 Oh, you guys. Hey, thank you. Hi to the bad kids up the back row. Look at you all. I love the way that people spread out in these things. All right. I don't remember what the podcast bit of my title was about. I wrote this before I went away. So my talk today comes out of a recent research trip that I took to the states. I went around seven different cities looking at how museums are reaching visitors using digital technology. The trip was generously funded by a Winston Churchill Fellowship and with assistance from the Hutt City Council, who are the core founders of the Dallas Art Museum. So my talk today is going to take the form of three experiences and three observations. And if I can just get a bit of help from you first, who has heard of the Dallas Museum of Arts Friends program with free entry level membership? Who has heard of the Koopa Hewitt's pen? All right. And who has heard of the Ask app at Brooklyn Museum? Okay, good. Thank you. So that, every year there is a new hotness in our sector. And we sit here at the bottom of the world and we watch the hotness heat up. And if you're anything like me, you kind of sit there in the audience and the speakers that come over every year, you look at them in a bit of wonder and you think, that's amazing. And you're doing amazing things. Right now it is kind of the Koopa Hewitt with the pen battling it out with the Brooklyn Museum and the Ask app. Before that it was the O-Mona, before that it was Cleveland's Wall, it was the Walker's website, it was the AMAs Art Babel and their dashboard. The main point of my trip was to try out for myself as a visitor some of these kind of superstar projects. And I felt like after flirting online with them all for years, I was finally going to go on a real date but I wasn't just going on a date, I was going straight into their front lounge. So, few of the people who visit the places that we run and particularly I'm talking about art museums because that's my wheelhouse at the moment. Few of the people who visit our places are museum visiting experts and even fewer of them are visiting for the explicit purpose of critique and so I am not a normal visitor. In this case I was not from around there. I purposefully visited cities Dallas, Baltimore, Minneapolis, Indianapolis and I'll count Brooklyn in here because it's basically a different city. They're not on the international tourist museum map and I picked museums that like my own have an emphasis on repeat attendance by local residents. And I'm a professional and I was doing what I call a view source visit and on many of my visits to art galleries I'm so focused on looking at the front of house staff and how clean your bathrooms are and how you've lit the artwork and what kind of hanging devices that you use. Occasionally I walk out of a gallery and not actually have a visual memory of any of the art that I looked at. So I tried really hard on my trip to use these products with some kind of optimism and a bit of joy in my heart rather than being a mendacious mystery shopper just looking for issues. So I hope you're going to take my experience and observations with the kind of honesty and some of the self-acknowledged limitations that go with them. So after moving to the Dallas Museum of Art three years ago the director who has just announced his resignation, Max Anderson and his head of technology, Rob Stein, who came with him from the Indianapolis Museum of Art introduced a free entry policy to the museum and a new free entry level of membership called the DMA Friends. And the program has three aims. It's to promote the gallery to non-visitors, it's to increase engagement and repeat visitation and it's to use the data gathered from tracking those members to inform the museum's operations. So on the first day that I visited the DMA I watched the front of house staff greeting visitors to the museum and selling them on the Friends program. And people were remarkably happy to stand and listen to the sales pitch and I think that's partly because people in Texas are very polite and they will hear you out. A friend in Brooklyn observed to me that no New Yorker would stand there and listen to you in the front door of your museum trying to sell them on something. And I think it's also because people still aren't used to the idea of free entry and they think that there's got to be some sort of I have to give you something. So after looking for a wee while I took the plunge and I signed myself up and it was quickly clear that this was not a program that was for people like me, international visitors like me. So one of the first things that they're asking for is your postcode which is a key part of their tracking information. They're using that to understand where visitors come from and particularly with the idea of trying to make their visitation more equitable and to target their marketing and outreach into particular neighbourhoods that are underrepresented in their visitor stats. But there's no option for an international visitor and instead the staff are used to the work around that he's developed which was to sign me up under the postcode for where the museum is itself. So I assume that people like me have caused something of a glut in their statistics right there. We also went through a screen where I was encouraged to choose an avatar and at this point the very nice man said to me everyone who has ever developed a piece of kind of web technology for a frontline person to use will recognise us. He said to me, I just don't understand why they put this in here. They don't know what they're going to use it for. You can just skip it if you want to. But I did it, I did it. So the way that the program works is that for a visitor you gather points in order to access rewards