I made a fun thing…yesterday. In my 20% time, downtime, er.. 2am time, I decided to build a simple tumblr blog called Curatorial Poetry. I was inspired by Aaron’s take on our collection data and how he chose to present objects in our collection that have no image, but have a “description.” In the office we often have fun reading these aloud, or better, with Apple’s screen reader.

But, I thought it would be fun to “reblog” these in another form. So, I built a simple python script to do just that. To do this, I forked our collection data and wrote a short tool to convert our JSON objects into an sqlite3 database. I chose sqlite3 because, well, it’s light, and doesn’t require me to set up a DB server or anything.

Next, I spent most of my time trying to learn how oAuth2 works. It took me a good bit of time googling around before I realized that the python-oath2 library includes oAuth1 ( which tumblr uses ). All I really needed to do with the tumblr API was to create the post. Once I had my keys worked out and authenticating, it was just one line of code.

Once the post is published, the script updates my sqlite3 db so it makes sure to not post the same thing twice. Thats all!

I’d like to expand the code for this a bit to add some error checking, build in connections to our own API ( instead of using the data dump ) and connect with Twitter. I’m also interested in adding other museum’s data. We have the IMA data available on GitHub, but they don’t include “description” text, so well see… In the meantime, follow it and you’ll receive a new “poem” in your tumblr feed every two hours, for the next 8 years!

Our Museum has a new digital-only book series coming out called DesignFile.

I designed the covers, and we want to show here how much thought we put into them, because it’s more than first meets the eye. Designing anything for a design museum is always very meta-meta-meta.

Design we liked: Strelka Press

There is a sort of prerequisite reading for this–Craig Mod’s essay called Hack the Cover. The essay introduces ways to re-think what book covers can and should do in digital format. (What if the cover had a little dashboard area for updates and related information? What if the cover imagery somehow dispersed itself throughout the body of the text? What if we designed separate graphics for pre and post-purchase?) We kept this essay in mind and shared it with everyone involved in the process as an intro to our mindset.

Design we liked: Sternberg Press

The essay also has basic tips on what works visually (large icons, large typography, boldness) when you shrink the cover down and look at it in its true natural habitats: Amazon, publishing websites, iBook shelf, Kindle library, etc.

How it looks on the iBook shelf should not be an afterthought.

DesignFile is cool because the books can be about ANYthing design-related (similar to our exhibitions and programs, which range from cutting edge interaction design to 16th century glassware). I love to find the connections among these diverse examples of design (i.e., the eternal human pursuit of creating and improving stuff) across times, nations, ideologies and peoples.

This is a lofty way to say that the DesignFile visual system had to be flexible: comfortably covering all sorts of content, whether historical, contemporary, popular, obscure, nerdy, or fancy.

They also had to be flexible technically– function on Kindle, iPad, iPhone, as a thumbnail on Amazon, etc.

How does it look in the Kindle library? We were inspired by how this Oliver Sacks series about Neuroscience created a giant image of a human head when ordered alphabetically in the Kindle library.

How to be graphically flexible and technologically all-encompassing without being a total visual snooze? And also somehow communicate that the single and beautiful unifying thread across all the different books is something as broad and polysemic as design?

Iteration was the key for us. Once we agreed on the above requirements, we played with a lot of different ideas.

A design we liked but decided against because it didn’t translate to greyscale.

Super plain! Inspired by Architecture Words, a print book series we saw at the Designers & Books fair and liked.

We also agreed to fight logo creep. The only logo on the cover would be the DesignFile logo. A collaborative publishing project like this had the potential for a cover swamped with fussy, tiny logos.

This design is still my favorite even though we didn’t choose it.

This very simple and elegant version was inspired by a German publisher, Reclam, whose schoolbooks and textbooks I really like.

We almost went with this as final, but when Pam came in as head of Cross-Platform Publishing, she thought it didn’t grab enough attention. At first I didn’t want to re-open the design process (oy!) but in retrospect I’m glad we did, I like the new ones better. And graphic design is pretty much always fun to do.

This one was well-liked. but still not the one.

