevlin's instruments. You can look at the actual tools used to characterize the volt, the amp, and the electro-static forces.
https://www.gla.ac.uk/collections/#/details?irn=16534&catTyp...
I've seen a few different science museums and the like have a special day of the week where they stay open later and are 21+. Booze is involved. I've never been, but it seems like it could be a fun time.
Exploratorium and Academy of Sciences in SF have adult nights I believe. I remember attending a Yelp Elite event back in the day at the Exploratorium at night and it was pretty fun.
Back when big tech did Christmas parties but before they had hired so many people they wouldn’t all fit in a museum (thus requiring the renting of hangars), we booked this whole place for the night. It was great as everyone was dressed to the nines and drinking while the staff taught us about fish and quasars or something.
Visiting my parents this summer with my kids, I was excited to find that the zoo served beer. That definitely wasn't an option for my dad when I was growing up.
The zoo near us had boozy lemonade stands on Labor Day this year. Quite refreshing.
Pittsburgh's Science Center has over-21 events all the time. They're very popular.
You're right. Kids should be able to enjoy art, too!
You should check out the Deutsches Museum if you're in Munich sometime.
Same, not everything should be for kids. It’s become pretty evident that the adult population doesn’t know science.
Just for clarification, are you upset that art museums tend to be less kid-focused, or that science museums and zoos tend to be overly kid focused? Both seem to be things to be potentially concerned about IMO.
I visited part of the Smithsonian recently (the natural history museum) and the level of patronizing displays is truly incredible. It seems pretty clear that if you're more than 10 years old, you're not supposed to be in there. But that feels like a development of recent decades.
On the other hand, zoos seem to have become more adult-oriented and less children-oriented over time.
That's disappointing. I liked to believe it would remain an example of a good museum after other places followed this trend. But on the west coast, I've had no reason to visit the Smithsonian in many decades.
I'm still unsure whether changes I see are all about the facility or partially about my changed perspective. I visited the Monterey Bay Aquarium and the La Brea Tar Pits in the past decade, and I found neither of them stands up to my memory of them from 1980s school field trips.
Our science museum has dumbed everything down to where truly only a child could enjoy it and they don’t even seem to like it much. When I was a child the exhibits were so different and really interesting to both ages. Now it’s the most homogenized crap imaginable. Something only Blippi (the lobotomized) could love. I donate blood there and I’m never even tempted to go look at an exhibit. A lot of this happened in just the past few years, maybe they are just matching their reading and science impaired audience, I don’t know.
Vindication! I’ve spent over a decade of my life putting physical interactives into museums. I have preached (sold) many museums on the stance that they should put unique experiences into museums that can’t happen on an iPad at home, to varying degrees of success. The museums that have listened are the ones that continue to be wildly successful to this day.
They are hard to do right though. I used to compete in combat robotics and the stresses put on museum exhibits is higher. I tell my new engineers that if their exhibit can be dropped into a gorilla enclosure and survive, they are about half way strong enough. Little makes up for raw experience in the art of building bomb proof exhibits, and many companies have failed before getting good. The amateur hour exhibits from the low bid newcomers that inevitably fail and/or need a lot of expensive maintenance has left a sour taste in a lot of museum’s mouths. A lot of those museums have knee jerk reactioned the opposite direction to touchscreen exhibits, only to see their ticket sales slowly drop. Thankfully, i’m seeing the pendulum of the industry swinging back towards physical interactives again.
THANK YOU for fighting this fight. I hope the responses here might add some empirical weight to your arguments — some people apparently do care about this.
And I believe you on how hard the reliability/durability challenges must be in engineering these things — I've seen what the kids do to them.
BTW, I think the mechanisms themselves are no small part of the interest; kids don't just get to see whatever phenomenon is being demonstrated by the device, they get to poke at the thing that does it and try to figure out how it works, and that's a lot of fun for a curious kid; there are layers there.
> A lot of those museums have knee jerk reactioned the opposite direction to touchscreen exhibits, only to see their ticket sales slowly drop.
According to what you've written here something close to 100% of those touchscreen exhibits should be broken. Are they?
I think they say that because screens are really easy to make bomb proof. You just lock them in a big metal case. Even more points if you interact with them through Kinect because you can now make the layer of hardened glass in front of them a full centimeter thick.
I totally agree with the authors point. The Franklin Institute at its core is a place that teaches science through tactile experience and the special exhibits don’t reflect that.
