Author Archives: Seb Chan

About Seb Chan

Seb Chan is currently the Director of Digital & Emerging Media, Smithsonian, Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Prior to joining Cooper-Hewitt he led the Digital, Social and Emerging Technologies department at the Powerhouse Museum in Sydney, where he oversaw the implementation of Open Access and Creative Commons licensing policies and many projects exploring new ways for visitors and citizens to engage and contribute to the Powerhouse’s collection. Chan was a member of the Australian Government’s Government 2.0 Taskforce and, as a consultant, has helped organisations and institutions all over the world strategise and implement cutting-edge technologies in the cultural sector. He also writes about museums, technology and digital strategy at http://www.freshandnew.org.

We won an award

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The annual international gathering that is Museums and the Web has just passed and this year we were lucky enough to win one of the Best of the Web Awards in the Research/Collections category.

We are especially proud of this award because it represents critical evaluation by our peers. And we love that they called out its tone, experimental nature, and its early alpha release. These are exactly the qualities that we believe offer the most to others in the field – something that shiny, polished, and ‘finished’ projects often don’t. What we are doing can (and perhaps, should) be copied by others.

We dedicate the award to Bill Moggridge and we’d like to particularly thank the generosity of curatorial and registration staff in letting us experiment to try re-inventing the collections online paradigm – a task that is far from over.

Congratulations to all the other winners – it is nice to be in such great company!

Exploring quickly made 3D models of the mansion

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Restoring the Carnegie Mansion which provides the shell in which Cooper-Hewitt resides, gives a fantastic opportunity to test some 3D scanning. So in the latter part of 2012 we started exploring some of the options.

One local startup, Floored.com, came to do a test scan of our freshly restored National Design Library. In just 15 minutes their Matterport camera had scanned the room and their servers were generating a navigable 3D model. This is much more than a 360 panorama, it is a proper 3D model, and one that could, with more clean up be used for exhibition design purposes as much as general playfulness.

3d-library-floored

We’re pretty excited to see what is becoming possible with quick scanning. Whilst these models aren’t high enough resolution right now, the trade off between speed and quality is becoming less and less every year.

We’re sharing this, too, because of the way the unmasked mirror in the scan has created a ‘room that isn’t there’. It would be a good place to hide treasure if the 3D model ever ended up in a game engine.

Go have an explore.

‘Discordances’ – or the big to-do list

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Yesterday Aaron rolled out a minor data update to the online collection. Along with this he also whipped up a ‘anti-concordances’ view for our people/company records. (Yes, for various reasons why are conflating people and companies/organisations). This allows us to show all the records we have that don’t have exact matches in Wikipedia (and other sources).

Along with revealing that we don’t yet have a good automated way of getting a ‘best guess’ of matches (Marimekko Oy is the same as Marimekko) without also getting matches for Canadian hockey players who happen to share a name with a designer, the list of ‘discordances’ is a good, finite problem that can be solved with more human eyes.

People | Wikipedia | Collection of Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum

We are currently inviting people (you, for instance) to parse the list of non-matches and then tell us which ones should link to existing but differently-spelled Wikipedia pages, and which ones need to be created as new stubs in Wikipedia itself.

If you’re feeling really bold you could even start those stubs yourself! You can even use our easy-to-insert Wikipedia citation snippet to reference anything in our collection from your newly created articles. You’ll find the snippet tool at the bottom of each object and person/company record.

Being ‘Of The Web’: now with Behance, Lanyrd & Art.sy

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Last week we talked about our philosophy of being ‘of the web‘, rather than just having the museum ‘on the web’.

And so onto our latest partnerships, our stepping stones to make this a reality.

Behance

We’ve worked with Behance, to deepen the exposure of the National Design Award winners through the creation of a branded gallery on their platform.

Rather than the museum making (another) microsite, Behance offers us a way to put the award winners into one of the largest professional social networks used by designers themselves. You can now browse projects by the winners, finalists and jurors – all within their platform.

Behance brings huge exposure to the winners, and the awards, and we’re expecting that many more people find out about the awards than would ever have made it to our own site.

Lanyrd

And we’ve partnered with event calendaring Lanyrd to highlight design events across America this month. Lanyrd offers a branded site for National Design Week, and, at the backend, has allowed us, in the words of Aaron Cope, ‘to get out of the calendaring business’ (which museums shouldn’t ever be part of!). Aaron’s also been able to whip up a nice little mobile web app – helped by the normalisation of the data feed provided by Lanyrd. (App post soon!)

Art.sy

You already know we are one of the larger contributors to Google Art Project, and now we’ve also contributed to another pan-institutional project, Art.sy. I’m excited by this because it challenges Art.sy’s ‘art genome‘ tools to deal with a design collection. And also because the site itself very publicly reveals the porous boundaries between the art market and the art museum.

Read the New York Times piece on Art.sy which quite nicely demonstrates the subtle rift between the old (on the web) and new (of the web) worlds.

And . . .