and in a city where everyone drives the first objective is to gather enough points to get your parking at the museum redeemed. And so this nice man entered some cheat codes for me and I had enough money, enough money, enough points, upfront to get a free ruler from the shop. So I started on that basis. And after that I started exploring the galleries and you gain points in several ways. Every gallery in this place is fucking massive. Like it's got three entrances, it's so big. It boggled my mind how big this museum was. So every gallery has an entrance at its sign with a code. You text the code to the thing, the program and that racks up the points. And you don't actually have to walk into that gallery or interact with the art in any way in order to get those points. Correspondingly it's a really low point activity and this was where it was reinforced again for me that it was not like people for me because I'd stayed on my New Zealand data plan and I wasn't going to be texting from my New Zealand number to an American system to get points because it would cost me too much. So instead I had to note these all down. I flicked open my notes app and I noted down all the codes and then I would go down four or five floors to the front of House Lobby and I would manually enter them at a kiosk after I'd signed myself in. And it's just as well that this was a low value activity because I was there to actually look at the art. I kept on missing. I don't even have a picture of one of these codes because I forgot to take them. They're actually incredibly discreet. They're quite easy to overlook. And so I wonder if that's equally disruptive for the data gathering effort. If they're trying to understand who's visiting what galleries if the signs are actually remarkably easy to miss then you're only getting a small picture of what that actually looks like. The other main activity that the DMA was offering on the day was the DMA Faves scavenger hunt. And I hate scavenger hunts. I think they are one of the lowest forms of engagement but that is my personal perspective and I know some people love them. But it's good to be honest. So this is a photo of a Monet with the normal DMA label style and then the DMA Faves sign underneath of it. Here's the prompt up close. Like I said this place is enormous and the art is astounding and the interpretation is all very discreet. And so these things just sing out at you. You see them from galleries away and you're drawn into them. And they gave these artworks a really, really strong level of visual attraction that I think was probably not totally intentional. Again, a code for a fave object, earns you more points but you didn't have to engage any harder. You just had to find it. You didn't have to understand the work in any way. So my experience of this programme was that it requires only the most modest effort from the visitor and it evokes correspondingly low engagement and the incentives, I do think, are very conducive towards people who live locally, visiting frequently. And of course now I am receiving at least a weekly email from the DMA telling me about events, exhibitions, things I might like to buy and things I might like to donate towards. But the power of the project really does light in the data and when Rob Stein showed me the analysis of membership data against census data neighbourhood by neighbourhood for their region I could kind of palpably feel the vision that he was putting across and with a goal that's not just about increasing visitation but trying to more equibly serve communities across the city and to not over-serve communities that are already well-served and to understand that as well as underserved communities. I do see that data being invaluable for their outreach, their marketing and their programming initiatives at a mass scale, which is really, it's not easy to do and it sounds like probably I'm being heavily critical. These are my observations. I think in some ways it was one of the most ambitious projects that I saw. All right, it's time to get moving. All right, the pen at Cooper-Hertz. The good thing is you all know what this is already most of you and if you don't it is all over the internet so you can look it up. Unlike the DMA friends where the program is promoted for a free entry, the pen gets given to you when you buy your ticket to go into the Cooper-Hertz at the front of house staff have got like a 40-second pattern that they run through with you and they explain what it does and how you use it. It has two ends. One end you use to collect icons from labels as you move around the galleries. The other end you can use to, and then you download them into the interactive tables. This will make sense with time and then the other end you use to manipulate them. Well, I loved about the pen and I loved it as a design object. I loved the weight of it. I loved that kind of firm rubbery feel as a physical person. I loved being able to use my body in an art gallery, even in just the smallest way. It was really nice to feel like I was moving when I was in that building and it was unique and it was special and it wasn't like reusing a device that I use all the time in the rest of my life where it got pesky and again not your normal visitor. I had a bag, I had the pen, I had my phone so that I could take photos, I had my notebook and I had a pen and they don't have any benches anywhere for me to sit down on and I got told off for leaning on things when I was trying to take notes. So you've got stuff, you've got lots of stuff and I can't quite imagine what that's like when you've got a kid but I guess then the kid's got a pen so they're happy. Sorry, that was on the fly. I didn't actually see many children when I was on my visit which was on a weekday. So