Some context as a local though, the Franklin Institute’s special exhibit space rotates every couple of months and I imagine they’re put on by outside vendors who move the exhibit from venue to venue. The special exhibits for better or for worse more akin to Disney World or the pop culture museum in Seattle. I’ve been to a bunch of them and they’re usually quite good, but they don’t represent that tactile learning experience at all.
Many of us Philadelphians really lament that the place isn’t as well maintained as it should be. It was the field trip destination for so many kids and I’m sorry OP wasn’t able to recreate that same level of magic for their kids.
My biggest gripe is that art museums, especially modern art museums, play documentary/clips from documentary that last anywhere from 2 minutes to 30 minutes. Those films are not accessible anywhere else.
I would be very willing to watch them in full, but like most other visitors, I have limited time, especially when visiting a new museum in a different city. If you say observing a painting/sculpture in person is different from looking at a picture, fine, whatever, but making these videos only available in museums is sad.
This has also been going in in Libraries in Australia. Go to the library - toddlers Rush to play on the computer.
I wouldn't mind so much if it was available for those who wanted it but in my experience it tends to be central and noisy - difficult to avoid if that's not what you're after.
I will admit that the author's post strikes a chord.
The last time we visited Chicago's museum of science, this was the only acceptable use of screens for me ( https://www.msichicago.org/explore/whats-here/exhibits/blue-... ). That was genuinely well done and awe-inspiring.
The rest of the stuff that is basically just a lame tablet app is a waste of my ( and my kids )time and, well, money.
That said, and I offer it merely as a defense, if the goal is to interest kids, you want to meet them where they are at. Apps is where they are at. Granted, thanks to parents, but still.
If you have a change to visit the Tokyo Science Museum, it's quite good in this respect - it has a lot of interactive displays, many of which are very hands on, and some are application based - focused on how the science concepts are used in industry (with some occasional corporate tie-ins, which weren't too over the top). It's fairly kid focused, as others have mentioned - most of your competition for seeing the exhibits will be school student groups.
Incidentally, the building is featured near the end of the Shin Godzilla movie.
Are you talking about the one in Kitanomaru park, or the Miraikan, on Daiba?
The Miraikan, in particular, is a fantastic science museum. I think it suffers a bit from what the OP is describing -- and also, a lack of English -- but for the most part it's interactive and uses technology in a really innovative way that goes beyond iPad fluff (an interactive seismograph room comes to mind, where you could move around and see the systems detect your movements in real time).
Ah, the first one is where I went - 科学技術館 (Kagakukijutsukan) in Kitanomaru park between the imperial palace and budoukan. It has some english (but, as always in Japan, knowing a little Japanese greatly helps), and the exhibits are fairly self-explanatory.
Good to know that there's another nice place to go.
Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in the 1970s had a real submarine periscope you could use, a manned space capsule you could look into, a DC-3 airplane you could go into, and a variety of whirring/buzzing physical things to interact with. In the late 90s, I escorted a school group there and it was all screens. It had gone from being a destination worth driving across the state for to being an experience less interesting than a decent web site.
It's not a museum, unless there's a dark room with a bunch of mostly empty chairs lined up in front of a projection screen showing a slide show or documentary (or really both at the same time) with an overly enthusiastic narration covering the history of the subject.
Sometimes you can't even get to the displays, without first at least walking through the room.
Whenever I walk by the vaguely muffled sounds of someone watching a movie in another room, I get nostalgic for childhood visits to museums.
A little too cold. Stimulating but also lulling you to sleep with it's proto ASMR. Your parents slightly frustrated that this is the point your choose to have an attention span.
I’m going to call out the science museum in Manchester, and the one in Osaka (Japan) as two of the best ones I’ve been to. Manchester had a whole section of old machines, and a working mainframe computer, and Osaka had a planetarium that was nearly the height of the entire building.
I have personally made several interactive displays/exhibits for work. Yeah there are plenty of poorly made ones out there, but speaking from experience a good one truly does turns a museum into something a child is excited to visit. There is a reason why children's museums are made the way they are. Even children that are interested in learning, want to play. A great digital experience at a museum does wonders to bridge the gap between a regular museum and a children's museum. If a child has fun at a museum they are going to want to go back. If they keep having fun and keep wanting to go back, eventually they are going to start paying attention to substance of the museum. I agree great physical experiences are missing from many museums, but I'll happily continue to trick children into wanting to learn any way I can
The museum of science here in Boston got a lot less interactive and a lot more screens after Covid. I get that it’s cheaper to develop new exhibits when they are all digital, but my kids aren’t even interested in it. They want to get their hands on stuff.
> And where it looks like the budget has been going are the screen rooms. They occupy the huge central spaces on the main floor of the museum, and I’m sure a lot of time, money, and passion went into these things. But it’s misguided.
