a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: The Living Museum

Episode Date: May 29, 2017

Every industry (for-profit, non-profit, government, private-sector) has been touched by tech, with most trying to lead the charge in order to stay ahead. But museums and memorials, by definition, lag rather than lead there. How is that changing as visitors increasingly expect to be a part of a dialogue, not just a monologue limited to a single interpretation of events or objects in a room? How are tech tools -- from VR/AR, RFID and beacons, and mobile apps to data, personalization, and prototyping -- changing storytelling around exhibits, artifacts, and experiences... even going beyond the museum walls? In this episode of the a16z Podcast -- recorded as part of our annual D.C. podcast road trip 2017 (in conjunction with the a16z Tech Policy Summit in Washington, D.C.) -- Rachel Goslins, Director of the Arts and Industries Building at the Smithsonian; Sarah Lumbard, Digital Curator of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum; and Adam Martin, Chief Digital Officer at the National Museum of African American Culture and History, in conversation with Hanne Tidnam, describe what happens as museums move from "cabinets of curiosities" to living spaces that are defined by interaction.

Hi, I'm Hannah, and welcome to the A16Z podcast. We talk a lot about how various industries are adapting to tech, but what about museums, whose job, to some extent, is to lag behind? As part of our recent DC podcast Roadshow, guest Sarah Lombard, digital curator of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, whose voice is the first guest you'll hear, Adam Martin, chief digital officer at the National Museum of African American Culture and History, who is the second voice, and Rachel Gosland's Director of the Arts and Industries, building at the Smithsonian, talked with me about all things tech, museums, and storytelling.

I saw you tweeted a study that museums are perceived to be more trustworthy than news at the moment. At a time when there is tremendous schisms in society, it is a place where people expect to be safe and to have issues, topics, stories that they can talk about in a way that is interesting, provocative, eye-opening, and doesn't have the noise from outside. One of the ways where hopefully we are starting to evolve, though, is because of the expectations that our audience has now, just as we've seen in media, people also have an expectation now that their stories are going to be part of that, and looking for ways to engage with museums in a way that they haven't in the past, where before it was a place where you went to receive information,

from one source or from one interpretation. They want an opportunity to have their stories and their perspectives be a part of their museum experience. In general, the expectation has gone from the museum is a monologue to it's a dialogue. At the end of the day, museums and exhibitions are about telling stories. So how is technology actually changing how we tell those stories? How is it making it better?

How is it making it more challenging? How about it's just making it more complicated? Is it? I mean, it's become more complicated and more challenging because, you know, so many of those limits have been pushed out now where there's, we can start to build on top of those exhibitions in the physical space. So what do you mean by the limits being pushed out? You went to the museum, you had one experience while you were there in the building

and what the curators and exhibitions, yes, and what they were able to present to you and to share to you. With the introduction of digital and more interactive experiences, it's created nearly limitless opportunities for us as to, storytellers to expand on those themes, those issues that we raise in the museum and allow people to continue to explore them. Could we have an example of how those experiences go beyond the museum now? We look at our missions as institutions, the Holocaust Museum, is looking for people to think

about the Holocaust and as they walk out, their role in society, right? Because society is fragile. And we all have a role in upholding the institutions of a democratic society and to keep it strong. So you have a fairly specific message for what you want people to leave the museum thinking about. But then the question is, well, what do they do with that afterwards? It's really successful if an intergenerational family comes and they have a conversation in the cafe after their visit or if they go home or if they end up choosing. a career, these ways that we as museums have really lofty goals of inspiring and of taking it with you. And taking it with you. Can digital help or not? I tend to think about what technology

can do in museums in three buckets. And at the most basic level, it can give you more sophisticated information about the museums. But the two areas, which I think are both really rich, are they enable people to dig deeper into a subject or an artifact or a story that interests them. And they allow people to be interactive. In the digging deeper category, there's an app in our museum of natural history in our bones hall, which has all of our skeletons, and it's called skin and bones, and it uses augmented reality. You can see a skeleton of a prehistoric platypus, and if you hold up your iPhone, its skin animates over the platypus, and then you can see it swim around, and you can also access videos of, you know, biologists talking about these creatures.

