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I didn't bring my son to a museum to look at screens

• potbelly83 1y ago
  Nothing really to add, but the NSA museum outside of DC is really cool. I think this is a good example of a museum that works well for adults/kids alike.
• divbzero 1y ago
  It’s not just museums. Schools today also face the challenge of limiting screens in favor of hands-on activities.
  • moduspol 1y ago
    And amusement parks, even. Well, maybe just Universal Studios. And I guess their brand emphasis is on movies, but still: does EVERY ride need to be heavily reliant on screens?!
• onetokeoverthe 1y ago
  the exploratorium in san francisco has also been dumbed down. the old palace of fine arts exploratorium had a working TESLA COIL !
  • OkayPhysicist 1y ago
    IMO, the geyser exhibit in the Exploratorium is one of best demonstrations I've seen in a museum. Far more impressive than a tesla coil, and contains a really good explanation of how it works (unlike the vast majority of tesla coil exhibits). Sure, a tesla coil is flashy and a pretty awesome (in the biblical sense) demonstration of man's harnessing of electricity, but they don't really tell you much about how electricity works. A simple snap-together circuit with a battery, some wires, and some incandescent light bulbs does a much better job of that.
• parpfish 1y ago
  One of my longstanding peeves is that art museums are treated as serious places for grown-ups but science museums and zoos are treated as places for kids.
  • gullywhumper 1y ago
    Visiting my parents this summer with my kids, I was excited to find that the zoo served beer. That definitely wasn't an option for my dad when I was growing up.
    • vel0city 1y ago
      The zoo near us had boozy lemonade stands on Labor Day this year. Quite refreshing.
  • greyb 1y ago
    I get the economics of it for science museums, but at least science museums in major cities tend to have adults-only nights now.
    • MarkusQ 1y ago
      Where the adults get to act like kids and drink. They don't add substance to the exhibits, they don't attempt to educate, they just attempt to tap an adjacent market for the same dumbed down slop. (Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of the _idea_, just a huge critic of the _implementation_.)
      • OkayPhysicist 1y ago
        The Exploratorium had a few speakers at the adult night that I went to. It was definitely on the pop-sci end of the spectrum, but it was definitely not dumbed down to kid levels. Heck, even during normal operations, I'd say the Exploratorium walks a fair line between "approachable to children" and "teaching more science topics than we expect most adults to know".
      • parpfish 1y ago
• crazygringo 1y ago
  > But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with. To be fair, that's what I remember children's museums being like in the 1980s as well. A significant number of exhibits would be temporarily out of order on any given day. I don't think screens are responsible for that. Maintaining physical exhibits that can survive constant physical contact with kids is hard.
  • dcminter 1y ago
    Yup. Tim Hunkin went for a last look around his Secret Life of the Home exhibition¹ at the London Science Museum and quite a few things were out of order; this may be because the exhibit was imminently closing, but my impression is that that's just the deal with mechanical exhibits - they break more often than the digital ones. Very likely it's one reason the screens are at the forefront. ¹ https://youtu.be/cqpvl-YGFD4 https://youtu.be/cqpvl-YGFD4
    • incone123 1y ago
      Similar thing at This Museum is (Not) Obsolete, in Ramsgate. Just so many things that can go wrong that you expect not everything will be working on your particular visit.
      • TRiG_Ireland 1y ago
        That's a one-man passion project, isn't it? I follow Look Mum No Computer on YouTube.
        • incone123 1y ago
          Might be a couple of people. I certainly don't hold it against them if a few things are out of service on any given day.
    • Animats 1y ago
      Ah, it's been "modernized". I like that museum. But you had to know the history of technology to appreciate it. There's Maudslay's lathe! Now it's been dumbed down.
• badlibrarian 1y ago
  It's rampant in art museums as well. It costs approximately $2,000 to frame a 36" piece of art to museum standards. A similarly sized LCD screen, on the other hand... Art wasn't supposed to be a "by the square foot" kind of thing yet here we are.
  • symlinkk 1y ago
    It costs $2000? Why?
    • badlibrarian 1y ago
      Archival preservation materials, anti-reflective glass, and a person who knows what they heck they're doing around artifacts is expensive. Just getting the thing onsite can cost thousands.
    • AndrewLiptak 1y ago
      It costs a lot of money to create a frame! You need skilled people to make one, get the proper archival glass to protect whatever you're displaying. There's a lot of work and field best practices that goes into this.
      • forgotoldacc 1y ago
        And then you visit nearly any museum in Europe, and walls are absolutely covered in paintings with almost none of the wall itself visible and most of the paintings not even behind any sort of glass. It's kind of funny.
        • kridsdale1 1y ago
          The STOP OIL NOW people are changing that with their paint.
          • wizzwizz4 1y ago
            (a) Just Stop Oil has disbanded. (b) They only pulled that stunt on art that was already behind suitably-protective covers. (Whether the stunt is effective or not, they weren't putting artwork at risk: just temporarily disrupting the operation of galleries, and getting themselves arrested.) (c) This is completely off-topic.
• DrNosferatu 1y ago
  Well, video-art.
• zdw 1y ago
  If you have a change to visit the Tokyo Science Museum, it's quite good in this respect - it has a lot of interactive displays, many of which are very hands on, and some are application based - focused on how the science concepts are used in industry (with some occasional corporate tie-ins, which weren't too over the top). It's fairly kid focused, as others have mentioned - most of your competition for seeing the exhibits will be school student groups. Incidentally, the building is featured near the end of the Shin Godzilla movie.
  • timr 1y ago
    Are you talking about the one in Kitanomaru park, or the Miraikan, on Daiba? The Miraikan, in particular, is a fantastic science museum. I think it suffers a bit from what the OP is describing -- and also, a lack of English -- but for the most part it's interactive and uses technology in a really innovative way that goes beyond iPad fluff (an interactive seismograph room comes to mind, where you could move around and see the systems detect your movements in real time).