It reminds me of a Reddit thread about if someone should divorce their spouse because they significantly overdid it with smarthome tech. They (the other spouse) insisted that controlling everything with phones was "the future" and did things like drill out locks so they could only get in with a smartphone, and update the toilets so they would only flush from a smartphone.
It's too bad the content was deleted, but you can get the jist from reading the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmITheAngel/comments/1lv1t0r/aita_f...
I was an exhibit designer there in the early 2010s (the last exhibit I worked on was "Your Brain"); we had an incredible in-house design team that did all of the design and interactive prototyping, but unfortunately everyone was let go in ~2016 in favor of outsourcing much of the design work.
The truth is that the traveling exhibits (Body Worlds, Harry Potter, etc.) make a lot more money for them and do not require the ongoing maintenance burden. They have a reduced ability to design the exhibits as precisely as they used to and the physical stuff takes a tremendous amount of work and expertise to do well.
That said, the museum is run by people who care deeply about science education and the proliferation of touch screens is something they are sensitive to. The type of content has a lot to do with it (a physics exhibit has no excuse not to be 99% physical interactives), as does the fact that they tailor exhibits to many different styles of learning so that there's something for everyone.
Author here, thanks for your comment. I'm really sad to hear that everyone was let go; as I said, I loved TFI like nothing else when I was a kid.
I completely understand the incentives re: Body Worlds, Harry Potter (I've even seen an Angry Birds exhibit). But there's a fine line between a non-profit doing what it must to survive, and drifting so far from its mission that it no longer deserves to survive. TFI is still far from that point, but the trajectory is worrisome to me, so I called it out.
Yeah I hear you, and fwiw I largely agree with your article. Whether the presence of screens and software-based experiences means they are drifting from their mission is definitely up for debate, but your point is taken! Similar to you I had a hugely impactful trip to TFI in 5th grade, and much later on it was a dream to work there. And now I get to take my 5 year old. It's a special place and it's nice to see people feeling protective of it :)
My favourite museums are those that are a huge pile of old shit with some labels telling you what you are looking at. This whole "hundreds of screens with some odd artifact inbetween" style is just boring.
I had similar experiences seeing WWII artifacts and museums in Romania, Hungary, London, Brussels, and Berlin.
In the first 4 I had the most immersive experiences seeing memorabilia and artifacts from the Allies and Axis. Things like uniforms, cars, letters, tanks, jets, war trophies, and so on.
Everything was highly curated, and from the outside, the infrastructure was not so expensive to run. In terms of quality, the military museums of Romania, London, and Brussels are great.
Those places are to feel and have immersion.
In Berlin, there are only a few screens, but they have only some sort of "small billboards" in a version in German and some rough translation to English. Most of the time it is a picture of someone and some legend only.
However in Berlin and Munich, they have something, in my opinion, better than museums that we call as Documentation Centers. In Berlin there is the _Das Dokumentationszentrum Topographie des Terrors_ (Topography of Terrors), and for me the best documentation center is in Munich, called _NS-Dokumentationszentrum München_, which gets into the roots of the regime via the whole buildupand actual documents from leadership, political party meeting minutes, political discussions, and so on.
Feels like you could write the same article about theme parks nowadays too. Okay, there are still a fair few physical attractions there, but the likes of Universal Studios were infamous for having 'rollercoaster' like rides which were just simulators on a screen rather than relying on physical scenery, animatronics, etc.
Feels like there's a lot of attempts to integrate smartphones into the parks too, like through activities that involve using a mobile app instead of a physical prop or console.
yeah those rides for the most part suck.
I worked at disney when they were developing what became "Avatar Flight of Passage" where you ride a dragon wearing 3d headset. The ride vehicle moved in sync so it was pretty immersive.
On the other side "Toy Story Midway Mania" totally sucks
You can say the same thing of the long text that are often next to the exhibit in museums. I don't get the point of trying to read some essay while standing in the middle of a crowd pushing. You might as well read the wiki page in the comfort of your home and focus on the actual exhibit in the museum.
I usually want some interpretive signage, but there is a sweet spot on length.
I'll take this opportunity to suggest some great places I've found.
The Corning Glass Museum is free (!!) and has both great art and great science, several interactive exhibits, and lots of information about glass and its history and application.
Interactive art exhibits like Otherworld! (and Meowwolf maybe? I have not been to it, but I hear it is a similar idea) It has a whole storyline, various rooms with different 'exhibits'. Classic physical art, puppets, electronics, a space invaders arcade game that is broken but then you realize you can climb under the arcade game and through a tunnel into a room where you can play _for real_ while space invaders drop from the ceiling, etc.
