6 ms·

> 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 see

• 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.
    • dcminter 1y ago
      I think the Hunkin exhibit really did look a bit tired - I don't think it's necessarily unreasonable to try something else. After all, Secret Life only got its chance because they were willing to change something back then. If you like Tim's stuff you can always catch his Novelty Automation arcade over by Holborn. Highly recommended by me at least! I don't know how good the information transfer was at the London Science Museum way back when I was a kid; I remember excitedly spinning all the little brass handles and pushing the brass buttons on various teak cased devices, but I'm not sure I took much science home with me. Sci Fi, a home computer, and (much later) Bill Bryson's book informed me far more.
• c22 1y ago
  It's not just museum exhibits and kids, it's everything. I have some maintenance roles in my background and the rate at which things like paper towel dispensers get worn down and completely destroyed when interacted with by hundreds or thousands of people a day is eye opening.
  • Der_Einzige 1y ago
    It's cus all skilled workers learned they can charge insane rates. Blue collar skilled labor starts at 100$ an hour in West Virginia or Mississippi now. Most of them, like Software, have learned that it's hard to figure out if the work they did was good or not until afterwards. As such, there are tons of charlatans, grifters, scammers, and related in many industries right now. Classic cases are Dentists (Literally everything), Car Mechanics (blinker fluid scams to grandma), Plumbers, Leak Detection Companies, etc I started to understand a whole lot of class or even guild warfare stuff from the past when I start to see what happens when skilled workers start to scheme for their gain against the common good. I also don't just accept unions as being good for everyone anymore for the same reason. The sad reality is that skilled workers are just like the hot waitress index. When the economy is bad, it's a lot easier to get the cream of the crop for those who still have money. The fact that everything is still somehow decent for a few more months is exactly why it's insanely difficult to source any kind of labor for a reasonable price. Since no one can source this labor, they simply don't and do without. Shit stayed open late during the recession. Good thing Trump is trying his hardest to put us into another one right now.
    • mikestorrent 1y ago
      >learned they can charge insane rates It's called "what the market can bear" and it's what corporations with marketing and sales professionals have always tried their best to do; charge as much as you possibly can without losing business. Of course, it only actually works when there is competition, and so the rising prices are kept in check by undercutting competition.... and then, _that_ only works when the undercutting competition is working to the same quality (by a code, ideally) and is subject to the same economic pressures so that it can level out fairly. If the competition is all fresh immigrants with lower CoL, or if the competition is cutting corners, all bets are off. You end up with a race to the bottom, where each individual is trying to be part of a race to the top at the same time... everyone wants more than they're worth, but those who are actually doing the best work still aren't getting what they deserve, lol! A free market actually requires a lot of surrounding regulation to work, just like any other freedom. It's always been strange to me that Americanism seems to view freedom as the fundamental condition of man, hampered by law; ultimately most freedoms come from rule and order, because they can carve out space for one to enjoy freedoms with far fewer negative consequences.
• jMyles 1y ago
  Great observation. And it might even bigger than that: the wonder of the digital world may be retrospectively giving us unfair expectations of meatspace uptime.
• etrautmann 1y ago
  Yes, but this is the core of what they're offering. As the son of a science museum director, I've seen exactly what it takes to keep hands on science exhibits going. I agree with the article here, although I think it's appropriate to have some screens if required for an exhibit (e.g. a thermal imaging system)
  • Brian_K_White 1y ago
    This, exactly. Sure, ok, it requires whatever it requires. That's the product. Don't do it and you have essentially no product.
• schlauerfox 1y ago
  My father worked on a Natural Gas exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Los Angeles as an emergency substitute when a contractor flaked. There was an oven that had a handle, when you opened it the narration said "don't open the oven during cooking" to save energy. Kids hung off this and immediately broke it, they replaced it with steel and it was broken the next day, then ended up having to put a Triangular metal piece that couldn't be hung off of because children are wild animals. This museum prior to the rebuild into the California Science Center (which I love but is just different) and the Exploratorium were amazing experiences for this as a kid. I miss the big kinetic scuplture of rolling wood balls through the electricity exhibit, the plotter that would draw out your bicycle design, the next door room full of electronic interactives of the kind that he's complaining about but early 90s style. The weird chrome McDonalds left over from the 84 Olympics. The giant ceiling mounted helmet VR exhibit (crt, no doubt) I wish I could find better photos, there's so few.
  • jimmydddd 1y ago
    Went to the Frost Museum of Science in Miami. They had this big (6ft x 6ft) video display and four 6-inch diameter track balls where you guided a vessel through the virtual ocean or something. These two academic minded parents asked their sons (maybe 8 and 10 years old) to try the exhibit. They ran over excitely and just started pounding on the track balls with their fists as hard as they could. They of course did not understand the exhibit at all, but they had a great time! :-)
    • pklausler 1y ago
      Maybe the parents shouldn't let their offspring go feral on the exhibits?
      • AndrewLiptak 1y ago
        They shouldn't but they do.
      • loco5niner 1y ago
        As a parent with one of those kids, you never know which mode they will start off with, even with the right prompting. And yes, you correct them and steer them in the right direction and hope they will eventually learn how to behave.
