Transcript

"""Design thinking"" to turn a museum into an experiential place | Paolo Rigamonti | TEDxMilano"

Translator: Claudia Di Lorenzo Reviewer: Muriel de Meo At this point in the evening I ask all of you a little effort. Please try to associate one image in your mind with the word "museum". Especially a natural history museum, or a scientific museum, Chances are, most of you will think of a boring image of a somewhat dusty, silent place with a soft, suggestive atmosphere and myriad of objects in glass cases displayed orthogonally. In fact, this is how it is. This is our inheritance from the Enlightenment museum. As Karl Popper said, this is the Enlightenment's naivety. The Enlightenment created the museum and inherited collections, the "wunderkammer", private collections gathered by rich lords from the Middle Ages to the 17th century. The Enlightenment made them public, thus creating the museum. Nevertheless, this kind of museum has followed one paradigm for long: "Don't touch". "Don't touch" ruled for a really long time. Like many of you, I belong to a generation raised on the following motto: Look, don’t touch is a thing to learn. It's a social virtue. It's about nurturing the behavioral aspect of a virtue: don't touch. We must wait until the begininng of the 20th century before something changes. But something happens at a certain point that flips this point of view: In London, in 1851, an amazing event took place: the first Expo in history. The Great Universal Exhibition, as they call it. The very word "universal", in 1851, shows what an ambitious project it was. In fact, it was meant to celebrate the British colonial power. It was something unbelievable. Just to make it clear, six million people visited it in just six months. Basically one third of the entire population of Britain at the time. 13,000 exhibitors, gathered from 45 countries. Actually, that was the seed of what, 150 years later, we'd start to call "globalization". Never-before-seen things were shown for the first time. There was everything in there: the world’s finest artisanal products; textiles, ceramics, exotic animal trophies; the exhibition of Koh-i-Noor, the world's largest diamond of that time, up until the exposition of scientific tools, scientific experiments, and measuring instruments. Yet, this is the most fascinating aspect: the exhibition of machines. Steam engines, industrial processes - We spoke earlier about loom. This was the presentation of the first Jacquard machine. This is industrial revolution on stage. This is the vertigo of modernity. Look at this great promise of a better future. Modernity, finally, emancipates humankind from nature. This is the ultimate dominance, we’re dominating all of this, and we all will enjoy a better life. Even more fascinating, what I want to stress now is that this event shows the spectacular, extraordinary power of science and technology. As we said, this event was attended by six million people. At the beginning, entrance tickets came at a cost of £350. In just three months, price plummeted to £3 so that everyone could visit it. In fact, everyone did - the Royal family and the working class. And everyone was astonished by viewing this exhibition of science and techniques. The event was such a great achievement because of the discovery, spectacularity of science and techniques. It was also a huge economic success - it was perhaps the only Expo who ever made money in history: around £18 million, based on today’s exchange rate. The decision was then made to open three museums in London: the Victoria & Albert Museum - it goes without saying, Prince Albert had patronized the event- the Natural History Museum, and the Science Museum. Now, the Science Museum is exactly one of those we want to understand the most. It took a lot of time, but in 1934, the Science Museum made a relevant step: it launched the Children's Gallery, so a space for kids, where children could touch stuff for the first time ever. Physics experiments were displayed through "hands-on", touchable exhibits. Things then start to change, a change was triggered. This was the beginning of an experiential museum. This model is participatory, interactive, and requires direct fruition. Then, this gentleman changed the game. His name is Frank Oppenheimer. He was an American particle physicist, a professor at the University of Colorado, and brother of Robert, the world-famous Oppenheimer. Robert Oppenheimer, as you know, worked with Enrico Fermi on the Manhattan Project. Essentially, we are talking about the inventors of the atomic bomb. Now, Oppenheimer happened to be in London for an award, did some research, and was deeply impressed by the Science Museum, and the European scientific museums. When he came back to the U.S., in San Francisco, he launched the Exploratorium and everything changes. The Exploratorium still exists, and it's an extraordinary place. If you have yet to visit it, please do, because it’s truly an incredible place. Indeed, it’s a game changer since it’s not, technically, a museum. How does it define itself? It defines itself a Public Learning Laboratory. The Exploratorium is a place where science is not experienced but through interactive experiments. Kids need to participate. To invert and paraphrase the motto, we could now say: "You can’t learn, if you just look without touching." In fact, the opposite is true: if you want to learn you need to touch. This is the embodiment of the "Edutainment" concept, that is, content is conveyed, scientific content in this case, such