There are a lot of these neat things around.
Seconding Meowwolf! The one I went to in Santa Fe was very hands on and physical, requiring lots of object manipulation as well as crawling through very tight spaces. Absolute delight.
Less so for the one in Colorado, which had more of an interactive back story done through an app; but I understand the Colorado one was also meant to be more ADA-friendly, and it was still pretty good.
the Vegas one is very ... vegas.
I work in a museum, so I'll add in a couple of cents. Seth isn't entirely wrong here: museums are good opportunities for hands-on activities and to see things in a real sensory way that you can't in other places. "I believe museums exist to present the real thing for the visitor to experience with their own senses" rings really true to me.
That said: iPads and screens do have their place and it really depends on how well they're implemented.
First up: "But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with."
This is probably the key reason why there are so many screens in this particular museum: he answers his own question. Physical items, especially things with motion, will degrade with time and use, and maintenance can get really expensive. Physical models like a human heart aren't something that you can generally buy off the rack: museums and similar institutions will work with a company to produce something like that (I'm guessing fiberglass?) These are things that can run thousands and thousands of dollars to repair or outright replace.
But here's the other thing with a physical static or interactive display: once they're in, they're in. You can't really update them without actually replacing the entire thing.
Here's an example: at the museum where I work, we have a section about the Civil War: it had some uniforms, weapons, and a whole bunch of other items that told the story as it related to our mission. The panel that outlined everything stretched across the room -- it was about 20 feet long. When we pulled everything out to update it, we had to replace that entire panel. It was a good fix, because the room hadn't been updated in like 15-20 years, but if we had wanted to pull out any one item, we'd still have to replace the entire panel. That sort of thing can be an impediment to updates, because it requires a lot of work. We ended up putting in three panels, which will allow us to switch out objects more easily.
We also put in an interactive with an iPad that allows visitors to explore a painting in the exhibit in a lot more depth.
We've done a handful of these sorts of interactives, and as I noted up above, the experience really depends on the audience and how well it's presented. In our case, we aim for ours to be usable for a wider range, which means that we have to keep things fairly simple, so adults and children can use them.
"My wife — a science writer who used to be the only staff writer covering space for New Scientist and before that, worked at NASA — poked at one of these with my son, added too many boosters to their launch vehicle, and were told it failed “for reasons” in a way she found totally unhelpful and pointless." That doesn't entirely surprise me, because she's an expert and is really knowledgeable in the field! But you have to make sure that you're calibrating for your audience: most of the people using that likely won't have her experience or knowledge, and digging deeper and deeper into detail might be lost on most of their audience. (Not having seen it, I can't tell for sure.) It is good to have that depth of knowledge be available, if you have audience members who do want to go further, but it could come down to limitations or be an exception that they didn't account for.
Digital interactives can also be swapped out quite a bit more quickly: if you have a new exhibit that you're putting in for a short amount of time, it might make more sense to have something that doesn't cost a lot if it's only going to run for months, rather than years. (Or if you find an error, there's new research, new updates, etc. -- a digital interface is easier to update than a static panel.)
On top of all that: cultural institutions are facing real crunches right now. There's a lot of uncertainty (and outright lack of support) from federal funding sources (which in turn impacts the willingness of private/state/NPO donors), and staff shortages that means everyone has fewer resources and fewer people to utilize them with. From where I sit, if we have to implement more digital content, we'll be able to repurpose the screens that we've already purchased to new exhibits and interactives.
Finally, there's nostalgia at play here: I have a ton of fond memories of visiting museums with interactives and huge displays, and I'm glad that I can take my kids to them as well. But I'm also happy to see that these museums aren't stuck in the past and the only thing that they're doing is rehabilitating old exhibits that are decades old or out of date: they still have some of those things, but they're also making sure to bring in new interactives, looking at new scholarship and best practices for museums (because museums aren't static organizations or fields!) to change as audiences change. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who use screens as a way to take in information: museums have to keep abreast of those trends, because if we don't deliver information to people in familiar and accessible ways, they probably won't come in.
> But you have to make sure that you're calibrating for your audience: most of the people using that likely won't have her experience or knowledge, and digging deeper and deeper into detail might be lost on most of their audience.
I think this is a really key point; I've definitely felt slightly disappointed at certain exhibits, and had to remind myself that these things are designed for everyone. It would be lovely if every exhibit was pitched at exactly your own level, but as an adult, there are definitely areas where you are more knowledgeable than the general public, and so that's not possible.