• Theodores 1y ago
  "I didn't bring my niece to a museum to look at a screen..." I took my niece around the Natural History Museum in London recently, taking in the new 'Darwin' extension first. It was a liminal space of sorts with lots of broken screens. The tech had not been updated in a decade or more so you had Adobe Flash Player running, complete with the crash pop-up messages to let you know what version of Flash they were updated to. The idea generally was to have a large touch table with a projector in the ceiling showing an image that could be interacted with. My 8 year old crash test dummy still enjoyed the screens, which was no surprise given that she is addicted to her tablet. The touch table (however it worked) was not quite registered to the image projected on it. Some exhibits (screens) had a 'tell a friend' feature where you could enter an email address. However, all of the 'keys' were off, so you press 'Q' and you get 'W', or 'N' and you get 'M'. I persisted and entered my sister's email address. Did she get the email? What do you think!!! Some of the screens had the toughest armour I have ever seen. ATMs are soft targets by comparison. I had never seen whole keyboards made of stainless steel before and found the level of vandal-proofing to be absurd. Admittedly the throughput of the museum is absurd, in the UK every person gets to go there at least five times, once with mum and dad, another time with one set of grandparents, then with the school, then, as they have their own kids, they have to go again, then it is rinse/repeat when they are a grandparent. The reason for going is dinosaurs. But they got rid of 'dippy' from the entrance hall. Before you get to the entrance hall there is the begging chicane. This is a ridiculous entrance route back and fore between a dozen different begging bowls to support them financially. If you choose not to pay up, then you can then spend the next six hours not speaking or interacting with any humans apart from the ones you arrived with, except for maybe at the giftshop. There were no annexes with staff doing talks, nobody apart from the beggars to greet you, but plenty of screens. The brief for the new wing was to have scientists doing classification of specimens in such a way that they were on show, a 'working museum'. But nobody wanted to work in goldfish bowl conditions under the gaze of hordes of kids. I don't want to dismiss the place in its entirety, the gardens outside were lovely even though they have a motorway-sized road next to you with considerable noise pollution. That's right, the place we send all our kids to for the big memorable day is made toxic with the filth of car dependency. The air is utterly disgusting there just because of car dependency. The whole area is full of museums and the whole lot needs to just be pedestrianised, but no, it is clogged up with those cheesy 'status symbol' cars people buy in London. So there is this wall of cars outside and this wall of screens inside. Then the daylight robbery in the gift shop. We didn't do the full tour, got to save some for the parents and school trip. But we did go to the earthquake room. It is modelled on a Japanese shop and shakes every few minutes. Shakes is being kind. A garden swing or any wheeled vehicle does a better simulation, clearly the hydraulics have lost some of their zest. The 'climate change' room was also a little off. Maybe this is a leftover from when they had the likes of BP sponsor the place. I was not going to let anything spoil my perfect day out with my niece, so I wasn't miserable about the place when I was there. However, on reflection, the dilapidation was a glimpse of the future, a future where museums have screens to interact with but no staff to interact with.
• kotaKat 1y ago
  > I don't think screens are responsible for that. Maintaining physical exhibits that can survive constant physical contact with kids is hard. That reminds me of something I’d love to learn a bit more about: the Strong Museum of Play. It appears the Wegmans’ supermarket exhibit where kids are able to work with real point-of-sale equipment has actually gotten equipment refreshes over the years itself, and I was really amused to see how far they went to have a “fully working” setup in the exhibits for kids to play with. https://www.museumofplay.org/exhibit/wegmans-super-kids-market/ https://www.museumofplay.org/exhibit/wegmans-super-kids-mark... The checkout counters are actual IBM/Toshiba SurePOS lanes, with actual current Datalogic scanner scales, and they’ve got a OS4690/TCxSky install and SurePOS ACE running on every single lane. (Or, at least, one of those registers has to be a controller+terminal, the other 5 lanes have to bootstrap off at least one lane, so they’re all networked, too!) They’ve also maintained enough of the store configuration so receipts look just like a store receipt and all (of course, with the Strong Museum as the “store”). And yes, you’re told to only push certain buttons and only scan stuff that’s inside the environment… ;) Over the years they’ve swapped out the lanes from the old white to the modern Slate Grey, upgraded the scanner-scales, but the UX is still the same as it always was.
  • lotsofpulp 1y ago
    My kids just use the actual self checkout machines / lanes.
  • PaulHoule 1y ago
    The Museum of Play and Wegmans are really class acts.
  • ghaff 1y ago
    You have to keep those sort of museums up to date. As I recall the Computer History Museum in Boston, they had some interesting historical artifacts like Sage I think. But a fair bit of the museum was devoted to supposedly state of the art computing, some interactive. As a lot of the local computer companies went away, a lot of the the exhibits started looking pretty dated--and I'm sure a lot of funding dried up as well.
  • michaelmior 1y ago
• mandevil 1y ago
  I was a tour guide at the National Air and Space Museum for a dozen years. I still remember seeing the exhibit plans the curators had, which called for a then 90-year old airplane (a Curtiss JN-4) to be mounted such that people could look down over it from the balcony. All of us docents who saw that immediately said "what about the kids who will drop pennies onto that precious canvas and wood thing to break it?" Six months after the exhibit opening the Jenny was removed from that location, never to be returned to that exhibit. Because sometimes museum guests aren't just pushing things too hard, they are actively taking steps to destroy things, just to see if they can get away with it.
  • AndrewLiptak 1y ago
    Because sometimes museum guests aren't just pushing things too hard, they are actively taking steps to destroy things, just to see if they can get away with it. Can confirm.
    • serial_dev 1y ago
      If there is only two troublemakers in every group of 30 children, and a museum receives 10 groups a day, that’s 20 little rascals who are all trying to do the craziest stunt they can come up with…
  • BryantD 1y ago
    My wife worked in an aerospace museum for quite some time; I've heard a lot of similar stories.