it was when I was looking at a collection show about different elements of design that I was really struck by the underlying power of what Seb Chan who has recently left could pure and move to ACME what he and his team have made. So this is a really bad photo taken through a perspex case of an early 20th century bracelet and an early 21st century piece of medical technology that's used in shoulder reconstruction and on the face of it they're both very attractive objects but they have no link between them but when I read the label another layer gets revealed to me so every object that's on display possibly every object in their collection database they have got the curators adding at least 10 tags to and in the case of the implant the first two words are aesthetic descriptors lace-like and snowflake and everyone who's worked in an art gallery has seen dumb database curating which is like we need a show very quickly someone search for flowers search for dogs search for whatever this to me took database curating to a whole new level and it kind of changed my whole perspective on this particular exhibition so a group of things that were blue were suddenly a much smarter display when I thought about it in the terms of what they'd done to understand and think about kind of deep diving their collection and during my visit I came to perceive the pen as the most recent point on the design continuum that stretches all the way from this beautiful historic mention that you're in the Fancy Pants House of the Fancy Pants people that is now a public museum all the way out through its collections and then right up to the contemporary visitor experience and this kind of shitty photo summarises that so I'm standing in this exquisite original carved teak library and in the distance there's an isimayaki dress and between me and the dress are two people using the pen on one of these interactive tables and this to me this was designed across the centuries. These were objects made to be used and enjoyed by humans which is the story that the Koopa Hewitt is trying to tell and of course nothing is perfect they have some problems that I'm not going to go into quite so deeply right now around touring exhibitions, they haven't figured out how to integrate this kind of collect thing when the objects on display are not in their collection and this was a weakness again a very very discreet panel so you didn't really notice the weakness and an otherwise exquisite show about the Heatherwick Design Studios and those of you who heard Melissa's talk Melissa Feth's talk yesterday would have seen this, I really did feel using the interactive table and using this particular one which is around picking something that you want to design and the materials that you look at all the designers I have worked with I felt this completely undersold their work for these kind of two janky lines and make something that looks like that that to me didn't communicate what design is and what it does I also have not gone back to my unique URL that would allow me to access the riches that I collected on my visit and I thought about doing it, I thought about doing it really hard and then I realised my heart wasn't in it and so as a visitor I wasn't going to do it but my relationship with the Koopa Hewitt isn't through that URL, it's through all the micro touches, their blog posts and their tweets and publications and things like that, that's how I stay in touch with them the URL is not my link to that museum alright, the Ask App at Brooklyn Museum, at first point if you're a Kiwi you talk about this a lot, it sounds like this which is awesome when you're travelling around America and telling people what you're doing what I found as I went around and tried these different products what was required of me to interact with them grew and the engagement grew as well, so again unlike the DMA where you sign up on site and the Koopa Hewitt where everyone's given a pen the Ask App is not integrated into the entry process, you either download it and it is going to sound like that every time I say it you download it in advance or you notice a sign inside the building that prompts you to do so, we had a quite vibrant conversation about this at museums in the web Asia or about whether someone who's standing inside your museum is going to download your app and my gut feeling is no, why would you? you know, you don't stand inside the warehouse and download their app, why would I download to Papa's App just because I'm in the building anyway, so uptake is very low it's at about 1% or 2% of their visitors so the app effectively lets you live message a group of specially trained staff with questions as you travel around the museum and they can pinpoint you using beacons or you can communicate where you are through the text and the photos that you send to them. I had to push myself really hard to use this because it turns out I don't actually generate a lot of questions when I'm looking at exhibitions either I already know the answer or I'm just kind of usually just moving on especially when I'm visiting by myself so the DMA friends is all about kind of picking up breadcrumbs and then depositing them into a bread box and then the pen is this kind of oh that's interesting, click click, click interaction to get started with the Ask App I felt like I had to come up with a question that was worth asking someone who was waiting for me to do that and I found it strikingly difficult and my first experience was a little bit frustrating it was a excuse my pronunciation it was a Redfield chair from like the 1913 or 1930 one of those beautiful monodist thing and my question was was this generally available could any punter buy one of these is it just available to people who were