Something I've noticed with academics of all stripes is that they don't always recognize that not everybody shares their assumptions / views / insights / knowledge, and that's not a good mindset to go into building an exhibit or interactive.
You have to understand your audience, not design them. I frequently hear from folks who stop by our museum who tell me that they haven't been to ours since they were a kid, and they're generally not someone who keeps up with the field. I don't like the phrase "dumbing down", but it's something that we need to do in order to reach patrons.
A bit of a tangent, but has modern maker culture made it easier to make and maintain exhibits? Things like 3D printing, version control, Arduinos, etc.
Thank you for all the work you do :)
It's situational. It's helpful to us that our executive director is a carpenter: he makes and fabricates a lot of things that end up in displays.
As far as 3D printing, we haven't dabbled with it, but we have had folks come in to scan our objects, which is pretty cool. But we're also a small staff that doesn't have the time to really dig into the tech as much as we could.
I think "physical exhibits are awkward and expensive so we use screens instead" is kind of a cop-out. Yes they are more expensive and difficult, but they're what you're supposed to have!
Imagine if you went to a zoo and they just had photos of animals. "But it's so much cheaper and easier!"
This.
Author here. Thank you for this comment, you make so many great points. I'd like to respond to some of them.
> First up: "But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with."
> This is probably the key reason why there are so many screens in this particular museum: he answers his own question. Physical items, especially things with motion, will degrade with time and use, and maintenance can get really expensive. Physical models like a human heart aren't something that you can generally buy off the rack: museums and similar institutions will work with a company to produce something like that (I'm guessing fiberglass?) These are things that can run thousands and thousands of dollars to repair or outright replace.
You may be right that this is the answer to my unstated question of "Why are these exhibits not in perfect working order?" However, I reject it as an excuse, because, for instance, the building also requires maintenance, and this maintenance is apparently kept up with: it was clean, the doors opened and closed without squeaking, the elevators function.
Both the building and the exhibits are required to serve TFI's mission and need maintenance to perform their functions. If an exhibit is worth conceiving, building, and housing in the museum, it deserves maintenance, just as the museum building does. So I'm inferring that adequate exhibit maintenance is just not being prioritized either in the cash budget or the "volunteer effort budget". Emotionally, it feels terrible to walk my son over to a thing and be excited to show it to him, and have it not work. I'd rather the thing not be there.
> We also put in an interactive with an iPad that allows visitors to explore a painting in the exhibit in a lot more depth.
I have no problem with that because it's adding something to the experience of the artifacts on display. My problem is with the exhibit itself being a touchscreen. I would say there is very little point to visiting a museum in this case, because the web can distribute software more cheaply. My complaint is that a touchscreen does not count as being "hands-on", and TFI is all about being hands-on; that's what makes it so special, and to me, wonderful and worth fighting for.
> Finally, there's nostalgia at play here: I have a ton of fond memories of visiting museums with interactives and huge displays, and I'm glad that I can take my kids to them as well. But I'm also happy to see that these museums aren't stuck in the past and the only thing that they're doing is rehabilitating old exhibits that are decades old or out of date: they still have some of those things, but they're also making sure to bring in new interactives, looking at new scholarship and best practices for museums (because museums aren't static organizations or fields!) to change as audiences change. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who use screens as a way to take in information: museums have to keep abreast of those trends, because if we don't deliver information to people in familiar and accessible ways, they probably won't come in.
This, right here, is the rub. Because to my mind there is a fine line between meeting people where they are, and pandering to perceived preferences or limitations of our audience, and in the process, losing sight of the mission.
If we know kids are on screens a lot, or worse, believe that kids "need screens to be engaged", and thus proceed to skew our museum exhibits toward screens, are we doing right by them? I would argue, vociferously, that we are not. When we try to serve everyone, even those with little interest in our mission, by diluting our fidelity to our mission, then we end up serving poorly those who really are interested in our mission. There's probably a term for this phenomenon, but I don't know it.
There's also a fine line between doing what must be done to survive, and bending the mission in the interest of cashflows to the degree the organization is no longer serving its mission. TFI needs cashflow to survive and there are doubtless many ways for it to boost revenue and reduce costs that I would argue go against its mission. I'm arguing that the touchscreen-based exhibits are so far outside its mission that they need to go. The Kinect exhibits are on the edge for me, but I think those can stay.
It’s not just museums. Schools today also face the challenge of limiting screens in favor of hands-on activities.
And amusement parks, even.