And finally, you might notice that if you happen put the URL of one of our collection objects in a tweet, you get a nice little ‘expanded’ bit of information, complete with object thumbnail and @cooperhewitt attribution! That was Aaron’s Friday afternoon treat. Next stop is a custom short URL to make that whole process a bit nicer on the eyes. Cool, huh?

First look at our new online collection (public alpha)

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“Perfect is the enemy of good” (Voltaire).

An early alpha version of our new ‘collection online‘ is now live.

I say ‘alpha version’ because all this version is trying to do is replace the previous standard eMuseum collection viewer that used to be on the website. I also say ‘alpha’ because it is full of ‘known issues’ both in design and content. I say ‘alpha’ a third time because before you know it, there will be a beta which will introduce new features and fix some of the most glaring problems.

But a public alpha release is important.

In a sector that is allergic to the idea of a ‘minimum viable product‘, a public alpha makes a lot of sense. It especially makes sense for a ‘design’ museum that preaches/teaches the ‘design process’. Early testing with real users will help us select which features to prioritise, and also which of our existing issues matter most. And we’ll find that the users we expected probably won’t be the only ones who come and visit.

Admittedly our museum is a little different.

On the back of two, far too short, years of transformation under the leadership of designer Bill Moggridge, we are in a position that many other institutions are not. We are trying to be more agile with our processes, more experimental with our products, and more promiscuous with our content.

We don’t have the choice not to be.

The world of design is changing – and that is the world we are documenting, collecting and ruminating about as an institution. And it is not just the world of design, but the world itself.

We need to not just be ‘on the web’ but we need to be ‘of the web’. And this is most important for our collection.

So what’s in the alpha release?

- access to just over 123,000 objects
- navigation by various metadata elements
- persistent URLs for everything including people
- people ‘concordances’ with the holdings of other institutions and online sources!
- decades!
- random object mode!

Aaron Cope and Micah Walter will each be exploring these in much more detail in their own blog posts over the next week. Aaron’s also released some new bits and pieces related to our collection on our GitHub repository.

But right now, go and have an explore.

Sample object record.

On cleaning our collection data with interactive data transformation tools

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Seth van Hooland, Ruben Verborgh, and Rik Van de Walle’s Free Your Metadata group have been hard at work looking at the dataset from Cooper-Hewitt.

The first in a number of articles in various publications on their work with our collection has been published.

It provides a good introductory piece to their work using Google Refine and the way in which other institutions with ‘messy data’ can now use ‘interactive data transformation tools’ to clean it up in ways that were previous extremely time consuming.

Linked Data hold the promise to derive additional value from existing data throughout different sectors, but practitioners currently lack a straightforward methodology and the tools to experiment with Linked Data. this article gives a pragmatic overview of how general purpose Interactive Data transformation tools (IDts) can be used to perform the two essential steps to bring data into the Linked Data cloud: data cleaning and reconciliation. these steps are explained with the help of freely available data (Cooper-hewitt National Design museum, New York) and tools (google refine), making the process repeatable and understandable for practitioners.

Read online: (free PDF)

Van Hooland, Seth, Ruben Verborgh, and Rik Van de Walle. Joining the Linked Data Cloud in a Cost-Effective Manner. Information Standards Quarterly, 2012 Spring/Summer, 24(2/3):24-28.

Sealing a Facebook App in amber

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One of the more painful things that happens from time to time is the decommissioning of a digital product. And in a museum this, of course, means trying to ‘preserve’ it.

But how do you ‘preserve a Facebook App’ built for an exhibition?

Cooper-Hewitt’s record breaking Set In Style exhibition of 2011 included the creation of both an iOS App and a Facebook App. The Set In Style Facebook App allowed users to add jewellery from the exhibition to their Facebook photos and share them on their wall and the walls of their friends.

A couple of months ago Facebook changed their security settings for Apps (again) and we were faced with a decision – turn it off, or pay to have the code rewritten to support the security changes. With the exhibition ended we opted to close the App down, but before we did so we decided to make a quick video of it in operation with a ‘real Facebook account’ so that the ‘social side’ of the App could be captured in a way that still screen grabs would not.

Here’s the video.

Some questions still remain.

Where does the ‘record’ for this ‘object’ now live? What ‘metadata’ needs to be associated with the ‘record’? What happens to the source code? Should it be released? If it was released, is the App so heavily reliant upon the infrastructure and sociality of Facebook itself that it would be useless?

(Our newest member of the Lab’s ‘Armory of Nerds’, Aaron Cope, has been thinking about these very same issues in regard to ‘preserving Flickr’ with his project Parallel-Flickr)

We’re interested in these sorts of questions at a meta-institutional level too, as, being ‘the National Design Museum’ we are inevitably going to have to be collecting ‘objects’ that face similar issues soon enough. Indeed, should a design museum be ‘collecting’ the designs of Facebook itself over the years? And how?

Designing the responsive footer

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We now have a responsive main website. To a degree.

Like everything it is a stopgap measure before we do a full overhaul of the Cooper-Hewitt online – timed to go live before we reopen our main campus (2014).