mating habits and life and habitat. So if you're interested in that, your technology allows you to dig deeper. So it's offering you more ways in into richer sort of more. And it's self-selective, right? You can choose which thing is more interesting to you and then access more information. So that's what I think of as an example of digging deeper. And then there's interactivity. So at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum in New York, we have the pen. It allows you to go into this amazing design museum and using a checkout device to capture information in some instances to drag those objects onto an interactive table and manipulate them or to change the wallpaper in this kind of installation room. This technology allows you to interact with, personally curate, and

save things that are of interest to you in the museum. When I look at the wallpaper solution, the Cooper Hewitt found a way to bring wallpaper to life. Well, this is a is an interesting question because I think that sounds amazing and I actually have a wallpaper thing. So I totally have to go. Yeah, but some of these things feel kind of like the gamification of the museum and some of them feel like they're actually transforming the relationship between the viewer and the museum. How do you tell the difference? How do you think which of these is a foundational difference in which is in our relationship? Yeah, I mean, changing that relationship really, I think of in our museum, the lunch counter interactive. Which I've heard is amazing

experience. He meant to be evocative of the Woolworth lunch counters and the sit-ins that took place there, the student sit-ins. And so we invite you to come and sit in these seats. And the experience you have is it sort of asks the visitor, what would you do if you were some 60-plus years ago in this scenario here? What it does is it gets people not only engaging with the history and learning more from the context, but having a social experience as well, turning to the person next to them and asking them questions about what choices they made and what different experiences they were then presented with. They can have a rich experience with the history that they're being presented with, but then

does it lead them to further conversation? So making it a very long story, right? A deep, sort of back into deep time and then bringing it forward into now and into the future. Is that what makes it a rich tool when it does that? I think any time you can, you know, you can use those tools to make those things relevant for people, right? So that it's based in.

That's the framework you evaluate. That's the framework. So how do we connect those generations? How do we connect those different visitor experiences through the technology and the stories that we tell? Sometimes people call digital new media. And I'm like, it's been around for over 20 years. So I think we need to stop using the word new. Digital is another tool in our storytelling toolbox. And so the question becomes we have a story to tell. What can tell it best? Sometimes it's digital. Sometimes it's film. Sometimes it's an artificial. Sometimes it's an artifact. or a facsimile of an artifact that you can touch. Yeah. I think that's interesting because I wanted to talk a little bit about the virtual museum. What the relationship between the virtual museum and the physical museum is, especially because one of the biggest, the most promising use cases, right, for VR

is this idea of making the museum accessible to people who can't come to the museum, to people in far-flung places. Do we need the physical museum? Look, I think what everybody is trying to create profound digital experiences, in the private sector and the nonprofit sector and government in museums. So yes, there's obviously

a frontier there that is going to be explored by all of these industries. But you have to look at what is the distinguishing feature of the museum? What is the thing that museums that can do

that very, very few other places can do? And that, I think, at its fundamental essence, which is not to devalue the importance of digitizing collections and having experiences accessible from all over the world. But the thing that museums do better than anything else is inspire awe at being in the presence of something spectacular

and sharing that with the people around you. That's beautiful. We need more tools in our toolkit, and it is myopic of us to not look at those. Museums have been using the same two or three tools for the last hundred years. Those tools being artifact, panel, or board with text on it, and maybe in the last 20 years of video if we're feeling crazy? What are some of the basic tools that digital curators have at their fingertips now,

how they're changing the museum experience, to help answer this spectrum of problems? They're the touch screens. There are the beacons that will talk to your phone. There are new types of audio tours. There are all sorts of different types of interactive screens or projections where you touch a physical object and then something will project on top of it? I think of, you know, augmented, mixed, and virtual reality in one kind of bucket,

although you need different devices to mediate those. And then there are kind of tracking and personalization technologies. RFID is radio frequency identification and NFC is near field communication. And both of those are technologies that allow either your phone or a chip in your ticket, or something to track you individually and in some instances allow exhibits to respond to you or to change their information as you get close to it. There's a geolocation that allow the museum to locate you wherever you are and push content to your phone.