Well, maybe just Universal Studios. And I guess their brand emphasis is on movies, but still: does EVERY ride need to be heavily reliant on screens?!
> I believe museums exist to present the real thing for the visitor to experience with their own senses. Here’s the sculpture — the actual piece of stone, two thousand years old, Greek sculptor unknown — now go ahead and form your impressions.
When I'm in a museum with ancient sculptures, ironically, I don't want to see them as-is. Instead, I want to walk into a room that attempts to emulate how the sculptures looked in the context that they were originally displayed in, often with original paint that's been lost over the millennia since they were made.
Even cooler would be a projector that could "turn on and off" what the sculpture looked with original paint and possibly other decorations that have long since decayed.
The franklin institute hosted yearly robot fights for a long time, which I was going to present as evidence that they aren't completely screen-pilled but it looks like that has ended sometime in the last 5 years. It's a shame- I competed one year and it was an all time favorite museum experience.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-vmSDgnlbg
What I don't understand is why science museums aren't more geared toward adults. For me, it's hard to tell the difference between a children's museum and a science museum.
Probably a combination of factors:
* Fewer adults interested in science than children. Children are learning new things. Magnets! Pulleys! Not many adults (outside HN) are going to get excited about a pulley.
* The people making the museums don't have sufficient scientific knowledge to do science for grown ups.
* Exhibits for children are much easier to make robust, and probably cheaper to make.
That said I do think it would be really cool if there was a science museum for adults. There's all sorts of things you could show.
The author is applying a universal prescription to ALL museums based on a single experience at a single museum.
I generally agree with the thesis of the blog post.
I'd like to add that I feel frustrated when try out a screen at a museum and it not working (malfunctioning). I have been to NASA's Kennedy's Space Center (KSC) many times (like 5-6). Although they have got most of the exhibits working in good order, some of them are broken or not functioning well anymore. I still appreciate KSC (am an annual member), but I wish there is some philanthropist or the government fund to renovate these museums periodically...
Absolute irony: Pittsburgh has a privately-owned museum of computers (actually in New Kensington, a suburb). A HUGE amount of big old boxes. PDPs, Cray, some early home computers and printers. Some have been actively used by the owner/maintainer, so we know they work.
But there's no digital displays. There are screens - that are off.
The owner can barely make rent, even in that desolated section of real estate, so there's not going to be any snappy big screens or interactive software. But it's literally a museum of computers where no computers are computing.
Same thing at Science World, luckily they have a lot of tangible artifacts, but a ton of computers/displays. Last time I went (<6mo ago) a bunch of displays/stations in the most-hyped exhibit were non-functional due to hardware faults. :\
The Franklin Institute was in dire straits during COVID (as many similar institutions were), but has by all accounts recovered nicely financially. It felt pretty dumpy the last few times I've been there, with broken exhibits and the aforementioned screen-based exhibits. Hopefully they'll loosen those purse-strings eventually and put some money into the more expensive but much more tactile physical exhibits that had always been one of their big strengths.
Before reading the article, I was going to talk about my very disappointing visit to the Franklin Institute a few months ago. Then I read the article and discovered that it's about the disappointment of visiting the Franklin Institute. My strongest impression of that museum is that it mostly consists of corporate sponsorship displays and a few neglected lessons in how things actually work.
I did enjoy walking around the enormous steam loco in the basement. That one room, where they seem to have stuffed all the old 'museum' stuff was the highlight of my visit.
The best science museum I've been to in years is in Glasgow. Walking across the I-beam compared to the sheet (or was it a bar?) of steel actually taught my kids something.
Screens in such museums would work nicely to augment physical exhibits. So, instead of signs and such, not as the main event.
It's rampant in art museums as well.
It costs approximately $2,000 to frame a 36" piece of art to museum standards. A similarly sized LCD screen, on the other hand...
Art wasn't supposed to be a "by the square foot" kind of thing yet here we are.
It costs $2000? Why?
It costs a lot of money to create a frame! You need skilled people to make one, get the proper archival glass to protect whatever you're displaying. There's a lot of work and field best practices that goes into this.
It doesn't really have to cost that much. You're mostly paying real estate and a professional waiting for business. Framing material, UV glass, and acid free paper are quite cheap. Anti-glare Tru Vue museum glass costs maybe a couple hundred dollars for a medium sized work, but a lot of museums don't even use it because art framers mark it up like crazy.
>You're mostly paying real estate and a professional waiting for business.
Are these optional? If not, I don't see how this makes sense:
>It doesn't really have to cost that much.
