Museums and the Web 18 Review OR Reality can be hard even when its not Virtual

Museums and the Web 18

Museums and the Web 2018 was hosted in lovely Vancouver. As always, friends from around the world descended upon the town for ideas and enjoyment. While the MuseWeb organization does a great job of publishing articles that expand on the presentations, here are the highlights and themes from this year’s conference:

 

VR/AR/R: All types of reality were discussed and debated. Virtual reality was featured in the keynote, from LucasFilms VR lab no less. The back channel, a bit of unicorn at conferences these days, got fired up, with good reason. Virtual reality, in practice, currently feels more virtual than real. And, we as a field have real problems. We need to slay our dragons before marching out onto a virtual quest.  In addition, VR is about being in a new reality. For museums, this is a big challenge. We want people to explore our reality, not escape our reality. In that way, AR seems supremely promising. Augmented reality is like seeing your own world through a surprising lens. Interpretation at museums is basically augmented reality, without the tech. So, this tech feels like a natural option. That said, a few pioneers have marched into VR, eyes open. From what they say about the frontier; it is challenging but compelling if you work really hard to do the VR right and have money from the private sector. Oh, that is, if you aren’t under 13, because insurance, et al, are not into VR for the teeny, tiny visitors.

 

More Money/ More Problems: “Big museums get to do big projects” used to be the story of the field. Now, with a proliferation of technology options, technology is being used across the sector. Investment dollars don’t have a direct relationship with success. Leaders who lay off their ego and instead focus on their visitors will succeed.

 

The Thing Doesn’t Matter; The Thing Really Matters: A few years ago, the theme of tech conferences could be: its all about tech/ its not about tech. There was a real tension between the need to focus on content and the need to focus on tech.  Truthfully, they both matter. One is about how the road is built; the other is about where the road goes. For the road to be useful, both its physical manifestation and its functional raison d’etre have to be considered together. This tension from conferences past seems to have been transmuted slightly. Rather than should we tech or should we not, now the field has moved into a bit more nuanced questions: how should we do this? Should it be tech?

 

The Workplace can be an Albatross or our Lifejacket: We are at the end of the college years in the field of museum technology. In our infancy, we could do one-off projects because everything young ones do is great. In our teen years, we showed responsibility by attempting to implement enterprise solutions. In the last few years, like college students, we did group projects better than ever by playing nice(r) with other departments and other institutions. Now, as if with new found maturity, we are aching to make our lessons mean more for the field and more our visitors. But, how? We are struggling with making the workplace equitable and reasonable. We are trying to get others to understand that tech is for everyone; and that everyone needs to know tech. We are communicating better ways for work to happen. We are hoping that our leaders grab those life-jackets; many in our field feel like they are drowning.

 

Be Analytical but not an A**hole: We are all trying to understand everything better. Data feels like the place to get answers. Numbers seem like they don’t lie. (Be warned. The people crunching the numbers might inadvertently make them do so.)  We want the best museum: well-run and well-attended. But, this ideal has a Shangri-la-like quality; a foggy possible existence that is remote and unreachable. We use data to help us track a path to this ideal. We are getting closer and closer, but it is still not quite in reach.

 

Collaboration & Coalitions: Working together is the hardest and easiest part of work.  That is, in theory, it makes perfect sense to work together towards a common goal–easy peasy lemon squeezy.  However,  nothing that involves people is easy. We, as a species, are erratic and confusing.  Therefore, collaboration can be the hardest part of the workplace. Politics and bad behavior can cost an organization hundreds of thousands of dollars.  Killing it at collaboration means everyone on the team succeeding.  Collaboration gets easier with practice, though.  Thoughtful action can result in being better collaborators, which will eventually lead to an easier/ better workplace situation. Inter-organization collaboration expands reach exponentially (with the commensurate expansion of challenges.)

 

Conclusion: These year’s MW had a sort of sedate quality, as if many in the field are in their crystallises getting ready to burst out in full flutter. So many conversations were about doing better at our work. Refinement and improvement seems like key issues in the field.

 

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