With the proportion of mobile traffic to our web properties increasing every month we couldn’t wait for a full redesign to implement a mobile-friendly version of the site. So we did some tweaking and with the help of Orion, pulled responsiveness into the scope for a migration of backends from Drupal 6 to Drupal 7.

Katie did the wireframing and design of the new funky fat footer – which you’ll notice, changes arrangements as it switches between enormous (desktop), large (tablet) and mini (mobile) modes.

Here she is explaining the what and why.

Why did you do paper prototypes for the responsive design?

A few months ago I was working on a design for the Arts Achieve website. I showed my screen to Bill, our museum director, to get his thoughts. Bill is a former industrial designer and one of the pioneers of interaction design. The first thing he said was “ok, let’s print out a screenshot.” He then drew his suggestions right onto the printed page. We didn’t really look at the screen much during the conversation. Writing directly onto the paper was more immediate and direct, and made his suggestions feel very possible to me. Looking at a site design on a screen makes me feel like I’m looking at something final, even if its just a mockup. The same thing printed on paper seems more malleable. It’s a mind trick!

Paper also lets me print out many versions and compare them side-by-side (you can’t do that on a single monitor).

Paper also ALSO lets me walk around showing my print-outs to others and ask for rapid reactions without pulling everyone into a screen hover session. This is a simple body/communication thing: when everyone is facing toward a screen to talk about a design, you’re not in a natural conversational position. Everyone’s face and body is oriented toward the screen. I can’t see people’s faces and expressions unless I twist around. When you’re just holding a paper, and there’s no screen, it’s more like a natural conversation.

Post-its stuck to the monitor as a way to quickly agree on our initial ideas

Why do some of the elements move around in the responsive footer? (why do the icons and signups move)

They move around to be graphically pleasing. And to make sure the stuff we wanted people to notice and click on is most prominent.

We had a strong desire for the social media icons to be really prominent. So they’re front and center in the monitor-width design (940px width). They’re on the right hand side in the tablet-size design (700px wide) and in the mobile-size design (365px wide) because I think it looks sharpest when the rectilinear components are left-justified and the round stuff is on the right.

What were the challenges for the responsive design?

We had a really clear hierarchy in mind from the beginning (we knew what we really wanted people to notice and click) so that eliminated a lot of complexity. The only challenge was how to serve that hierarchy cleanly.

One challenge was the footer doesn’t always graphically harmonize with the body of the page, because the page content is always changing.

Another challenge was getting the latest tweet to be clear and legible, but still appear quiet and ambient and classy.

What were some of the things you are going to be looking out for as it the site goes live?

I want to see how the footer harmonizes with our varying page body content and then decide if it makes sense to change the footer to match the body, or re-style the body content to sit better atop the footer.

I wonder if people on Twitter will start saying stuff @Cooperhewitt just because they know they’ll get a few minutes of fame on our homepage. That participation could be awesome or spammy. We’ll see.

I’m really excited to see the analytics. I want to see if this new layout really does boost our newsletter signup and social media participation and everything. It will be super gratifying if it does.

Of course, we’ll reiterate and revise based on all the analytics and feedback.

Patrick Murray-John hacks our collection at #THATcamp

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And following Mia’s residency in the Labs we were excited to find out collection data ended up being toyed with at THATCamp.

Patrick Murray-John wrote up his experience with our data, reflecting many of the same issues that Mia cam across.

He calls out our CC0 licensing –

If the data had been available via an API, that would have put a huge burden on my site. I could have grabbed the data for the ‘period’, but to make it useful in my recontextualization of the data, I would have had to grab ALL the data, then normalize it, then display it. And, if I didn’t have the rights to do what I needed, I would have had to do that ON EVERY PAGE DISPLAY. That is, without the licensed rights to manipulate and keep the data as I needed, the site would have churned to a halt.

Instead, I could operate on the data as I needed. Because in a sense I own it. It’s in the public domain, and I have a site that wants to work with it. That means that the data really matters to me, because it is part of my site. So I want to make it better for my own purposes. But, also, since it is in the public domain, any improvements I make for my own purpose can and should go back into the public domain. Hopefully, that will help others. It’s a wonderful, beautiful, feedback loop, no?

As a fork of CC-0 content from github, it sets off a wonderful network of ownership of data, where each node in the network can participate in the happy feedback.

Go read his full post.

Learning from data. Part 372

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Here’s an interesting image which shows a heat map of the mouse clicks in the last week on a page element on the Graphic Design: Now In Production page.

We are using a tool called Reinvigorate to generate these. And the data to help us figure out whether certain UI elements are working or not – before we do a wholesale redesign and rebuild.

Surprisingly we’re seeing a lot of interaction with the image gallery slideshow – far more than what we are seeing on a much more prominent video element on the same page.

What can we learn from this?
What should we change as a result of this data?

If anything, we are rolling out more analytics tools across our digital projects to help us better understand the behaviour of visitors.

And as we redesign our physical museum spaces we are looking at a number of different tools to help us do this in ‘meatspace‘ as well.

Might our future galleries as be as reconfigurable as our digital projects? Could we begin to treat our galleries as having this down specific UI elements?