Gallerists always act like having a professional framer is given, but maybe their typical clientele are rich enough to just treat that as a mandatory tax. I framed my art with a diy LevelFrames kit for 10x cheaper which took less than an hour. The frame itself isn't particularly good quality, so for now, boutique framers have a strictly superior product, but this advantage could easily be commoditized away.
And then you visit nearly any museum in Europe, and walls are absolutely covered in paintings with almost none of the wall itself visible and most of the paintings not even behind any sort of glass. It's kind of funny.
The STOP OIL NOW people are changing that with their paint.
(a) Just Stop Oil has disbanded.
(b) They only pulled that stunt on art that was already behind suitably-protective covers. (Whether the stunt is effective or not, they weren't putting artwork at risk: just temporarily disrupting the operation of galleries, and getting themselves arrested.)
(c) This is completely off-topic.
Archival preservation materials, anti-reflective glass, and a person who knows what they heck they're doing around artifacts is expensive. Just getting the thing onsite can cost thousands.
When I was in 5th grade (I think?) we went to the nation's capitol as a field trip. My mom volunteered to be a chaperone, as a result over the following years, we would go back. We would go into every museum, if you get a room at the right hotel (I forget which one we stayed at back to back) you can walk to any and all the museums, you can spend all day in several different museums. I highly recommend anyone to take such a trip if you've never been to DC. The city is full of so much history that we all have been taught, its something else to see it in person.
> I remember running through the gigantic model heart with other kids.
This is one of the most memorable exhibits in TFI and thankfully still exists today.
I am from Philly but don't live there any more and was a little bit sad when I took my kid to the Franklin Institute and she didn't want to go in the giant heart. It scared her. I'm hoping we can go again next time we visit and she won't be scared.
If you want to take your kid to a museum then...go to a museum. The Franklin Institute, which they went to, is not a museum. I have the Liberty Science Center near me, which is also not a museum. They have interactive exhibits, planeteriums, and yes, screens. All this is by design, and it is great.
A museum here plays an inaudible voice recording on a 30 min loop with the speaker persistently building on previous context. It was like browsing an unfamiliar code base.
I admit to not being a museum head myself. Now that I'm a parent though, I've gone to them all, multiple times. Before that, I'd not gone to any of them unless they're world famous.
If it wasn't for kids, nobody would go to most museums (non-famous ones especially)
Kids are simply the demographic, because every parent is looking for activities to entertain the kids every day.
Interactive non-screen based exhibits that are designed for kids are the best, but if you can't have that for cost/know-how reasons interactive multi-media exhibits are a good second on the "it did a good job entertaining my kid" spectrum.
Actually learning anything is a secondary demand from the consumer when it comes to museums unfortunately. Entertaining the kids is number one, bonus points if it also managed to entertain the parents.
Old enough to remember when most museums and art galleries were absolutely free.
This had pretty much ended by 1980, unfortunately, and now they are enormously expensive.
Agree a lot of “museums” are turning into less of cool items and more of a lot of text and visuals and electronic displays. I could just do that at home and skip the inconvenience, cost, and exposure.
Next time visit modern and classical art museums. Sorted.
I’m inclined to believe that this happens because there are strong incentives to being able to add to your resume “Directed digital modernization of Museum of Note”.
Why bother with hardware when you can just use software?
Exactly. It's easier and cheaper for the museum to change exhibits when they just update the screen vs swapping out a hands on exhibit. Screens also use less floor space and are easier to maintain.
On the other hand, an app for your phone, or digital display placed by an artifact, it a bar code: could have as much detail as possible, with more and more in depth lessons that you can investigate depending on your own level of curiosity. (Or age.) A fantastic museum of the world - natural and human history in Ottawa, was great. But imagine, they have a diorama depicting a historical scene... Then there is a display counter in front where you can read what's going on in the diorama. Also a few selected elements from the display, shown behind that glass, but visible up close for us to admire. What is the description of a brass ring, in the display: "A brass ring."! We can see that! WTF? But we want to know: where was it found, what was it's purpose, why is this down here not something else. What era is it from? You could dig deeper: how was it made? Who made it? Where? With what technology? Brass? How did they blend the raw materials? Who wore it? Etc etc etc. A little electronic display could have that, It a link for everyone to follow - bar code for example we could scan. It could even link to a Wikipedia page, whatever. But, something! More than: "A brass ring"
It's disappointing to see but it feels as if to keep a futuristic theme and to provide almost an "edutainment" environment that a museum feels as though it must implement screens to keep up with the times. I think this might almost be comparable to how places like McDonalds that had themed play areas for kids have been wiped away. We aren't really designing many places where kids can be kids and when we do, we try to put more screens in there to connect with a younger technology savvy generation?