Another idea that came very close…

You’ll have to peep the books on Amazon to see what the final design looks like.

I would love to hear your comments & thoughts on these ideas and iterations.

We launched the alpha version of the new collections website at the end of September. Then I spent a good chunk of the next two months, on the road, talking about it. Or talking around it, sometimes.

There’s the nerdy nerd version with walks through some of the technical architecture and statements of bias for those choices. This was one half of a talk that I did with Micah at the Museum and Computers Network conference (MCN) in November.

• Parallel-TMS part one and part two

It’s nerdy but just as importantly it discusses the reasons why we chose to do things the way we have. Namely that: The speed with which the code running an application can be re-arranged in order to adapt to circumstances. This is not the only way of doing things. Other museums may have legitimate reasons for a slower more deliberate pace but given that we are in the middle of a ground-up renovation and re-imagining of the museum and given the nature of the squishy world of design we don’t.

The other talks bracket the one we did at MCN. There is a long talk and a very very long talk. They are the “think-y” talks. Both were funhouse-mirror keynotes delivered first at Access 2012, a libraries and technologies conference, in Montreal and then a month later at the New Zealand National Digital Forum (NDF) in Wellington.

Both talks are, ultimately, very much about the work we’re doing at the Cooper-Hewitt and the core of each keynote covers the same shifting ground that define our daily grind. Neither talk is a timeline of events or a 12-step songline for re-inventing your museum or the mother of all product demos. Those have their place but I don’t think that a keynote is one of them.

I chose instead to ask the question of why we bother collecting any of the stuff we keep hidden away in our storage facilities in the first place and to work through the claim that the distinction between museums and archives, and by extension libraries, is collapsing in most people’s minds. Assuming it every existed in the first place.

• We Were Otaku Before It Was Cool

• time pixels

In between (or rather before) all this talking was even more talking. In October I attended To Be Designed (TBD), a three-day design fiction workshop held in Detroit. The goal of TBD was to produce, from scratch, a near-future product catalog and in the process the experience worked its way in to every other talk I did in 2012.

I also spoke with James Bridle and Joanne McNeil as part of Rhizome’s Stories from the New Aesthetic, at the New Museum. My talk doesn’t actually hold hands with any of the other “museum” talks but does sort of wink at them from across a crowded subway car. It was also the first time this slide, which has shown up in every subsequent talk, appeared.

Because this is what 2012 looks like for museums.

It is most definitely not about Twitter but about the fact that some random person out there on the Internet is building a record of understanding about Roombas that may well rival anything we will ever do ourselves.

Beyond that, we are being forced to accept the fact that our collections are becoming “alive”. Or at least they are assuming the plausible illusion of being alive.

We are having to deal with the fact that someone else might be breathing life in to our collections for us or, frankly, despite us. We are having to deal with the fact that it might not even be a person doing it.

These earlier talks were the soundtrack music. They were soundtrack music in a busy room with lots of people talking. The reason I mention them here is because the place where I think they overlap with the three “museum” talks is at the intersection of motive and how we understand its consequences and how we measure it in a world where the means of production are no longer much of a proxy for anything.

Motive and desire. Desire and means.

The good news is that this is okay. This is better than okay. This presents an opportunity that we’ve never had before and we have proven, by the work that precedes us, that we are not complete morons so I believe we can make something of this.

The bad news is that we are competing with Tumblr. Not Tumblr the company but the ability to, more easily than ever before, collect and catalog and investigate a subject and to share — to publish and to distribute — that knowledge among a community of peers.

Which sounds an awful lot like classical scholarship to my ears. Even if the subject happens to be exercise treadmills. Or tyre swans.

Call me naive but I thought that we had decided that what was important was measuring people on the rigour and merit of their study and not so much on the subject themselves. We’ve been bitten by those blinders so many times already that maybe we could just get past them this time?

Because people are going to do this. They are going to build catalogs and registries and pointers to the things in their life and they are going to put them online so that they have… a center of mass around with the rest of their lives can orbit.

But most important of all is that people are going to do this because they have the means at their disposal. We no longer operate in a world where we have any kind of special access to the means of production and no one is ever going to go back to that world, at least not willingly.