    • zdw 1y ago
      Ah, the first one is where I went - 科学技術館 (Kagakukijutsukan) in Kitanomaru park between the imperial palace and budoukan. It has some english (but, as always in Japan, knowing a little Japanese greatly helps), and the exhibits are fairly self-explanatory. Good to know that there's another nice place to go.
• SilverElfin 1y ago
  Agree a lot of “museums” are turning into less of cool items and more of a lot of text and visuals and electronic displays. I could just do that at home and skip the inconvenience, cost, and exposure.
• Frozen_Flame 1y ago
  It's disappointing to see but it feels as if to keep a futuristic theme and to provide almost an "edutainment" environment that a museum feels as though it must implement screens to keep up with the times. I think this might almost be comparable to how places like McDonalds that had themed play areas for kids have been wiped away. We aren't really designing many places where kids can be kids and when we do, we try to put more screens in there to connect with a younger technology savvy generation?
  • throwawayoldie 1y ago
    > It's disappointing to see but it feels as if to keep a futuristic theme and to provide almost an "edutainment" environment that a museum feels as though it must implement screens to keep up with the times. And you just know that in board meetings of plenty of museums, someone is saying "We NeEd To MaKe ThE mUsEuM Ai-NaTiVe."
• giancarlostoro 1y ago
  When I was in 5th grade (I think?) we went to the nation's capitol as a field trip. My mom volunteered to be a chaperone, as a result over the following years, we would go back. We would go into every museum, if you get a room at the right hotel (I forget which one we stayed at back to back) you can walk to any and all the museums, you can spend all day in several different museums. I highly recommend anyone to take such a trip if you've never been to DC. The city is full of so much history that we all have been taught, its something else to see it in person.
• renewiltord 1y ago
  This is just complaining that the SF Exploratorium is not in your city.
  • throwawayoldie 1y ago
    No, this is complaining that the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia has gotten worse over the decades.
    • renewiltord 1y ago
      But that makes sense. Half of Philadelphia is practically illiterate https://www.achieve-now.com/poverty-cycle https://www.achieve-now.com/poverty-cycle One must imagine their educators are crap
    • madcaptenor 1y ago
      You're asking a lot to expect people on HN to know that Philadelphia exists.
      • throwawayoldie 1y ago
        Maybe it would help if I describe it as being in the Extremely East Bay. Like, about 3,000 miles east.
• AndrewLiptak 1y ago
  I work in a museum, so I'll add in a couple of cents. Seth isn't entirely wrong here: museums are good opportunities for hands-on activities and to see things in a real sensory way that you can't in other places. "I believe museums exist to present the real thing for the visitor to experience with their own senses" rings really true to me. That said: iPads and screens do have their place and it really depends on how well they're implemented. First up: "But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with." This is probably the key reason why there are so many screens in this particular museum: he answers his own question. Physical items, especially things with motion, will degrade with time and use, and maintenance can get really expensive. Physical models like a human heart aren't something that you can generally buy off the rack: museums and similar institutions will work with a company to produce something like that (I'm guessing fiberglass?) These are things that can run thousands and thousands of dollars to repair or outright replace. But here's the other thing with a physical static or interactive display: once they're in, they're in. You can't really update them without actually replacing the entire thing. Here's an example: at the museum where I work, we have a section about the Civil War: it had some uniforms, weapons, and a whole bunch of other items that told the story as it related to our mission. The panel that outlined everything stretched across the room -- it was about 20 feet long. When we pulled everything out to update it, we had to replace that entire panel. It was a good fix, because the room hadn't been updated in like 15-20 years, but if we had wanted to pull out any one item, we'd still have to replace the entire panel. That sort of thing can be an impediment to updates, because it requires a lot of work. We ended up putting in three panels, which will allow us to switch out objects more easily. We also put in an interactive with an iPad that allows visitors to explore a painting in the exhibit in a lot more depth. We've done a handful of these sorts of interactives, and as I noted up above, the experience really depends on the audience and how well it's presented. In our case, we aim for ours to be usable for a wider range, which means that we have to keep things fairly simple, so adults and children can use them. "My wife — a science writer who used to be the only staff writer covering space for New Scientist and before that, worked at NASA — poked at one of these with my son, added too many boosters to their launch vehicle, and were told it failed “for reasons” in a way she found totally unhelpful and pointless." That doesn't entirely surprise me, because she's an expert and is really knowledgeable in the field! But you have to make sure that you're calibrating for your audience: most of the people using that likely won't have her experience or knowledge, and digging deeper and deeper into detail might be lost on most of their audience. (Not having seen it, I can't tell for sure.) It is good to have that depth of knowledge be available, if you have audience members who do want to go further, but it could come down to limitations or be an exception that they didn't account for. Digital interactives can also be swapped out quite a bit more quickly: if you have a new exhibit that you're putting in for a short amount of time, it might make more sense to have something that doesn't cost a lot if it's only going to run for months, rather than years. (Or if you find an error, there's new research, new updates, etc. -- a digital interface is easier to update than a static panel.) On top of all that: cultural institutions are facing real crunches right now. There's a lot of uncertainty (and outright lack of support) from federal funding sources (which in turn impacts the willingness of private/state/NPO donors), and staff shortages that means everyone has fewer resources and fewer people to utilize them with. From where I sit, if we have to implement more digital content, we'll be able to repurpose the screens that we've already purchased to new exhibits and interactives. Finally, there's nostalgia at play here: I have a ton of fond memories of visiting museums with interactives and huge displays, and I'm glad that I can take my kids to them as well. But I'm also happy to see that these museums aren't stuck in the past and the only thing that they're doing is rehabilitating old exhibits that are decades old or out of date: they still have some of those things, but they're also making sure to bring in new interactives, looking at new scholarship and best practices for museums (because museums aren't static organizations or fields!) to change as audiences change. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who use screens as a way to take in information: museums have to keep abreast of those trends, because if we don't deliver information to people in familiar and accessible ways, they probably won't come in.
• Workaccount2 1y ago
  Why bother with hardware when you can just use software?