as the laws of physics, is conveyed through the so-called "Gamification", a playful dynamic. What’s exciting about Exploratorium is its goal, which is also in its name, Exploratorium. It aims to create active explorers. In the Exploratorium's values, one can read the following: we do not want young people to come here to find answers. Rather, we want them to come and learn how to ask new questions. Now, this is another fundamental change. Look at this photo. It looks older than it is, but it was taken in the 1980’s. In 1986, the Science Museum inaugurated the first Launchpad Gallery, which is a fully interactive gallery also dedicated to scientific demonstrations. There's a funny anectode, told by the museum director at the time, an 8-year-old child who, for the first time - among the first entering that hall- exclaimed in awe, as the doors opened: "Wow, it's toy heaven!” He had found the ultimate playground. In fact, this started the transformation of the museum. It kickstarted a new era: the "Please, touch" era. It's a game changer. Museums begin to use totally new languages: scenography, show, performance, and interaction. What I wish you understand, though, is how cultural paradigm changes. Which is to say, the previous museum had inherited a tradition that had, how can I say, two key points: the curator and the visitor, who used to go and contemplate. The paradigm completely shifted. This means, reality becomes more complex, the scope of science and physics widens and clearly, if one doesn't feel as though belonging to this universe, if you don't experience it personally, you keep being an outsider. The whole way of talking science changes. Thereafter, the museum changes completely. It completely changes, including the "Don't touch" part to the point of this naughty one to the right, hopping on it. This is what forces us to build structures three times more resistant than they are meant to, because we need to provide for a "touch" that, at this point, is no longer as easy to measure and forecast. New ideas grow, and become installation mechanisms. This is again at the Science Museum: one can slide down the staircase, and in the process, run a scientific experiment because they experience materials' friction. Here is the CERN Museum in Geneva with its landscape made of microparticles. This is an exhibition on DNA, in Rome, that we organized a few years ago. In order to explain chromosomes, we built a forest of interactive chromosomes. As previously mentioned, we need to make visible an invisible scale. We need to make people understand how a system works, so we take it to the extreme and it becomes an installation, an object that people can even access. Then, there are cases like this one, that are quite fascinating. This is - let's call it a poop museum. (Laughter) Actually, when a child enters he receives a beautiful poop hat - Not sure how this may affect a child's self-esteem, anyway- (Laughter) He’s put into a giant toilet bowl, and flushed down through the entire sewage system. (Laughter) It’s in Tokyo - it’s real, and an experience. I trivialized it’s name as poop museum, but that’s not its real name. It’s called, “Toilet!? Human waste, and Earth's Future”. In fact, this is Edutainment at its finest: trying to make children understand the complexity of an urban infrastructure, such as sewage, and trying to offer environmental awareness. Therefore, Edutainment at a very high level indeed. Everything has really changed, so the museum also becomes a subject that needs to enter the marketing world. It must start promoting itself, communicate, and become competitive. It’s no longer that thing, it’s something else. This statement makes it very clear. And it wasn't spoken by a layman. This statement comes from New York's former Digital Director of MoMA, one of the world’s most visited museums. He says, we don’t compete with other museums; we compete with Netflix and Candy Crush. Our topic is no longer a competition through cultural means. Rather, culture has become an add-on to an experience that competes with other entertainment experiences. Here’s where I come in, because this is my job. I do this job with others, around the world. I try to elaborate this passage, to find the design key of this new entity that we still call the museum, to avoid misunderstandings, Yet it’s no longer a museum, but something else. It’s still nameless, but it’s another thing. Now, what becomes difficult for me is that compared to previous museums, that could keep working for at least two, even three generations, I'm in this situation. I’m the one on the left. By the way, I actually had a disgusting sweater like that. (Laughter) In short, as many of us in this room, I belong to that generation, which, in fact, grew up with the book as a medium of knowledge. Then we accessed other media too, but books were a staple medium. So we became information seekers. In order to broaden our knowledge, we needed to seek information. In fact, that photo could come from any of our family albums. But when I needed to search for a photo to talk about the generation that I design for, I could find only one photo that might communicate effectively. However, this is the generation we need to design for. It’s a multi-tasking generation of digital natives who are facing the opposite problem: they do not need to seek information, rather, they must deal with the so called information overload. This generation needs support to manage all their information. In short, a 2008 University of California study - so we're