Ask yourselves this: Why didn’t David Walsh give his collection to one of our museums? I am less concerned with the answer than with the question, in this case. MONA is the far end of the spectrum when we talk about what’s possible. David Walsh has, I’m told, more money than the sky but squint your eyes a bit and you see not money but means and desire.

Now look back at the internet.

So, what’s happened between then and now? Aside from just getting back to thinking about and sweating the details as we look towards 2014 the Labs team had a meeting, with a visiting museum nerd, a couple weeks ago.

We were sitting in one of the bigger conference rooms so there was a projector resting in the middle of the table surrounded by a small inanimate support staff of VGA dongles. At one point Seb picked up one of the dongles and asked: How do we (the Cooper-Hewitt) show something like this?

It seems like a throwaway question and in some ways it is. The simultaneous peril and opportunity of a design museum is that our mandate is to consider the entire universe of objects like this. Think of everything you’ve ever known about formal design and aesthetics multiplied by automated manufacturing and distributed openly available databases of designs (and gotchas) and then multiplied again by the steady, plodding march of technology.

And there’s the rub: The VGA dongle is made even more fascinating in that light. All VGA dongles are the same at one end. The end with the VGA adapter. The end with the weight of a black hole that the computer industry despite all their best efforts, and advances, can’t seem to escape.

In fairness we might just barely be starting to see a world beyond VGA in that fewer and fewer devices are using it as their default input standard but I suspect it will still be another five (probably ten) years before it will be unnecessary to ask whether there’s a VGA-to-whatever adapter.

And that’s the other end of the adapter. That whole other world of trying to improve or re-imagine video display. That whole other world of computers and other equally real and conceptual “devices”, at the end of those adapters, that we can use a way to understand the shadows of our history.

That would be an awesome show, wouldn’t it?

And if someone wanted to they could just set up a Tumblr (or whatever) account and grab all the press shots for each dongle from Amazon. There’s probably even a decent opportunity for corporate sponsorship in the form of affiliate/referral links or simply Google Ad Words ads.

A comprehensive cataloging of images of VGA dongles does not an archive, or an expert or a scholar, make but it is a pretty important piece of the puzzle. And what happens when that random person with a Tumblr account writes — and posts — the most comprehensive history of VGA dongles the world has ever seen? Everyone remembers the epic 9, 000 word Quora post on airplane cockpits, right?

I mentioned all this to Joanne one evening and she pointed out that you could probably do the entire show for free if you just ordered all the dongles from Amazon and sent them back before the return policy expired. It’s a genius idea.

You probably wouldn’t be able to remove the dongles from those overwrought and horrible plastic moulds that all electronics are packaged in but that might also be more interesting than not.

Piotr Adamczyk was one of the other keynote speakers at NDF this year and he spoke about the work he’s doing with the Google Art Project (GAP). He pointed out that GAP is really more like a Rachel Whiteread scuplture than anything else; that GAP can show you the shape of the inside of a museum. It’s a lovely way to think about what they’re doing whatever else you think about the project.

To likewise belabour injection-moulded packaging would be a mostly silly way to articulate and conceptualize how we might display a circus show of VGA dongles. But only a little. Given how difficult is it to remove anything from moulded packaging (without also destroying the packaging itself) putting the whole thing on a pedastal un-opened might be the only way we have to consider the formal qualities of the shells that house all the electronic barnacles that cover our lives.

So, yeah. Welcome to 2013.

“What’s theo dot php?” Nate asked.

We were sitting in a coffee shop in Melbourne and catching up on things because we still hadn’t sorted out internet access at the hotel. We’d arrived the night before from Hobart, the capital of Tasmania, where we’d spent the day visiting the Museum of Old and New Art which is often just referred to as “MONA”.

“Theo” is actually “The O” the name of the retrofitted iPod touch with custom software that MONA gives to every visitor when they enter the museum. “theo.php” is the URL that you’re emailed the following day which shows you all the stuff you saw during your visit.

It’s not a page that’s especially well-designed for looking at on your phone’s tiny web browser. You can do the pinchy-zoomy thing to move around the page and make the links big enough to click on but only at the cost of feeling vaguely annoyed and disappointed.