  • randycupertino 1y ago
    Exactly. It's easier and cheaper for the museum to change exhibits when they just update the screen vs swapping out a hands on exhibit. Screens also use less floor space and are easier to maintain.
  • eloisant 1y ago
    Because that's what a museum is supposed to be.
• dfxm12 1y ago
  And the wonderful hands-on physical stuff that I loved as a kid? Jammed into out-of-the-way spaces in the Sir Isaac’s Loft and Air Show rooms. These rooms are terrific, and I was delighted to see they were absolutely packed with kids playing with stuff. I'm really not sure what the problem is, given that these exhibits are there, popular and obviously accessible. Ok, the author has an issue with screens, but, hey, a lot of real science is done on screens today...
• AnthonBerg 1y ago
  I’m inclined to believe that this happens because there are strong incentives to being able to add to your resume “Directed digital modernization of Museum of Note”.
• sam_lowry_ 1y ago
  French have a weird passion for screens in museums.
• theogainey 1y ago
  I have personally made several interactive displays/exhibits for work. Yeah there are plenty of poorly made ones out there, but speaking from experience a good one truly does turns a museum into something a child is excited to visit. There is a reason why children's museums are made the way they are. Even children that are interested in learning, want to play. A great digital experience at a museum does wonders to bridge the gap between a regular museum and a children's museum. If a child has fun at a museum they are going to want to go back. If they keep having fun and keep wanting to go back, eventually they are going to start paying attention to substance of the museum. I agree great physical experiences are missing from many museums, but I'll happily continue to trick children into wanting to learn any way I can
• rs186 1y ago
  My biggest gripe is that art museums, especially modern art museums, play documentary/clips from documentary that last anywhere from 2 minutes to 30 minutes. Those films are not accessible anywhere else. I would be very willing to watch them in full, but like most other visitors, I have limited time, especially when visiting a new museum in a different city. If you say observing a painting/sculpture in person is different from looking at a picture, fine, whatever, but making these videos only available in museums is sad.
  • jillesvangurp 1y ago
    I always just skip video installations in modern art museums. Because these are usually a bit meh and dated technologically, and you always walk in mid way through some screening of some random thing. Somehow it never occurs to them to just put that stuff on Youtube or one of the other streaming platforms. I guess that would be a bit too modern. It always annoys me when they have a lot of this going on; especially when the ticket price is high. Usually a sign of a weak curator and exposition. If filling the space with interesting art is a challenge, that's what you do. And the art is why I go there.
• A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  I will admit that the author's post strikes a chord. The last time we visited Chicago's museum of science, this was the only acceptable use of screens for me ( https://www.msichicago.org/explore/whats-here/exhibits/blue-paradox https://www.msichicago.org/explore/whats-here/exhibits/blue-... ). That was genuinely well done and awe-inspiring. The rest of the stuff that is basically just a lame tablet app is a waste of my ( and my kids )time and, well, money. That said, and I offer it merely as a defense, if the goal is to interest kids, you want to meet them where they are at. Apps is where they are at. Granted, thanks to parents, but still.
• colinb 1y ago
  Before reading the article, I was going to talk about my very disappointing visit to the Franklin Institute a few months ago. Then I read the article and discovered that it's about the disappointment of visiting the Franklin Institute. My strongest impression of that museum is that it mostly consists of corporate sponsorship displays and a few neglected lessons in how things actually work. I did enjoy walking around the enormous steam loco in the basement. That one room, where they seem to have stuffed all the old 'museum' stuff was the highlight of my visit. The best science museum I've been to in years is in Glasgow. Walking across the I-beam compared to the sheet (or was it a bar?) of steel actually taught my kids something.
  • dangus 1y ago
    In this sense I’m not sure if the article is an indictment of science museums overall. The conclusion seems to be that “this one specific museum sucks.”
• didibus 1y ago
  I admit to not being a museum head myself. Now that I'm a parent though, I've gone to them all, multiple times. Before that, I'd not gone to any of them unless they're world famous. If it wasn't for kids, nobody would go to most museums (non-famous ones especially) Kids are simply the demographic, because every parent is looking for activities to entertain the kids every day. Interactive non-screen based exhibits that are designed for kids are the best, but if you can't have that for cost/know-how reasons interactive multi-media exhibits are a good second on the "it did a good job entertaining my kid" spectrum. Actually learning anything is a secondary demand from the consumer when it comes to museums unfortunately. Entertaining the kids is number one, bonus points if it also managed to entertain the parents.
• dlcarrier 1y ago
  It's not a museum, unless there's a dark room with a bunch of mostly empty chairs lined up in front of a projection screen showing a slide show or documentary (or really both at the same time) with an overly enthusiastic narration covering the history of the subject. Sometimes you can't even get to the displays, without first at least walking through the room. Whenever I walk by the vaguely muffled sounds of someone watching a movie in another room, I get nostalgic for childhood visits to museums.
  • _DeadFred_ 1y ago
    A little too cold. Stimulating but also lulling you to sleep with it's proto ASMR. Your parents slightly frustrated that this is the point your choose to have an attention span.
• amatecha 1y ago
  Same thing at Science World, luckily they have a lot of tangible artifacts, but a ton of computers/displays. Last time I went (<6mo ago) a bunch of displays/stations in the most-hyped exhibit were non-functional due to hardware faults. :\
• divbzero 1y ago
  > I remember running through the gigantic model heart with other kids. This is one of the most memorable exhibits in TFI and thankfully still exists today.
  • madcaptenor 1y ago
    I am from Philly but don't live there any more and was a little bit sad when I took my kid to the Franklin Institute and she didn't want to go in the giant heart. It scared her. I'm hoping we can go again next time we visit and she won't be scared.