Both LACMA and SFMOMA are engaged in very robust experiments on how to use that and are sort of the beta testing, I think, for a lot of us. It has issues in very tall spaces, a very crowd. outed spaces, which is sort of the definition of museums often. But the technology is evolving and evolving, and I have a feeling in a few years, it's going to be to a place where it'll be a hugely effective tool in allowing us to both track and impart information to patrons as they walk through the space. But there is a really scary underside to all of this.

So many of our experience that used to be shared are now isolated experiences. The idea of 28 million people walking through the Smithsonian museums over the course of a year looking at their phones in these, or in VR goggles, even worse. But some of these tools are fostering social interactions in a new way. And that's something we look at, and you use that word, accessibility. And I think we feel a responsibility at our museum to bring that experience to as many people as we can who will never have that opportunity to come to our museum. And so that's the challenge.

How do we come up with these experiences that can bring that same value, that can have that same measure of impact? And some of them will be better at fostering that social than others. Some might be a little more isolating. But I do think that sometimes you want a sort of inward-looking insular experience and the ability of some of these tools to heighten that is maybe also another tool in the arsenal. Absolutely. The physical experience, I believe, will always be richer than a digital experience because the

physical experience can hit all of our senses. And digital can be woven into that. So if you can't come to a museum, then what is that digital experience that will tell those stories? No one's answered the question. None of us have figured out, what will your digital experience of our museum be if you can't get there? The question that we all need to learn to ask is, what's the problem we're trying to solve? What's the story that we're trying to tell? What are the tools that we have that can answer that because sometimes people come to, at least to me, and they're saying, digital, you can do this. I'm like, well, what problem?

What are we trying to accomplish here? And sometimes it's digital. You're not just a hammer for every single nail. Yeah. Right. And sometimes like, how about we do, we did like a chalkboard, which, because we were asking people to respond. It's tactile.

It's in museum. Everyone can see their responses. The audience is sort of self-regulating. If there's something inappropriate, then people would erase it. And people said, but you're digital. Why are you doing a chalkboard? Like, we're doing a chalkboard

because it's the solution for the problem that we have, not a hammer for everything. I do think one of the opportunities that technology can help us solve in the museum world is this desire for personalization. That is something that technology that we don't particularly do well. One of the challenges that we have as museums is that, especially for the three of us at this table,

people tend to be coming to our museums once, which means that whatever we build has to be highly intuitive or something that once you figure it out in a fairly short amount of time and we're talking in the span of seconds or minutes and then it can be repeated over and over. It doesn't have the luxury that you might have

of sustained engagement, Of sustained engagement or something that you have to figure out. And so it has to be direct? Well, it has to be really easy because you're never, ever going to do it again. And you're not going to spend that much time trying to figure it out because you're in a crowded space with a lot of people. You mentioned before, you know, gamification. And that's something we've actually stayed away from for those reasons, right? The reason why we enjoy games is because they are complicated and then they're challenging in the beginning.

Oh, right. And then we do them over and over. and we get better at them. We don't have that opportunity in the museum. It has to be a don't make me think. But at the same time, but also make me think. But at the same time, contextually rich, it has to have educational value. It can't just be technology for the sake of technology taking up space on the floor in the museum. I make it a point to get out on the floor and just observe how people are experiencing those interactive so that we can get that real feedback of, you know, what seemed to be those pain points or are people stopping and engaging this with the way that we hope?

So you talk about the pain points of some of these tools. What is it like to have these in these crowded spaces when you have 8,000 people coming through touching these screens? One of the challenges, we have when we were prototyping in exhibit, which is a big thing for a museum to say, we're actually going to have a slightly different experience here for the next 16 hours, right? So we're pulling things in and out. But if we have 5,000 people touching a prototype, then we actually have to build a prototype then that can withstand at least 2,000 to 3,000 people touching it.

And that's not off-the-shelf stuff. And we did use something that was used for conferences, and it lasted eight hours. Eight hours. Museums on the whole do not have highly overstaffed IT, departments. The time that it takes to get something from an idea to the floor is often so long in the technological world that by the time it gets to the floor, it's already outdated. Something will become obsolete pretty quickly. That's a real challenge for the museum world.