Links to individual works are loaded in-situ using Javascript so there are no permalinks (not even self-updating hash marks) or any way to share a link for a particular piece of art that you loved (or hated) with another person. Or even just yourself if you wanted to, say, bookmark it for later reference.

So, that’s not great. On the other hand: Working code always wins.

Few other museums have mustered up the ambition (not to mention the cash dollars) to do something on the scale of The O so until we do any criticism of the work that MONA has done needs to be cut down to size by running it through a filter that is equal parts envy and armchair quarterbacking.

The first thing I did when I got The O was remove the lanyard that you’re supposed to use to drape the thing around your neck. Wearing it around your neck is meant to make the device easier to use which sounds like a classic engineering-as-philosophy excuse. It does actually make it easier to use but only because neither the hardware or the software are particularly well-suited for being shoved in to, and pulled out of, your back pocket.

The second thing I did was put the headphones I was given in the pocket of my jacket. I should have just given them back to the nice “front of house” person but a first visit to the lobby of MONA is a bit overwhelming. I couldn’t tell you what the person who gave me The O said about the device. Mostly I was looking at the impressive glass staircase beyond the entrance and thinking: Oh, it’s an iPod. I can figure this out.

The headphones seemed like overkill. Maybe that’s me. I’ve never been much for audio tours and between The O and the headphones I was starting to feel like I might soon be wearing a fighter pilot’s helmet complete with a built-in heads-up display. One of the nicer bits of The O is that every piece of art comes with a soundtrack; one or more songs that you can play while you contemplate a given work.

I might have been inclined to put the headphones on if The O sported a continuous partial soundtrack. Something that would just play by itself in the background and cut over, from one track to the next, as you moved around the museum.

Or a spoken narrative. That would be awesome and they don’t necessarily need to be pre-recorded. I once walked the 30 minutes it takes to get from the Detroit Institute of the Arts to the city’s downtown core listening to my phone’s text-to-speech software read aloud a very long email from my friend James, so it’s all in the realm of the possible.

Instead it felt like more buttons to press.

The third thing I did, as we were walking down the stairs in to the museum itself, was ask why I couldn’t take pictures with The O.

No one is discouraged from taking photos in the museum but it means fiddling with yet another device. Lots of people are going to want to use their fancy digital SLRs to take high(er) quality photos but most people are going to be perfectly happy with whatever this year’s iPod camera can do. Especially if it makes things easier and especially-er if those photos can be tied to all the stuff that MONA knows about a work that’s being photographed.

Managing photo uploads in a gallery would be a genuine engineering challenge (read: storage and bandwidth) but hardly an insurmountable one and the benefits would be pretty awesome. First of all, it demonstrates that a museum isn’t blind to a reality where everyone walks around with a network-enabled camera, sharing things as they go. Secondly, if you’re thinking about doing 3D digitization of your objects you could do a lot worse than stitching together all the photos that your visitors are taking.

One of the “crazier” aspects of MONA if you’re talking to museum professionals is the absence of wall labels. You know: Those pieces of cardboard stuck to the wall that tell you who the artist is, when a work was made and usually some overly polite interpretive text that is both too short to tell you anything of substance and too long to fit in a Twitter message.

MONA is full of wireless receivers and The O does some fancy-pants triangulation to figure out where you are in the building and only show you works that are nearby. It’s pretty clever, really. It’s also not very fast. Or rather it’s only fast if you remember that our ability to do this at all is still kind of magic – but that gets olds pretty quickly in a museum setting.

Maybe it was because the device isn’t configured to stay on all the time and silently update its location as I moved around? After all, the iPods all come with big honking extra battery packs. Maybe it was because I kept turning the iPod off every time I stuck in my back pocket? Maybe it was because the app itself kept crashing and I had to wait for it to restart?

When it is working and you click on an individual piece you get a handsome photo of the thing you’re looking at with five additional tabs for finding out more information. They are:

Summary

The basics like artist name, dimensions and a button to indicate you’ve seen the work, so that it will show up in the history of your (theo.php) tour around the museum.