• elric 1y ago
  I had a (now defunct) startup in this space some years ago. Maybe I can help shed some light on why things are the way they are. 1. Money. Most museums have no money. They either run on donations, on subsidies, or at the whim of wealthy patrons. They are very costly to run, especially the big ones. They are often in prime real estate areas, many require tight climate control, many also require specialised lighting to protect art etc. 2. Curators often see "taking care" of the exhibits as more important than actually exhibiting them. Not to mention they're often art/history majors with very little clue about anything digital. 3. Because museums are often subsidised, many of them are required to go through public tender procedures to get anything done. Because this is a huge pain for everyone involved, the results are often shit, as it attracts a certain kind of company to do the work. One of the tenders my startup looked at involved not only supplying the hardware and software for an interactive exhibit, but also the lighting and reinforced glass casings for various items. This was not our cup of tea, and the tender would subtract points for using subcontractors... Personally I'm not interested in museums that are just glass cases with stuff without any explanation. Maybe a little paper legend is sufficient, but I actually prefer a screen which offers more info in the form of adio or video in multiple languages. Depending on the exhibit, 3D printed replicas can be great as well.
  • BryantD 1y ago
    Good feedback. I wouldn't put "taking care" in quotes, however; my wife is a former museum worker and has graduate degrees in the field, and preservation is a key part of the role. Exhibits aren't just for the now, they're for the future. People would love to sit in the cockpit of the Bockscar bomber (little bit morbid, but true); allowing that would result in serious damage over time. This is less important for educational spaces like the one the OP describes -- strictly speaking, science museums often aren't museums in the classical sense. Preservation is less important there, although not unimportant.
    • elric 1y ago
      Oh I didn't put it in quotes out of disdain or anything, more because I couldn't think of a better description. Preservation sounds better indeed.
• ratelimitsteve 1y ago
  >poked at one of these [design a rocket apps] with my son, added too many boosters to their launch vehicle, and were told it failed “for reasons” in a way she found totally unhelpful and pointless. This is tripping my bullshit-o-meter. If it just failed "for reasons" how do you know it failed because there were too many boosters? Kinda sounds like the game explained that to them.
• kleiba 1y ago
  There is an incredible pressure on a lot of public facing endeavors to include digital, no matter whether it makes any sense at all or not. Take education, for instance - if it weren't such an important topic, it would be almost comical to observe how our schools are trying to jump through hoops to cram more IT into the classroom. (I wish the people responsible would take a look at Scandinavia though, where they are years ahead in that respect and have already begun taking digital devices out of the classrooms again.) But it's not about what makes sense. It's about prestige, and about the ability to tell everyone "look at us, how forward we are!". This seems very clear to me, for instance, by the fact that the year 7 comp sci classes they teach in our local high school have what on their curriculum? Yep, that's right, you guessed it: AI. Because that's apparently the absolute basic CS that every student should start with these days. Education is only one example, of course. But it's really creeping into everything. That museums have screen everywhere is no surprise. After all, flashing screen surely release more endorphins than non-interactive physical exhibits, so if you want to attract young folks, the pressure is on.
  • serial_dev 1y ago
    I don’t know what exactly they teach about AI, but trying out different AI tools could be very important, it’s a great learning tool if you want it to be. It can help students learn math, history, programming…
    • prerok 1y ago
      Indeed, but it's more like computer literacy not comp sci. We also had a course in "computers" in high school. We had to know by heart the contents of "File" and "Edit" menus for Paint in Win3.1. Windows95 was just came out that year, so naturally the curiculum had not adapted yet. Anyway, guess how useful that was. The only one student who knew how to program got an F in the course :) It was, of course, a way to teach nontechs how to use computers, as misguided as the material was. So, in that light, starting with AI makes sense. Would be nice to also include a bit more technical course, but apparently knowing where and when a poet was born is more important.
      • 1y ago
• crab_galaxy 1y ago
  I totally agree with the authors point. The Franklin Institute at its core is a place that teaches science through tactile experience and the special exhibits don’t reflect that. Some context as a local though, the Franklin Institute’s special exhibit space rotates every couple of months and I imagine they’re put on by outside vendors who move the exhibit from venue to venue. The special exhibits for better or for worse more akin to Disney World or the pop culture museum in Seattle. I’ve been to a bunch of them and they’re usually quite good, but they don’t represent that tactile learning experience at all. Many of us Philadelphians really lament that the place isn’t as well maintained as it should be. It was the field trip destination for so many kids and I’m sorry OP wasn’t able to recreate that same level of magic for their kids.
• clausecker 1y ago
  My favourite museums are those that are a huge pile of old shit with some labels telling you what you are looking at. This whole "hundreds of screens with some odd artifact inbetween" style is just boring.
• paxys 1y ago
  If you want to take your kid to a museum then...go to a museum. The Franklin Institute, which they went to, is not a museum. I have the Liberty Science Center near me, which is also not a museum. They have interactive exhibits, planeteriums, and yes, screens. All this is by design, and it is great.
• kylestetz 1y ago
  I was an exhibit designer there in the early 2010s (the last exhibit I worked on was "Your Brain"); we had an incredible in-house design team that did all of the design and interactive prototyping, but unfortunately everyone was let go in ~2016 in favor of outsourcing much of the design work. The truth is that the traveling exhibits (Body Worlds, Harry Potter, etc.) make a lot more money for them and do not require the ongoing maintenance burden. They have a reduced ability to design the exhibits as precisely as they used to and the physical stuff takes a tremendous amount of work and expertise to do well. That said, the museum is run by people who care deeply about science education and the proliferation of touch screens is something they are sensitive to. The type of content has a lot to do with it (a physics exhibit has no excuse not to be 99% physical interactives), as does the fact that they tailor exhibits to many different styles of learning so that there's something for everyone.
  • sethpurcell 1y ago
    Author here, thanks for your comment. I'm really sad to hear that everyone was let go; as I said, I loved TFI like nothing else when I was a kid. I completely understand the incentives re: Body Worlds, Harry Potter (I've even seen an Angry Birds exhibit). But there's a fine line between a non-profit doing what it must to survive, and drifting so far from its mission that it no longer deserves to survive. TFI is still far from that point, but the trajectory is worrisome to me, so I called it out.
