Chronicle: Get Smart(phones)

Download the article here.

In many museums, visitors are asked to silence and stow their cell phones when entering the galleries. But that’s not the case at the Brooklyn Museum, one of the nation’s largest art museums. In fact, visitors are encouraged to use their Web-enabled cell phones to explore the galleries with the help of BklynMuse, a new application designed especially for smartphones that lets visitors get on-the-spot recommendations and see what exhibits others are enjoying. “Our mission is about accessibility and community,” explains Shelley Bernstein, the museum’s chief of technology. “We’re saying, ‘Tell us what you like, and we’ll try to give you recommendations for what else you might like.’”

Though more than 80 percent of us still use “legacy” phones—those that aren’t Web-enabled and simply make calls and send texts—smartphones are rapidly increasing in popularity, especially among the 20- to 40-year-old demographic that many museums are eager to reach. “We want to provide a variety of tools, and a lot of people are really receptive to this technology,” says Kristin Prestegaard, director of marketing at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (MIA), which launched a free iPhone application last fall as part of an exhibit about the use of nontraditional methods to explore African art. Smartphone users are still primarily technology early adopters, and their feedback is helping to redefine the museum-going experience, making it more interactive and social.

At the Brooklyn Museum, the in-house designers who created BklynMuse were eager to release it to the public and let visitors help them refine and improve the application. Visitors using BklynMuse create their own gallery tours by entering one object or artwork of interest into the application, which then recommends other related works the visitor might enjoy. When users flag their favorite pieces, the program stores that data to recommend it to other visitors who also like Byzantine art or photographs of architecture. Users can even focus on a specific motif, such as clouds or the color yellow, and BklynMuse will point them toward works featuring those elements. Visitors to the museum’s website can also create sets of related objects, and then access and share those sets via smartphone when they arrive at the museum.

The initial iteration of BklynMuse was released last August, and a second version debuted this March. User feedback helps the museum make changes; for example, users have indicated that they want to be able to create sets and comment on objects while in the galleries with their smartphones, rather than having to go through the website first. In early 2009, shortly after putting its collection data online, the museum also took the important step of releasing its API, or application programming interface—basically, the code that lets outside programmers use the museum’s data to create their own applications. A few months later, one of these outside programmers created a free iPhone app called Brooklyn Museum Mobile Collection, which allows offsite users to browse the museum’s holdings.

There are both benefits and detriments to making the museum’s API public, Bernstein explains. Outside programmers bring new points of view and produce useful applications at no cost to the museum, but they also aren’t generally aware of the museum’s mission. “We were really happy to see the Mobile Collection, but if we had done this, it would have been part of BklynMuse, which is accessible from any platform. It illustrates outsider thinking versus our internal mission,” Bernstein says. Luckily, the Mobile Collection coder was happy to share his code, and plans are in the works for a third iteration of BklynMuse that will combine its existing capabilities and the Mobile Collection into one application.

Designing a truly interactive app like BklynMuse might be a daunting task for many museums, but there are plenty of examples of less-extensive—but still innovative—smartphone uses. The Dallas Museum of Art introduced its smARTphone tours in summer 2009, reaching beyond the one-size-fits-all traditional museum audio tour. “By adapting an everyday technology as a museum interpretive tool, we are expanding how our public can interact and learn more about the art in our galleries in an accessible and familiar way,” says Director Bonnie Pittman.

In addition to standard information about a piece’s title and the artist who made it, the smARTphone tours provide supplemental information intended to pique visitors’ curiosity and engage them more deeply with the works of art. Visitors browsing the museum’s Wendy and Emery Reves Collection can use the smARTphone tour to hear an audio clip of museum benefactor Wendy Reves talking about her passion for collecting art, see archival photographs of the couple relaxing with their friend Winston Churchill and view images of the insides of two Renaissance cabinets on display at the museum. Visitors who don’t have their own smartphone can borrow one at the front desk and view the collections remotely from the Web, as all the smARTphone tours are also available online.

MIA’s iAfrica application for iPhone works both onsite and off, and provides extended collection information and links to an online survey that allows visitors to share their thoughts about the museum’s African galleries, including changes they’d like to see when the galleries are reinstalled in coming years. The application, which was designed by the museum’s interactive media department and approved by Apple, also includes “some fun bells and whistles,” like a digital lamellophone—a virtual thumb piano modeled after a real version from the Democratic Republic of Congo featured in the museum’s African gallery—that users can play, says Prestegaard.

And at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, the new media department developed TAP, a multimedia guided tour to the museum’s “Sacred Spain” exhibit that works with both iPhones and iPod Touch devices. TAP provides users with supplementary video and audio content related to objects in the exhibit, including footage of the 2009 Holy Week processions in Navaicarnero, Spain, and in-depth interviews with curators and exhibit designers. Two new TAP multimedia smartphone tours are in the works for upcoming exhibits.

While art museums are still the widest users of smartphone technology, other types of museums are getting on board, too. The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History created a free iPhone and iPod Touch application to serve as a “digital field guide” to its “Butterflies Alive!” exhibit last summer. The app helped visitors identify the butterflies fluttering in the exhibit by providing magnified digital images, and also included an audio tour.

“Anyone older than a kindergartener is a ‘digital immigrant,’” says Easter Moorman, the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History’s marketing and PR manager. “But the next generation are ‘digital natives,’ and for them, museums need to fit in the palm of the hand. The experience of visiting a museum should go beyond the walls.” The Santa Barbara Museum is currently working with a local college to develop new smartphone applications that will highlight visitors’ top 10 favorite exhibits and provide supplemental information beyond what they get in the museum.

The hurdles to wider smartphone use in museums are not insignificant. Accessibility is always a top concern since so many visitors don’t have smartphones and are sufficiently unfamiliar with the technology that loaner models don’t appeal to them. The cost of developing smartphone applications as exhibits change can also be prohibitive, especially if museums aren’t lucky enough to have full-time media designers and coders. For many museums, designing complex smartphone applications may come after intermediate steps—such as creating text-message trivia games, accessible to any visitor with a simple text-enabled cell phone—to supplement existing audio-tour stops.

But for museums that are able to explore cutting-edge technology with their patrons, the benefits are clear, Bernstein says. “The more information we can put in multiple formats, the better. People can choose how they use it. That’s a complete win in my book.”