> It's disappointing to see but it feels as if to keep a futuristic theme and to provide almost an "edutainment" environment that a museum feels as though it must implement screens to keep up with the times.
And you just know that in board meetings of plenty of museums, someone is saying "We NeEd To MaKe ThE mUsEuM Ai-NaTiVe."
My experience of "the culture": cultural spending cutbacks mean exhibitors are often forced to fall back to the minimal spend of a screen.
It's literally all they can afford.
And the wonderful hands-on physical stuff that I loved as a kid? Jammed into out-of-the-way spaces in the Sir Isaac’s Loft and Air Show rooms. These rooms are terrific, and I was delighted to see they were absolutely packed with kids playing with stuff.
I'm really not sure what the problem is, given that these exhibits are there, popular and obviously accessible. Ok, the author has an issue with screens, but, hey, a lot of real science is done on screens today...
I think a lot of the time, museums really want to be "immersive" and give kids (and adults) something interactive. The problem is that "interactive" defaults to a touchscreen because it's easy to implement and maintain and looks flashy, even if it doesn't actually teach anything or spark curiosity the way a hands-on exhibit does. Honestly though, I think these kids do want to interact with the real world but lack the chance to. Screens are seductive and safe, but nothing beats the thrill of making something move with your own hands and actually seeing the physics happen.
As an example, one exhibition I found pure joy in that doesn’t involve screens is the Museum of Illusions. It's hands-on, mind-bending, and utterly delightful.
As a parent, I agree 100% with the sentiments expressed by the author.
But even judging digital exhibits on their own merits, I have yet to see one in a museum (or similar location) that was actually "wow" or that really captured my kids' attention or sparked any discussion (like other "real" stuff we saw). Most were, as my 9 year old would say, "mid" (==crappy in genAlpha speak). Very blah. Very low effort, and sometimes didn't even work properly. Think of your typical crappy software experience that just barely works.
The places that do have physical hands-on exhibits do catch my kids' attention, and we return multiple times. For example, one has a lab where you can do chemistry experiments (which they rotate) -- 100x better than doing some digital simulation (which 1) is very quickly boring, and 2) I'll just do it at home and we can close the museum (sad).
I used to love visiting museums to press buttons and turn dials as a kid. That's the funnest part. Anything in a museum that's just a screen is usually dumb.
Well, video-art.
French have a weird passion for screens in museums.
In the UK it comes off the back of "decolonize this" and "imperialism bad that".
Frankly I'm fed up of it over here and it's a shame this is being replicated in countries built a lot more strongly on actual modern scientific progress.
There's plenty of affordable interactive exhibits (the cost of crayons and paper hasn't inflated that much since the 90s!), but there's this false b$ that interactive digital media or 3d VR wish-wash is what people want. This mostly comes from asking the wrong people, the great unwashed who you were never going to attract away from the latest Disney flop.
As is being played out en-masse within hollywood and the wider entertainment industry. Ask the people who were your strongest supporters and original fans what they liked about your thing and you'll cut through all the noise and know where your priorities should be. Stop tyring to please everyone and focus on doing what you do well, growth and expansion numbers are good for one place the valley, and lets look where that got social media...
This is just complaining that the SF Exploratorium is not in your city.
No, this is complaining that the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has gotten worse over the decades.
You're asking a lot to expect people on HN to know that Philadelphia exists.
Maybe it would help if I describe it as being in the Extremely East Bay. Like, about 3,000 miles east.
But that makes sense. Half of Philadelphia is practically illiterate https://www.achieve-now.com/poverty-cycle
One must imagine their educators are crap
>poked at one of these [design a rocket apps] with my son, added too many boosters to their launch vehicle, and were told it failed “for reasons” in a way she found totally unhelpful and pointless.
This is tripping my bullshit-o-meter. If it just failed "for reasons" how do you know it failed because there were too many boosters? Kinda sounds like the game explained that to them.
the exploratorium in san francisco has also been dumbed down.
the old palace of fine arts exploratorium had a working TESLA COIL !
IMO, the geyser exhibit in the Exploratorium is one of best demonstrations I've seen in a museum. Far more impressive than a tesla coil, and contains a really good explanation of how it works (unlike the vast majority of tesla coil exhibits).
Sure, a tesla coil is flashy and a pretty awesome (in the biblical sense) demonstration of man's harnessing of electricity, but they don't really tell you much about how electricity works. A simple snap-together circuit with a battery, some wires, and some incandescent light bulbs does a much better job of that.