    • kylestetz 1y ago
      Yeah I hear you, and fwiw I largely agree with your article. Whether the presence of screens and software-based experiences means they are drifting from their mission is definitely up for debate, but your point is taken! Similar to you I had a hugely impactful trip to TFI in 5th grade, and much later on it was a dream to work there. And now I get to take my 5 year old. It's a special place and it's nice to see people feeling protective of it :)
• IAmBroom 1y ago
  Absolute irony: Pittsburgh has a privately-owned museum of computers (actually in New Kensington, a suburb). A HUGE amount of big old boxes. PDPs, Cray, some early home computers and printers. Some have been actively used by the owner/maintainer, so we know they work. But there's no digital displays. There are screens - that are off. The owner can barely make rent, even in that desolated section of real estate, so there's not going to be any snappy big screens or interactive software. But it's literally a museum of computers where no computers are computing.
• natalie3p 1y ago
  I think a lot of the time, museums really want to be "immersive" and give kids (and adults) something interactive. The problem is that "interactive" defaults to a touchscreen because it's easy to implement and maintain and looks flashy, even if it doesn't actually teach anything or spark curiosity the way a hands-on exhibit does. Honestly though, I think these kids do want to interact with the real world but lack the chance to. Screens are seductive and safe, but nothing beats the thrill of making something move with your own hands and actually seeing the physics happen. As an example, one exhibition I found pure joy in that doesn’t involve screens is the Museum of Illusions. It's hands-on, mind-bending, and utterly delightful.
• econ 1y ago
  A museum here plays an inaudible voice recording on a 30 min loop with the speaker persistently building on previous context. It was like browsing an unfamiliar code base.
• JJMcJ 1y ago
  Old enough to remember when most museums and art galleries were absolutely free. This had pretty much ended by 1980, unfortunately, and now they are enormously expensive.
• RankingMember 1y ago
  The Franklin Institute was in dire straits during COVID (as many similar institutions were), but has by all accounts recovered nicely financially. It felt pretty dumpy the last few times I've been there, with broken exhibits and the aforementioned screen-based exhibits. Hopefully they'll loosen those purse-strings eventually and put some money into the more expensive but much more tactile physical exhibits that had always been one of their big strengths.
• programmertote 1y ago
  I generally agree with the thesis of the blog post. I'd like to add that I feel frustrated when try out a screen at a museum and it not working (malfunctioning). I have been to NASA's Kennedy's Space Center (KSC) many times (like 5-6). Although they have got most of the exhibits working in good order, some of them are broken or not functioning well anymore. I still appreciate KSC (am an annual member), but I wish there is some philanthropist or the government fund to renovate these museums periodically...
• rob_c 1y ago
  In the UK it comes off the back of "decolonize this" and "imperialism bad that". Frankly I'm fed up of it over here and it's a shame this is being replicated in countries built a lot more strongly on actual modern scientific progress. There's plenty of affordable interactive exhibits (the cost of crayons and paper hasn't inflated that much since the 90s!), but there's this false b$ that interactive digital media or 3d VR wish-wash is what people want. This mostly comes from asking the wrong people, the great unwashed who you were never going to attract away from the latest Disney flop. As is being played out en-masse within hollywood and the wider entertainment industry. Ask the people who were your strongest supporters and original fans what they liked about your thing and you'll cut through all the noise and know where your priorities should be. Stop tyring to please everyone and focus on doing what you do well, growth and expansion numbers are good for one place the valley, and lets look where that got social media...
• gwbas1c 1y ago
  > And where it looks like the budget has been going are the screen rooms. They occupy the huge central spaces on the main floor of the museum, and I’m sure a lot of time, money, and passion went into these things. But it’s misguided. It reminds me of a Reddit thread about if someone should divorce their spouse because they significantly overdid it with smarthome tech. They (the other spouse) insisted that controlling everything with phones was "the future" and did things like drill out locks so they could only get in with a smartphone, and update the toilets so they would only flush from a smartphone. It's too bad the content was deleted, but you can get the jist from reading the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmITheAngel/comments/1lv1t0r/aita_for_telling_my_husband_to_choose_between_me/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AmITheAngel/comments/1lv1t0r/aita_f...
• gwbas1c 1y ago
  > I believe museums exist to present the real thing for the visitor to experience with their own senses. Here’s the sculpture — the actual piece of stone, two thousand years old, Greek sculptor unknown — now go ahead and form your impressions. When I'm in a museum with ancient sculptures, ironically, I don't want to see them as-is. Instead, I want to walk into a room that attempts to emulate how the sculptures looked in the context that they were originally displayed in, often with original paint that's been lost over the millennia since they were made. Even cooler would be a projector that could "turn on and off" what the sculpture looked with original paint and possibly other decorations that have long since decayed.
• pomian 1y ago
  On the other hand, an app for your phone, or digital display placed by an artifact, it a bar code: could have as much detail as possible, with more and more in depth lessons that you can investigate depending on your own level of curiosity. (Or age.) A fantastic museum of the world - natural and human history in Ottawa, was great. But imagine, they have a diorama depicting a historical scene... Then there is a display counter in front where you can read what's going on in the diorama. Also a few selected elements from the display, shown behind that glass, but visible up close for us to admire. What is the description of a brass ring, in the display: "A brass ring."! We can see that! WTF? But we want to know: where was it found, what was it's purpose, why is this down here not something else. What era is it from? You could dig deeper: how was it made? Who made it? Where? With what technology? Brass? How did they blend the raw materials? Who wore it? Etc etc etc. A little electronic display could have that, It a link for everyone to follow - bar code for example we could scan. It could even link to a Wikipedia page, whatever. But, something! More than: "A brass ring"
• pneill 1y ago
  What I don't understand is why science museums aren't more geared toward adults. For me, it's hard to tell the difference between a children's museum and a science museum.