I don't think it's being overstaffed. That's our challenge, which is the digital culture has gone to things like designing minimum bio product, going for lean design, and, And so it's looking to fail fast. That is not yet part of the museum culture. By the time you get something on the floor, technology may overtake you. It was recently in a museum where they had these beautiful tables. The problem with these interactive tables is that they were released like 2007. Well, in 2007, that's when the iPhone came out and everyone moved to swipe.

Wow. And those tables don't swipe. So they are indestructible, they're great, they're fantastic, they completely fail to meet the audience expectations of how I interact with a table. And that's a maintenance, like underfunded problem. What I've had to shift for myself and coming into museum space is, you know, what we mean when we say rapid is what's changed, right? From what to what? From two and four week, you know, cycles to two and four months. even that was, you know, a huge leap forward.

So from a technology standpoint, you know, one, yeah, hoping to make good bets on the underlying technology and some of the physical technology that we don't get stuck with a tabletop that is not going to meet visitor expectations in six months or, or a year. But really looking at the software that we develop so that we can make improvements and changes to the software, that they're not so married together. Oh, that there's just the hardware and the software. the software and the experience. You don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Certainly not the content. We can make changes to those stories. We can change out what we show on those tables. We can make, you know, start to make tweaks and hopefully improvements to the user interface and the user experience because those are software changes. That was something that went into the thinking in the beginning of the development is make sure the underlying software is built on top of, yeah, exactly that, right? It's built on...

Decoupled from the presentation layer. Decoupled from the presentation layer is built on a suite of APIs, that there is a content management system that the curators can use to update content based on feedback that we get from visitors, based on the analytics that we see of where are those drop-off points in the storytelling? Where are people getting stuck in their digital interactive experience on the table?

And then using that data, that information, to hopefully make some informed choices and informed decisions about how we improve those experiences. I wanted to actually specifically ask about the role of data in designing these exhibitions. A lot of these tools are about personalizing the experience. I mean, how much does data play into your decision-making and in the personalization of visitors' experiences? That is, I think especially for the Smithsonian, really powerful,

which is the ability to collect non-personal data about where people are going, what they are doing, what they're interested in. because we're a free set of museums. You know, we don't have a lot of information on our visitors. The ability to use the back end of all these interactive technologies to gather information and to make the museum experience overall better is a huge upside of technology that sometimes gets lost in the focus on what it can do for the visitors.

So what kinds of decisions do you make differently now because of that data? It's using the geolocation technologies that we're talking about to see where people are or the interactive ones can change things midstream. You know, this area of the museum isn't getting enough traffic or getting as much traffic or people aren't stopping here for very long. So how do we change the exhibit or change the information here so that it captures people's attention better or people are really clustering in this area. So maybe we want to put more things here.

You know, it's really kind of basic tracking and traffic patterns that are really helpful to understand. This is data that can completely change how we're shaping a physical space or how we create a physical experience. We've been using sort of the observing, where are people going, what are the questions that they're asking to create a new of orientation map. Maps are really hard and people really want to know where am I? Just literally getting around the museum, you mean? Literally when they first come in, what are the options? The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum is built.

specifically to show a moment when a society was falling apart. It is supposed to feel slightly confused, what would you say? Sort of shocking, not necessarily chaotic, but more, you think of the 1930s and Germany is falling apart, destabilizing. That's so good. And that makes it slightly hard to navigate on purpose. Yet, we are looking to create these frictionless experiences so that people can engage with the stories and the content that we are putting in front of them, both physically and digitally.

