In my recent travels to art museums, I’ve spent far too much time gazing at digital screens instead of the art. That’s because I’ve been researching an article for tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal (online now) analyzing museums’ use of technology to enhance the gallery experience.
My article’s unsung hero is Stephanie Cunningham, one of the Brooklyn Museum’s group of educators and art historians armed with deep information resources at their fingertips and trained to answer, quickly and cogently, the questions posed to them by visitors on the museum’s new ASK app.
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
At the end of my article, I praised the ASK experience as “thoroughly satisfying,” although, truth be told, I did manage to stump the experts once on each of my two separate visits. When this happens, visitors who are willing to provide an email address are sent an answer after further research.
Several times while working on this article, I was amused to find myself in the unaccustomed position of explaining unintuitive, overly complicated tech tricks to older visitors who were clearly befuddled and in need of guidance. I was less amused when I myself got stymied, only to find out, upon consulting a museum staffer, that it was the balky device, not me, that was at fault.
I’m concerned that those who read my article will (as one commenter already has) regard me as anti-technology. I’m not. I tried to take these devices on their own terms and, in several cases, found them significantly wanting.
As I wrote in the WSJ:
Intended to inform and delight, these innovations are often unintuitive, inadequately explained, or exasperatingly dysfunctional.
Read here about my museum-tech adventures, and judge for yourself!