  • IshKebab 1y ago
    Probably a combination of factors: * Fewer adults interested in science than children. Children are learning new things. Magnets! Pulleys! Not many adults (outside HN) are going to get excited about a pulley. * The people making the museums don't have sufficient scientific knowledge to do science for grown ups. * Exhibits for children are much easier to make robust, and probably cheaper to make. That said I do think it would be really cool if there was a science museum for adults. There's all sorts of things you could show.
• jdlyga 1y ago
  I used to love visiting museums to press buttons and turn dials as a kid. That's the funnest part. Anything in a museum that's just a screen is usually dumb.
• adzm 1y ago
  I'll take this opportunity to suggest some great places I've found. The Corning Glass Museum is free (!!) and has both great art and great science, several interactive exhibits, and lots of information about glass and its history and application. Interactive art exhibits like Otherworld! (and Meowwolf maybe? I have not been to it, but I hear it is a similar idea) It has a whole storyline, various rooms with different 'exhibits'. Classic physical art, puppets, electronics, a space invaders arcade game that is broken but then you realize you can climb under the arcade game and through a tunnel into a room where you can play _for real_ while space invaders drop from the ceiling, etc. There are a lot of these neat things around.
  • tropdrop 1y ago
    Seconding Meowwolf! The one I went to in Santa Fe was very hands on and physical, requiring lots of object manipulation as well as crawling through very tight spaces. Absolute delight. Less so for the one in Colorado, which had more of an interactive back story done through an app; but I understand the Colorado one was also meant to be more ADA-friendly, and it was still pretty good.
    • gorfian_robot 1y ago
      the Vegas one is very ... vegas.
• insane_dreamer 1y ago
  As a parent, I agree 100% with the sentiments expressed by the author. But even judging digital exhibits on their own merits, I have yet to see one in a museum (or similar location) that was actually "wow" or that really captured my kids' attention or sparked any discussion (like other "real" stuff we saw). Most were, as my 9 year old would say, "mid" (==crappy in genAlpha speak). Very blah. Very low effort, and sometimes didn't even work properly. Think of your typical crappy software experience that just barely works. The places that do have physical hands-on exhibits do catch my kids' attention, and we return multiple times. For example, one has a lab where you can do chemistry experiments (which they rotate) -- 100x better than doing some digital simulation (which 1) is very quickly boring, and 2) I'll just do it at home and we can close the museum (sad).
• unit149 1y ago
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• braza 1y ago
  I had similar experiences seeing WWII artifacts and museums in Romania, Hungary, London, Brussels, and Berlin. In the first 4 I had the most immersive experiences seeing memorabilia and artifacts from the Allies and Axis. Things like uniforms, cars, letters, tanks, jets, war trophies, and so on. Everything was highly curated, and from the outside, the infrastructure was not so expensive to run. In terms of quality, the military museums of Romania, London, and Brussels are great. Those places are to feel and have immersion. In Berlin, there are only a few screens, but they have only some sort of "small billboards" in a version in German and some rough translation to English. Most of the time it is a picture of someone and some legend only. However in Berlin and Munich, they have something, in my opinion, better than museums that we call as Documentation Centers. In Berlin there is the _Das Dokumentationszentrum Topographie des Terrors_ (Topography of Terrors), and for me the best documentation center is in Munich, called _NS-Dokumentationszentrum München_, which gets into the roots of the regime via the whole buildupand actual documents from leadership, political party meeting minutes, political discussions, and so on.
• QuadmasterXLII 1y ago
  The franklin institute hosted yearly robot fights for a long time, which I was going to present as evidence that they aren't completely screen-pilled but it looks like that has ended sometime in the last 5 years. It's a shame- I competed one year and it was an all time favorite museum experience. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-vmSDgnlbg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-vmSDgnlbg
• Certified 1y ago
  Vindication! I’ve spent over a decade of my life putting physical interactives into museums. I have preached (sold) many museums on the stance that they should put unique experiences into museums that can’t happen on an iPad at home, to varying degrees of success. The museums that have listened are the ones that continue to be wildly successful to this day. They are hard to do right though. I used to compete in combat robotics and the stresses put on museum exhibits is higher. I tell my new engineers that if their exhibit can be dropped into a gorilla enclosure and survive, they are about half way strong enough. Little makes up for raw experience in the art of building bomb proof exhibits, and many companies have failed before getting good. The amateur hour exhibits from the low bid newcomers that inevitably fail and/or need a lot of expensive maintenance has left a sour taste in a lot of museum’s mouths. A lot of those museums have knee jerk reactioned the opposite direction to touchscreen exhibits, only to see their ticket sales slowly drop. Thankfully, i’m seeing the pendulum of the industry swinging back towards physical interactives again.
  • sethpurcell 1y ago
    THANK YOU for fighting this fight. I hope the responses here might add some empirical weight to your arguments — some people apparently do care about this. And I believe you on how hard the reliability/durability challenges must be in engineering these things — I've seen what the kids do to them. BTW, I think the mechanisms themselves are no small part of the interest; kids don't just get to see whatever phenomenon is being demonstrated by the device, they get to poke at the thing that does it and try to figure out how it works, and that's a lot of fun for a curious kid; there are layers there.
    • necovek 1y ago
      It's amazing what adults do to things too. I believe it's actually easier to cope with what kids will do (banging it, trying every nook out etc), compared to many adults putting more force than needed on common mechanism or button or whatever as they figure it out. But ultimately, it's about wear and tear.
  • jancsika 1y ago
• jermberj 1y ago
  The author is applying a universal prescription to ALL museums based on a single experience at a single museum.
• Halan 1y ago
  Next time visit modern and classical art museums. Sorted.
• CM30 1y ago
  Feels like you could write the same article about theme parks nowadays too. Okay, there are still a fair few physical attractions there, but the likes of Universal Studios were infamous for having 'rollercoaster' like rides which were just simulators on a screen rather than relying on physical scenery, animatronics, etc. Feels like there's a lot of attempts to integrate smartphones into the parks too, like through activities that involve using a mobile app instead of a physical prop or console.