But it seems to me that, you know, part of what the museum has always been is a place to encounter the strange and the surprising and the unexpected ancient art that you would never have seen somewhere else. Data can't shape your vision. What it can do is once you've implemented your vision, it can show you where are places where you need to iterate and change because there may be an internal concept that we all were completely in love with. And then, you put it out on the floor or you put it on a website, choose your platform, and it just kind of fell flat. And that's another thing that digital has certainly brought into the museum world of doing

concept testing, iterative design, continually bringing the audience voice back into the conversation. It goes back to this fundamental assumption that museums need to be more of a dialogue and also that in today's world where we mediate the world through our own. choices and preferences and new sources and expression, the museum has to meet that expectation as well. There's a bunch of different ways to personalize experience. You know, I think really the Holocaust Museum, the Holocaust museums in general were trailblazers in this 25, however many years ago. With this idea that you pick a story, that you, when you come in, you're assigned

a person's story. I remember that having a profound effect on me. I kept the passport for years and years and years. So museums are now using these technologies to kind of take that to another level. And there's a couple great examples in Europe. There's the Horsons Prison Museum in Denmark in which you come in and this uses RFAD technology and you can pick a character and it's a prison guard or it's an inmate or it's a cook. And as you go and you get a card with that person's identity and as you go through the museum, literally these very rich exhibits transform to tell you the story of that person. So as you look into a cell and you scan your card, you see a hologram of the inmate that is your character sitting in that cell, typing on a typewriter, and you can see

the words from his actual journal typing out across the walls, all sorts of different experiences to take what this basic, you know, following a story idea and make it richer and bring it to life and animate it. And then there's another kind of option, the National Museum system of Wales where across all of their museums before you go, you download an app, you put in all your preferences, how old are you? What are you interested in? You know, what level of information is interesting to you? And then as you walk through the museum, you have this card with you and these beacons pick up where you are and can adjust the information you're getting to if you're 10 years old or if you're 80-year-olds, if you're a mechanical engineer, or if you're an artist,

you've kind of created your own profile, and so the information that you see at different spots adjusts to your preferences. So those are two examples of ways that you're still in the present, in the actual prison or seeing the, you know, lunar module. You're still in that social space. You're still in a social space, but you're getting information that is more tailored to your age, your interest level, your professional experience. Now the question is, as we're going forward, how do we create that personalized solution that allows us to see ourselves in the story, but also creates and enables that shared experience and then complicates your thinking about what society is and what our roles are.

One of the ways that we approach personalization in our museum is really all about that, is about accessibility, is about inclusion, is about seeing yourself in the museum and representation. And so I think... It's funny. A lot of this feels to me to be about empathy, really. That's an interesting insight. Traditionally, museums have been, you know,

cabinets of curiosities or places you go kind of like, I think you said, to see the unseen. But this idea that they're now locuses for... Specifically to create a sense of empathy. Yeah, right? Yeah. I mean, looking at the Holocaust Museum and Memorial,

and then you're looking at the African-American Museum of History and Culture, we're asking people to engage with really difficult topics and to think about them in new ways that they haven't before. In our museum, there are these reflections booths where individuals can go in and we provide with them questions to sort of get them thinking about the experience they just came through and they can record. It's a two-minute video that they can record of themselves sort of responding to these

questions. They're sharing their experience in the museum and what it's meant to them in a deeply personal way. And then those stories, they get shared back with the individual and they share them with their networks, with their family and friends on, they upload them to Facebook and they share them out on Twitter or YouTube. We're in the process now where those stories are also getting, you know, sort of reincorporated back into the museum experience.

So outside of each of those booths, there are videos on displays where, you know, different individuals are sharing their stories, sharing their reflections on a moment in history or something that they experience there. And it's incredibly powerful. And so you talk about personalization, and I think of it as now, these people are forming a personal connection with the museum. Their story is now a part of the museum's story. And that's a connection that is very, very powerful, I think, when you see whether it's

individuals or you see, you know, parents and kids or multi-generational. A lot of these experiments are about a desired emotional effect, an intellectual takeaway, but this is a weird thought. I love weird thoughts. They're my favorite kind. Well, I feel like you can't anticipate necessarily, right, the reactions that people will actually have. And sometimes it doesn't quite work out.

Like, I remember the World Trade, the 9-11 exhibit, the temporary one that happened, that right after September 11th, at the end, you could go into a booth and pick up a phone and listen to the voicemails that people had left from the plane. And I found that to be horrific and sort of a violation. And I remember comparing it to the Holocaust Museum at the time and thinking, what's the difference here where one feels gratuitous and macabre like you were getting some. some horror movie Friesant out of this. How do you think about gauging those emotional reactions when you're starting an experiment like that and you don't really know where it will go? There are a few things going on.

