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

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.

> 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.

Museum curators used to be called keepers and this only changed in the mid-late twentieth century. The philosophy of preservation runs deep and you won't struggle to find curators whose favourite day of the week is when the museum is closed to the public.

Curators tend to make exhibits and displays that appeal to their own scholarly reference points. You need a different role - interpretation - to literally interpret this scholarship into what the public might be interested in. Few museums can afford to apply the lens of interpretation, so for the most part we are stuck with what curators think and its limited crossover with what the public want.

i'm confused. in what way is this a response to the article?

the article laments the sidelining of physical exhibits, in favor of software. you respond that the screens probably have an arduous and expensive procurement process.

what's going on here?

> Personally I'm not interested in museums that are just glass cases with stuff without any explanation.

I am not sure why you mentioned this, because it has nothing to do with the subject article. This was a very specific article about interactive, hands-on museums replacing their exhibits with touch screens.

That being said, I have also been to countless museums of many kind and I have never once seen a museum that did not explain what the exhibits were. Have you actually seen this anywhere, or was this hyperbole?

My wife and I toured our neighborhood public elementary school a couple years ago. Almost every classroom we passed the kids were staring at their chromebooks, even in the art room—digital art, I guess [1]. In the music room the kids were sitting at rows of desks with electronic keyboards and headphones while the teacher sat at the front of the class and gave them instructions through a microphone (to be heard through the headphones, I guess).

It was incredibly depressing. We decided to send our kids elsewhere.

[1] Nothing against digital art, but I strongly feel young kids should be working with actual physical materials.

To be devil's advocate it is really practical to develop and roll out digital experiences. You can be a lot more creative about it than the "big tablet" experience you have at McDonald's. Some friends of mine have built experiential art installations that have things like a custom coin-op video game, Pepper's Ghost style displays, a "time machine" experience using video projectors, etc.

I'd love to be able to sell location-based XR experiences to museums: like you go to the paleontology museum and put on a headset and now the museum is a mixed reality Jurassic Park. For that matter I'd love to set up a multiplayer VR park in a big clean span space. There are a lot of difficulties like the cheap headsets don't really have the right tracking capabilities for a seamless location-based experience [1] plus getting together and paying a team which can deliver that sort of thing. A museum with really robust funding could probably afford an XR experience and subsidize development that transfers to other museums but I can't see the economics working for turning an old American Eagle at the mall into a VR experience park: malls have unrealistic ideas about their spaces can earn and most of them have posts in them that player would crash into.

[1] It already knows where it is the instant you put the headset on and it doesn't have to retrain like the MQ3 would.

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…

> Scandinavia though, where they are years ahead in that respect and have already begun taking digital devices out of the classrooms again

While I personally suspect that social media and by extension phones are detrimental: what you're writing here is opinion, not fact.

Just like adding tech was an experiment which seems to have been accepted all over, removing the tech again is - at least to my knowledge - in experiment phase, too.

And because a real experiment would take roughly 12-20 years (students performance from start to finish, until they're gainfully employed)... Neither of these approached have really been validated. It's all speculation, because there are so many other reasons that could explain the issues we currently have in our schools

And frankly - even though I honestly believe that social media is bad for them - I sincerely think its nowhere close to being the main reason for dropping performance, inability to take responsibilities or whatever else people are saying about the current children.

> 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-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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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)

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.

"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.

I think that science museums being places for kids is a good thing. The are the ones who benefit the most. If you want science for grownups, you have conferences. Also, that it is for kids doesn't make it impossible to enjoy as an adult, especially if it is about things you are unfamiliar with.

Now, if you go to a science museum and think "only a kid can enjoy that". Then the problem is not that it is a place for kids, it is that it is just bad. It is a thing Disney understood very well, its classics may look like they are for kids, but they are actually enjoyable by everyone, and it is a big reason for their success.

As for art museums, the problem is that they are usually just exhibitions, and to be honest, that's boring, especially if you are a kid. That's unlike a science museum where they actually try to teach you science. It is only interesting if you are already well into that kind of art, and most kids aren't (yet?).

History museums are kind of a middle ground as they can do the double duty of teaching history (mostly for kids) and showing off artefacts to people who are already into that (mostly for grownups).

It drives me absolutely bananas that the "interpretation" (fancy museum word for "signs") at science museums is so parsimonious. Some fascinating device vital to the history of an important branch of science will have a brief paragraph about the person who invented it, nothing about what it's for, and then just a date and the device name.

Often there's little or nothing further even in the museum shop. It's a crying shame.

One science museum that is not like that is the Deutsches Technikmuseum Berlin, at least when I was there (shudder) about a decade ago.

It was a museum that was designed for parents to explain to children. The written material for any given piece in an exhibit went into sufficient detail and successive sections of writing would build on each other without necessarily requiring that the previous section had been read.

Back then the museum had an exhibition on the longitude problem and time keeping, precision, drift, etc. that walked you through the development of increasingly accurate chronometers, the practical reasons why, etc. It was an absolute masterwork exhibit, and it expected the adults to be actively engaged with helping digest the material with the kids.

I don't remember the big Kensington museums being like that when I was a kid. There was a kids' section or two, but the rest was clearly for adults (and has stuck in my memory just as much, if not more than, the kids' sections).

Seeing the real Apollo 10 (I don't remember which module) sticks very clearly in my memory.

I also rode on a "heritage" train recently, and what struck me the most was that the interior decor of the passenger cars looked as though it had been designed for and by grown-ups.

I'm not sure which way you're going with this, but the Philadelphia Museum of Art, down the street from the Franklin Institute, isn't specifically geared towards adults and has lots of programming specifically for kids. Seeing Rubens' Prometheus Bound there as a child as part of such a program left me in awe. I remember the feeling to this day. Every time I go, I see families with young children or even just groups of teens there.

The Philadelphia Zoo also has events planned specifically for adults. My girlfriend and I went to one a few months ago. I'm not sure what specifically about the Philadelphia zoo, the Bronx zoo, the Shedd aquarium, etc. is for specifically geared towards kids, though.

Largely agreed, with one exception. If you're ever in Boston/Cambridge MA, check out the MIT museum. I've always told people that its a science museum but for adults. The Harvard museums are worth visiting as well, but the MIT museum really impressed me with their content.

There are exceptions - here in the UK we have the RI: https://www.rigb.org/

The Christmas lectures are probably the most famous thing they do, and these have definitely moved in a more 'child' focussed direction. If you were attending the Christmas lectures in the 1850s however, the audience would have been middle class victorioans, and you'd have had Michael Faraday telling you about electricity, forces, chemistry etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Institution_Christmas_Le...

I would recommend attending one of their lectures if you happen to find yourself in London, just to be in the building, and to sit in the lecture theatre!

Art museums could be made friendlier for kids, but they would need significant design and maintenance effort. In particular: many kids need a lot of running around, want to play with things with their hands, and get quickly bored just standing and looking at artworks. It would be nice if there were better art museums for kids though.

(For what it's worth, there are plenty of non-interactive and thus boring-for-kids science, technology, history, etc. museums if you look around.)

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.

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).

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.