in the know who knew the guy who had access to it and the answer that I got back came in four chunks because they deliver it in bite-sized information and it kind of started with you know, well avant-garde design wasn't to everyone's taste and it was very uncomfortable for people and I was yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah get me to the bit that I actually asked you and I think that was me and the person calibrating ourselves coming to a shared understanding that I was looking for from them and from their perspective understanding what I already knew and could be taken for granted so I was really intrigued by how the app grew on me and I found myself generating way more questions than I usually do and instead of shelving them, I started asking them and I felt like I struck up a rapport with this person and I started sending through observations and like like smiley faces and I felt like I was visiting with a friend and having discussions in the galleries rather than having a solitary experience and this is like after two weeks of just mega museum marathons I hadn't had a day off at that point I'd visited at least one if not up to four museums a day and it was getting to the point where you really had to work hard to arrest my attention not everything is perfect the Brooklyn Museum has these funny elevator lobby spaces where they put sculptural works and they feel like liminal spaces, they don't feel like art displays and a bad director I kind of thought maybe you should be able to touch the things that were in these spaces and so I sent that question through can I touch the sculpture but by the time I got my response which was somewhere between 10 and 15 minutes later I was hundreds of metres further on in the museum and I'll leave it up to you whether I did or didn't Shelly Bernstein at the Museum she acknowledges that one of the areas they need to work on are the question prompts which are scattered through the gallery to encourage uptake and use of the app I found myself asking quite detailed questions a recent blog post from the museum talks about a three hour long exchange with one particular visitor the questions that they've put out at the moment are dumbed down compared to the object labels that they sit next to the MA faves there is a disproportionate amount of visual grab with these bits of signage but the tone is the opposite of the experience in that they feel kind of patronising or try hard and they undersell the really deep engagement that the app can deliver we'll get to that in a second and another distinctive factor that I didn't notice until I heard Shelly at a conference about a week after I'd been there it disappears when you leave the museum you cannot track back over the conversations that you've had they are keeping all this information they're using it to answer future questions to inform the way that they lay out the museum, what they put on display, how they write labels, all that kind of stuff you cannot revisit your conversation and I was fine with that because it felt true to the real life experience of having a conversation in an art gallery which goes away when it's finished other people I've talked to have differing opinions on that from either it's my data and I should always be able to control it through to I really wanted to see what my kids were talking about so I think that's an interesting decision what I love about Shelly what I love about all of these people is that they have strong opinions and they're making strongly opinionated experiences and I think that's really admirable so who's is the best it's not actually a question at a fundamental level there's no point comparing what they're doing because they're all being designed in response to a really different question how can we widen others at a profile how can we communicate design in its fullest sense, how can we help people think curiously about art they're not setting out to do the same thing and so comparing contrast is not actually that useful but I do have some broad observations the first of which is global to local and this pertains especially to art museums I don't think applicable in other parts of the sector five or ten years ago we were talking about reaching the whole world through the web and this idea that our collections going online could change the world today I see art museums moving their focus firmly away from there and strongly into the physical visitor this is a quote from Shelly from her announcement last year where they talked about where they were shutting down a whole bunch of their social media social media platforms that they were appearing on they shut down the posse and they shut down two tagging games in order to focus their endeavours firmly upon the ask app and this decision for them was informed by the fact that they observed that people who live within five miles of the gallery are both that's their visitor base and they are the people who are actually by and large most involved in their digital outreach as well so the people who visit the museum are the ones who are the most heavily using their digital tools and last week at museums in the web Asia there was quite a lot of discomfort in the room at the idea of making a distinction between the online and the in gallery visitor in terms of the value of that person or their behaviour or their needs I actually have a lot of sympathy for this position 80% of my funding comes from the council which means from the 45,000 rate-paying households in Lower Heart effectively each of those households is paying an annual membership to visit my museum and my first duty has to be towards creating value for them, for that and for donation but I do often talk about first degree and second degree effects for