One that you've touched on, which is 9-11 isn't really history yet. It was so raw. It is in many ways still part of the present. There is an idea out there that history really, you can't talk about as history for about 25 years, that there needs to be some distance. And then there's also a question, that aside, the question of what is,

is there something that's too personal to share too much a part of the victims? Right. The Holocaust Museum had a huge discussion about whether or not hair should be on display. Yes, I remember that actually. Right. And it is not on display.

It is part. But the shoes are. Yes, but you can take your shoes, but you can take your shoes on and off. Oh, that's, is that how the decision is. The hair, the hair is part of, of you. It is part of your body. I just got, yeah, chills. That's a really interesting distinction.

And so in that, the last call you make to a loved one. You know that this is the last call. That is not kind of like your hair? Yeah, I think it is. And I think that's why it felt wrong, kind of, to me anyways. But I think when you're thinking about, you know, creating those experiences, though, and you, you know, in bringing it back to the reflections, booze. Well, that's what made me think of it.

Yeah. And, you know, and giving that over to the visitor, right? So, so you have that option as the visitor of whether you want to share your story with us at the museum. You opt in. And with others versus I just wanted as a keepsake for myself as a remembrance of my visit to the museum and what I experienced here. They don't have to share it with us.

It can be like a diary video. Exactly right. And sometimes we never see them. We certainly have ones that people have chosen to share with us where they're coming from the Slavery and Freedom Exhibition where it's a very emotionally wrought journey through that. Or they've come from the Emmettill Memorial and they're sharing the emotions that that caused in them coming from that.

and reflecting on things that are happening still today in our society. And so you get these incredibly charged emotional stories, very personal stories. But always remembering it's, you know, it's something that if they choose to share it with us, that's part of, I think, you know, challenging some held beliefs of increasing the dialogue and fostering, oftentimes very difficult, challenging conversations because they're done, right? I think this also asks another question, which is, is it necessary? Are you doing something because it's going to be a shock or be, you know, grab your attention? Are you doing it because it's integral to the story?

And there's different answers, right? I mean, I think hair arguably might be integral to the story, but be on the wrong side of the line in terms of too personal. But there's also the temptation with technology to do it because we can. Well, we should have a virtual reality experience in this exhibit or, well, we should have an augmented reality app here. And just because you can do something and because it's going to get a rise temporarily, gamification is the same thing. You know, there's some things that it's actually just not helpful to make a game out of. Although I would say that, you know, if we are experimenting, we don't actually know,

you know, to some degree, we have to push these limits and figure out how they're going to feel. Absolutely. And we'll only know when we get it wrong or when we get it right. But we do need to have that conversation of what problem are we trying to solve, what story are we trying to tell, and to stay. What's the end goal? Yeah. Last question, just to look forward a little bit,

what do you think 20 years from now will be the biggest difference in the way we interact with museums? I think it'll be integrated. At that point, we won't be, you won't ask us to have a conversation about museums and digital. You'll just ask us to have a conversation

about museum experiences. It'll just be completely... It'll be completely integrated. Baked in. Yeah. I think 20 years from now will be having the same conversation with different technologies. I do. You know, museums for many reasons, they're not leaders, they're laggers. And in some ways, that's good because we really are so protective

of our core experience. It is a protective institution, yeah, by nature. I mean, where our job is to protect at the core these amazing artifacts and stories that we've been interested with. But I think this sort of double bottom line for museums is how to accommodate the changing expectations and habits of our visitors without losing our North Star. Digital is a tactic to, to engage. engage with audiences, right? It's not a separate strategy that museums and cultural institutions should be pursuing. At the same time, there's going to be new challenges are going to arise. We haven't imagined yet because all those other ways that people receive information, the way that they communicate with one another, are going to continue to evolve by leaps and bounds over

the coming years and decades. And I think for us, that's where we look to going forward is the way that people engage with us and how they're sharing with the people who mean the most to them is really where we should be looking to in terms of what we want to do next. That's beautiful. Thank you all so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you so much.