  • gorfian_robot 1y ago
    yeah those rides for the most part suck. I worked at disney when they were developing what became "Avatar Flight of Passage" where you ride a dragon wearing 3d headset. The ride vehicle moved in sync so it was pretty immersive. On the other side "Toy Story Midway Mania" totally sucks
    • dangus 1y ago
      Basically, there’s nothing wrong with screens if they’re used thoughtfully, but they can be overused especially if they’re being used in an environment of budget pressures. Just a nitpick though, Avatar Flight of Passage is just 3D glasses. The ride system actually suspends everyone in a vertical moving theater in front of a spherical theater screen similar to IMAX Omni. It’s basically Soarin’ on steroids.
      • gorfian_robot 1y ago
        oh interesting! I never went to the final ride. all the prototypes had controls on individual 'dragons' that each rider could control.
  • dangus 1y ago
    The pendulum is swinging back on this, thankfully. Epic Universe is proof, and I think recently even Disney stopped being so drastically cheap.
• grishka 1y ago
  Screens in such museums would work nicely to augment physical exhibits. So, instead of signs and such, not as the main event.
• cm2187 1y ago
  You can say the same thing of the long text that are often next to the exhibit in museums. I don't get the point of trying to read some essay while standing in the middle of a crowd pushing. You might as well read the wiki page in the comfort of your home and focus on the actual exhibit in the museum.
  • gorfian_robot 1y ago
    I usually want some interpretive signage, but there is a sweet spot on length.
• LightBug1 1y ago
  My experience of "the culture": cultural spending cutbacks mean exhibitors are often forced to fall back to the minimal spend of a screen. It's literally all they can afford.
• wrp 1y ago
  Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in the 1970s had a real submarine periscope you could use, a manned space capsule you could look into, a DC-3 airplane you could go into, and a variety of whirring/buzzing physical things to interact with. In the late 90s, I escorted a school group there and it was all screens. It had gone from being a destination worth driving across the state for to being an experience less interesting than a decent web site.
• schwartzworld 1y ago
  The museum of science here in Boston got a lot less interactive and a lot more screens after Covid. I get that it’s cheaper to develop new exhibits when they are all digital, but my kids aren’t even interested in it. They want to get their hands on stuff.
• Aeolun 1y ago
  I’m going to call out the science museum in Manchester, and the one in Osaka (Japan) as two of the best ones I’ve been to. Manchester had a whole section of old machines, and a working mainframe computer, and Osaka had a planetarium that was nearly the height of the entire building.
• ideasman42 1y ago
  This has also been going in in Libraries in Australia. Go to the library - toddlers Rush to play on the computer. I wouldn't mind so much if it was available for those who wanted it but in my experience it tends to be central and noisy - difficult to avoid if that's not what you're after.
• boredinstapanda 1y ago
  Seeing his description about the early visits when he was a child reminded me of the City Museum in St Louis. Kid sized interactive art museum. A place I wish were around when I was grade school age.
• ungreased0675 1y ago
  It smells like grant consultants from here. Unfortunately, it’s a lot easier to get new money for digital high tech exhibits (don’t you know that’s what kids are into?) than maintaining what already exists.
• kirykl 1y ago
  That’s why they want you to go into the office tho
• rerdavies 1y ago
  However, the reason why your son wants to go is that they want to push buttons. And those buttons have to do things. Let a pack of children loose in a childrens' museum, and what do they? Do they run from button to button to button, pushing them, often not even waiting to see the effect. I don't see anything intrinsically worse about having a bunch of screens do the doing rather than a handful of mechanical thingamajig that would have done the doing in the previous generation of museums. What matters is the experience. And maybe (just a suggestion), if that's not what you want, don't take them to a science museum. Might I suggest, a natural history museum instead, where they can personally experience row upon row of awkwardly lumpen stuffed mammals collected in the 1860s, or entire rooms full of glass cases containing "minerals" (which seemed to me, as a child, to be nothing more than a fancy word for "rock"). Personally, I have great sympathy for science museums, most of which came to be in the 1970s, back when "multimedia" was something powerfully unique and special, and have since had real challenges re-inventing themselves in a world where "multimedia" is about as impressive as a toaster. (Yes, I mean you, Ontario Science Center). And great admiration for those curators who work hard to successfully re-invent museums in the 21st century. And respect for those curators who conduct brave experiments that sometimes fall short of expectations. I, personally, love the Royal Ontario Museum, which managed to transform its shelves full of rocks into a curated multimedia "experience" that walks children through the geological history of the planet earth using lots of buttons to push (almost all of which control screens), and an "elevator" that "descends" 600 feet underground into the heart of a mine. And this, children, is what granite looks like! Whumpf. 4 ton granite boulder!! And I'm pretty sure that was even a shelf with a leftover hunk of carbonaceous deoderantite in there somewhere, although I am uncertain on that particular point, because I was distracted by the pure genius of a museum display consisting of a 4 ton granite boulder that children could climb on. All performed while completely resisting the urge to re-invent their "Room full of Dinosaur Bones as a Temple to Science" experience. A first-class museum experience that has withstood the test of time. And they even managed to a preserve a hall full of awkwardly lumpen stuffed mammals, which serve as a reminder to visitors that museums are constantly evolving things. A display that has a button and a screen that explains that the museum has multiple warehouses full of lumpen stuffed mammals all collected in the 1860s, all of which have to be meticulously conserved for generations of future scientists despite the 1860s awfulness of it all, and that this diorama of a stuffed caribou surrounded by a snarling pack of stuffed wolves, as stuffed groundhogs look on is a vision of what a museum should be that was enormously successful in its time.
• letqin 1y ago
  Reminds me of the Ann Arbor Hands-on Museum I went to a few times as a kid. Some of my fondest memories of any museum or other similar activity are there. There were countless things to do and when I was young there were no screens to be had. I would be curious to go check it out and see if they are still following the same sort of idea or if they have fallen victim to the popularization of the screen.
