• Blog home

A mobile app in development

By: Dr Lynda Kelly, Category: Museullaneous, Date: 15 Oct 2011

A case study from Finland: Presentation by Leenu Juurola, Museum of Technology (Tekniikan museo) Finland, at the Open and Learning Museum Conference, Tampere, Finland, 12 October 2011. My edited selection of Leena’s PowerPoint slides are reproduced here with permission.

How can we use mobile to make the exhibition experience stronger?

Technology supports interactions with visitor and museum as they can:

• make artefacts alive
• help create information pathways in museum
• be used as an information collector (what are visitors doing?) and tool for sharing
• encourage visitor involvement
• be a hook within an exhibition: tech language is today's language
• build bridges from one learning environment to another
• support modern concepts of learning – true lifelong learning

What did they learn from their mobile development project?

• Visitors like a mixture of humour and information
• They want bigger fonts, more objects and (if using the museum-supplied tech) better phones
• Often the tech gets in the way – inhibiting the experience, not enhancing it
• Need to strike a balance between content, technical and visuals
• Tech changes rapidly and often there are major changes (e.g. iPhone, iPad2) – need to find ways to cope with that
• Thinking out of the box is challenging
• Teamwork based on trust is fundamental
• The project is never ready or finished, updating is important
• Challenges of research during the project – need both flexible and fixed boundaries, and has to be planned at the beginning
• Challenge of creativity tasks in mobile –how can we measure thinking?
• How to stop project fatigue? Tech projects often take a long time and we can become tired of them (we found this when developing DangerOz too!)

For more on the Tekniikan museo go to their website (it is in Finnish tho!).

Thanks for sharing Leena.