rate-payers so there's the experience and benefits that they can access from using the museum themselves but there are also the benefits that accrue to rate-payers when their city is the home of a respected and well-known cultural institution which takes me to my second observation, digital as unique selling point. Traditionally a museum's brand is being built on buildings, collections and kind of the cumulative effect of your exhibition program and something that really struck me while I was away perhaps because I was looking for it rather than because it's new is that digital is definitely the newest way of branding an institution and unlike buildings and exhibitions and collections, a new digital brand can be formed pretty rapidly so DMA's digital brand is about a commitment to inclusion and that's what DMA is saying, that design is an integral part of being human and that each of us has a designer inside of us and the Brooklyn Museum is saying that people are intelligent and curious about art and they warrant personal responses to their curiosity and these projects are being extremely heavily communicated out through to members, to funders, to stakeholders to residents and the general public and there is a lot of newspaper attention in the states on these projects at the moment and I think there is a very distinct danger in your digital brand being or becoming disassociated from your physical experience and my clearest experience of that on this trip was at the Walker Art Centre many of you would have seen Nate Solis at NDF a few years ago talking about the Walker's new at the time kind of website which was built on this kind of philosophy of incredible generosity and outwardness, they were using their social capital as a museum site outwards and direct people's attention to other things I am going to wrap up real quick, I promise I'm so close and I found what they were doing really inspirational and I have tried to use that in the way that the DALS behaves online and at the same time that they were doing this web redevelopment they were running a program called Openfield and some of you may have heard of the infamous internet cat video festival that they ran in this space 10,000 people who turn up to watch YouTube clips of cats so I rock up to the Walker and I have all of these expectations and what I'm met with is a building site so the field is being torn up and it's being replaced with a sculpture garden and a new entrance to the museum and there's none of that generosity and freshness that I felt when I was interacting with them online and it's a beautiful gallery, it is a beautiful building, they have astounding collections, they had the most beautiful light that I saw in America but they weren't who I had flirted with for all these years online they did not look like their avatar at all and it made me really sad but so I think what we love about the web is that it changes so fast and there's all this emphasis on experimentation and we on the website I count myself in here when I'm here I'm a web person, we joke all the time about museum time and how one year in a museum is like seven years of normal life I think we need to think about how we make enduring digital change where the values of our work are sustained even if the products that we're putting out into the market change over time and last one digital is merging with visitor services sometimes this is happening in a really concrete way Suze Kins who was the digital content coordinator at the Baltimore Museum of Art has just been put in charge of their front of house team so their web editor effectively is now running their visitors services stuff I met six people from the DMA who are in Rob Stein's team and four or five of them told me the same story that when Max got there three years ago gallery attendants were there only to protect the art, they weren't allowed to make eye contact, they weren't allowed to talk to visitors and if a visitor had the question that they would be conducted down to the front desk where someone who was qualified could answer that question for them Nick Paul, alumni 2010 I think, he tweeted this while I was travelling and it really resonated with what I was seeing the DMA and so many other US museums are starting on a massive back foot when they're trying to create a more inclusive and welcoming visitor experience and there's no way that an app can fix that by itself and by the time I got to the end of my trip my conclusion was that most you know frankly most museums should be ditching these visitor focused apps and they should be investing in more training, more empowerment higher pay and more autonomy for their visitor services staff but sadly it is a damn sight easier to get funding to create a new digital product than it is to pay your staff more. I should stop now I've got one more point I'm going to do it while you're coming out, there was a pause the other thing that I observed was please, please let me look honestly two paragraphs, do you mind? Okay I so much apologies to the other speakers but the other thing that I observe was the energy that's going into study and visitor behaviour and particularly that of members that when you sign up for these membership programs you are being tracked and your data is being used it is being used to sell things to you. In the states the word leveraging is uttered in conjunction with the word engagement so much more frequently than it is down here but in an environment of decreasing public funding and not increasing business support this move is coming to us too we will be digitally tracking our visitors and the front of us is going to be whether our use of this data tilts in favour of creating value for our visitors or creating value for ourselves thank you