• robbingtherob 1y ago
  The gamification of an entire industry. Call me Boomer, but i'm into nice handcrafted, oldschool museums with as little interactive and other electronic media as possible.
• CHB0403085482 1y ago
  Best museums are the ones where the old stuff still works ~ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MTOz7eOvmg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6MTOz7eOvmg Like the Tank Museum in Bovington.
• _carbyau_ 1y ago
  I get the articles point. I too feel as though things should be more actual hands on, less flash-game-y. But one kinda-counterpoint was my experience in Amsterdam at Micropia [0]. Museum containing many small things including fungi, bacteria, ants etc etc. Some stuff you didn't want to actually touch with hands really anyway... Yes they had magnifying glasses but many exhibits were simply using the screen to show the image from a microscope. And they let you control the microscope to focus, zoom in and out, etc. Left an impression on me as being a museum that did digital right. [0]https://www.artis.nl/en/artis-micropia https://www.artis.nl/en/artis-micropia
• zkmon 1y ago
  The screen culture is forced upon by perception goals. I cringe when I look at large screens all over my office, which are there only to create a perception, with zero information or usefulness. Sort of jewellery for an establishment. A cheap way to look modern. But it consumes power and creates global warming for nothing. It happens when you give a contract to someone to modernize the place. They throw a bunch of screens and meaningless sculptures (aka artwork), wierd-shaped structures, with random text in large font, around and fulfill the metrics for modern-ness. They just deliver on their customer's wish to see things to be quite different from earlier state. How that difference makes sense, doesn't matter. Delivery done, transaction completed. We are chasing change. Change is seen as accomplishment. Big bosses keep shuffling their org very often. Not really to optimize, but to show that they did something, and to show their power. Weirdness also qualifies as a good thing, because it is a change. No wonder TV ads and content promote as much weirdness as allowed.
• peteforde 1y ago
  Cory Doctorow wrote one of my favourite sci-fi novels, "Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom" a few decades (!) ago about a battle between people maintaining the classic rides vs people trying to replace those rides with VR experiences. It holds up.
• aucisson_masque 1y ago
  Did the Author missed the note about digital age ? Society evolved since he was a kid. His kid will also probably end up doomscrolling on TikTok and have the attention span of a gold fish. That’s just how it is, you can’t change society and going against it is a tough fight. I’d even say that the author contributed to it seeing his age and he works in tech.
  • sersi 1y ago
    I disagree with you. Yes society evolved as a kid but I think nowadays we're going to see increased class division around screen use habits. Educated wealthy parents increasingly try to control screentime and teach their children how to manage it responsibly while uneducated parents or parents who are poor in time (because they need to have 2 jobs to feed their kids) will let their children have a lot more access to screens and won't help them form good habits. I think it's likely to seriously decrease upward mobility in the future.
• wojciii 1y ago
  I try to limit my kids exposure to electronic devices while they are small. I can't avoid it, but I try. I consider blacklisting YouTube at our house. The withdrawal symptoms look like people having tried drugs. This is scary. I noticed that playing with phones for shorter amounts of time is ok and the kids get creative as soon as they don't have access to electronic entertainment. Currently I play chess with them and do reading. My kids are 4 and 7. This was a bit off topic, but I think that parents should stop exposing their kids to electronic entertainment.. its worse than drugs. I'm sounding like a lunatic.. I know.
  • proprietario 1y ago
    >I'm sounding like a lunatic lol that was basically my childhood and I am grateful for that, keep on doing it!
    • wojciii 1y ago
      I'm in my 40'ies. I grew up without computers initially and had a c64/amiga to play games on. I made a laptop for my kids which blocks all social media and only allows educational software. I think that the brain-dead entertainment loop is the problem. It takes no effort to learn something.
• d3k 1y ago
  I totally agree with the post. The definition of a museum is "an institution dedicated to displaying or preserving culturally or scientifically significant objects", according to Wikipedia. Most of the time I do not see anything significant on these screens in museums, since equivalent content can be easily reached on any phone. Real, relevant objects are much harder to find and find a way to create interest around them. But that is exactly what makes a museum a good museum, not the screen.
• robertlagrant 1y ago
  Sophie Winkleman (Big Suze from Peep Show) did a good speech on this[0]. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V6nucKFK88 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V6nucKFK88
• ipython 1y ago
  Congratulations to us. Enshittification has come to museums. As tfa states, physical exhibits - especially interactive ones - require extensive maintenance. Expensive maintenance is, well, expensive. Must cut costs. And here we are. Reminds me also of the apocryphical story of a McDonalds mba. They needed to cut a few million dollars and noticed that removing ten sesame seeds from the bun of a Big Mac will do it. Ok, great, but repeat enough times and soon customers will notice.
• rurban 1y ago
  Why not? Not every museum is rich enough to exhibit original works. And is digital art is no art anymore?
• _dabs 1y ago
  Come to Germany or Norway! Im comparison to the USA museums there are not full of screen. I can recommend "Deutsches Technik Museum or "Oslo technical Museum".
• PatchworkCasino 1y ago
  My favorite museum experience ever was at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry in the early 00's where they had this whole room that was just wood blocks, a little plastic tub running like a creek, a few little water-directing mechanisms and a couple water guns. No goal, I dont think it was even teaching anything, it was just me and 8 other kids. When I first got there some kid was telling everybody how to use everything and what little project he was working on and how they could help, basically like a little foreman. I helped and had fun with everybody for maybe 15 minutes until he had to leave and by then I had been there longest and just naturally ended up taking over as "foreman" until it was my turn to go and I told another kid everything that was left to do. It's a very important dynamic you experience a lot in life, and that exhibit taught me it naturally in half an hour. It's such a shame to see how many of these learning museums are now basically having these kids just walk from point to point and read and maybe play something that would have been bad as a flash game. The Seattle one (forget the name) I went to last year had a decent number of physical exhibits (which I still enjoyed as an adult) but none of them had any social element. Ironically, the screen games were all very poorly maintained.