There’s also a “love” and “hate” button which is bit heavy-handed but still kind of charming. After you’ve indicated a choice there’s some nice copy telling you where your ranking falls relative to everyone else’s. I sort of wish that those stats were shown to you before you indicated a preference precisely to see how people would game the system. I would totally go on a tour of the most hated things on view at MONA.

Meanwhile, why can’t I love or hate an artist?

Ideas

Or as I’ve started calling them: Fortune cookies. Short little pithy and fluffy aspirational dribblings of interpretation that are cornier than they are funny. They feel like throwaway comments that betray a lack of faith in the ability of visitors to be smart enough to figure things out on their own.

Art Wank

This felt like a deliberate provocation but it is David Walsh’s party so he can do whatever he wants. MONA is his personal art collection and he paid for the whole thing, building included, out of pocket. I didn’t read any of these texts if that’s what you’re wondering. They were too long to read standing up and too long to make me want to stare at a bright screen in an otherwise dark room.

Gonzo

I wish this hadn’t been labeled “gonzo“. At the end of the day, though, I don’t really care what it’s called so long as it never goes away. This is the best part of The O. It leaves you feeling like there’s some avenue for understanding why a given piece was collected by the museum. The tone is conversational and through it emerges all the wiggly and sometimes contradictory motives that went in to acquiring a piece.

It says: We probably know more of the shop-talk that surrounds a work of art but we are still human like you and our appreciation is something that we can, and want, to share with you. That we can hopefully make you appreciate how we fell in love with a work even if you think it’s crap.

Call me crazy, but I’m just not sure what’s “gonzo” about that. It seems like minimal competence, really.

Media

So. Many. Buttons. Do I have to press them all?!

A few quibbles about the tabs:

• It’s not clear when you’re using the device whether the texts will be included in the summary version of your tour so I found myself literally taking pictures of the thing in order to ensure that I’d have a way to recall the text I was reading. This suggests something that could be made… better.

• The layout and formatting of the text is terrible. There’s not really any excuse for this. The type is all smushed up together and the line heights are too small and the margins are non-existent. It all smells like some sort of default iOS NSTextWrapper handler from 2007. There is no shame in looking at what Readability or Instapaper are doing and just copying that.

• If I’ve gone to the trouble of clicking on one of the buttons for an artwork, or maybe clicking on a button and scrolling through some amount of a text, can that please count as having “viewed” a work? There are a bunch of things, like the creepy-worm-body-artist-guy, that MONA doesn’t think I’ve seen because I neglected to click the <I SEE YOU> button.

But it mostly works. Except when it doesn’t. Every once in a while, some or all the items in a room (sometimes upwards of 30) will be bundled up in to a single listing that, when clicked, opens a nested list of individual objects which you then have to scroll through to find the thing you’re looking for. In anger.

(pause)

It’s kind of a terrible time to be making mobile apps or, rather, it’s sort of the mobile equivalent of that time when people thought writing websites in Java was a good idea. Java is awesome for lots of things just maybe not websites, or anything that needs to change often. Native mobile apps feel the same way and there’s the added burden that they are being aggressively used as a weapon by the companies (the vertical “stacks“) that support them. See also: The long, sad history of vendor-specific authoring tools.

One of the things that seems to get lost in the discussion of “native” versus the “web” is that the web has not-quite-already-but-nearly won. Which is to say that rendering engines not browsers have won. Which means that HTML (and some combination of Javascript and CSS) has won. As has HTTP.

Almost.

HTTP has basically won as the network and transport layer for most things. Web-based rendering engines are still not really the equal of fussy and bespoke hardware and device-specific APIs when it comes to performance but everyone expects them to be soon, or to reach an acceptable threshold where the rest of it doesn’t matter. Once that happens why would you ever go back?

But we’re not there, yet. And tomorrow’s future promises do little to help get things done today. That is our burden, working in the present.

So, if you ever meet anyone who was involved in building The O buy them a drink and thank them for being willing to step up and stab themselves in the face with the minutiae of the future-now. We are better for it.

Also, when was the last time you had oysters at a museum?