talking about 10 years ago, and the situation is presumably even more pressing today. This study estimated that we are exposed, on a daily basis, to roughly 34 gigabytes of data - just through news, TV, billboards, smart phones, and so on. This means roughly 100,000 words a day. For example, War and Peace, which is one of the longest novels in the history of literature, has around 544,000 words. So it gets really complicated. It seems like the attention span has dropped to eight seconds. This makes designing for today a very complex task. Hence, what I always tell my students is that at the end of the day, we design filters. What we really need to learn is how to build smart filters. I’m not talking about content filters - that’s a curator's business. It’s not our job. Instead, we need to select all the information we receive and start figuring out how to distill it into many bits, finer than the eight second attention span so that, together, these can weave an interesting fabric. Today, any smartphone lets us access knowledge sources on many aspects of science. So a museum cannot compete with such a thing. The museum must entrench, must engage us, must make us understand a story’s entire picture which is becoming more and more complex. Finally, it must then offer you a deepening. In fact, I cannot steal you from Netflix or Candy Crush through a museum lecture. You know what the most important part is? Neither I nor anyone else in this field across the world today has a job title for it. No one of us got a specific training for this kind of stuff. We are all self taught. I’m an architect, my business partner is instead a musicologist, and my former one used to be an electronic musician and a graphic designer. We are all people coming from totally different backgrounds and learned how to do this qsubsequently. Our teams include designers, computer developers, artists, scenographers, theatrical technicians, IT experts, science communicators, storytellers, and engineers. We are a true example of multidisciplinarity, not because we like big, modern words, but because no one really knows how to do all this. We are all learning to create it by hybridizing several diverse skills. Perhaps on a positive note, we all teach at the university, so we’re teaching the younger generations how to do this job, how to build a system and a methodology. Difficult things might happen. Here’s an example of what we have recently done. You may have heard of the M9 museum that just opened in Venice - or in Mestre, to be more precise - around last year. It is a very big museum that took on a very special challenge, an extraordinary experimental project, similar to what we experience every day, when we experiment. It’s a museum of the 20th century that does not contain a single physical object. It is based solely on immersive and interactive experiences and talks to us the 20th century through this kind of narrative. It follows the Anglo-Saxon tradition of historical tales, of “Public History”. Instead of telling history from the point of view of the powerful, it tells it through the mechanism of self-identification. You try to put yourself in the shoes of someone who was there. Among other things that we designed, we have been asked to tell the factory. We needed to tell very young kids about this very important world of work that many of us still remember. We didn’t know where to start, so at a certain point we bet on an experiment. Let’s try this: let’s ask ourselves what the assembly line and video games doi have in common. Both share environmental stress, the point mechanism, and penalty in case of wrong-doing. So let’s try to work this out. Let’s build a mechanism which, through gamification - also known as “serious game”, a game that is not meant to entertain but is rather serious - renders a factory's inner machinery. This is the final installation. We also came up with this idea: that despite everything today is either digital or electronic, the interface is mechanical because we wanted to keep something specific from the 20th century. We also referred to Ansaldo from the 1950’s and we reconstructed a kind of video game that truly reproduces every aspect of the assembly line. We ask ourselves, every time we complete a work, if we made it right, or if we got it wrong. It’s a drama because you never know, because it’s an experiment and there is no path to follow. [Vanishing Mediators] And this always made me feel very close to this definition given by a philosopher that I appreciate very much. He’s alive, he’s Slovenian, and his name is Slavoj Žižek. Some years ago, he coined the term: “Vanishing Mediators", which defines those who, like us, are at a threshold, between before and after, and we are mediators because they mediate. We are mediating between what was before - We are trying to imagine what can come after. and "vanishing" because we will last just a very short time, because like they just told us, big leaps await us in the years ahead if compared to what has already been achieved. I keep saying that 50 years ago a son, a grandfather, and a father used to share nearly the same lifestyle. There just was a talk about that. I see young people that totally change their point of view every 15 years. Žižek said, so that you understand what he meant by vanishing mediator, he used Charlie Chaplin as an example when the film industry began using sound. Charlie Chaplin, in a way, put his foot down and had an attitude that was a bit conservative since he tried to understand the traumatic effect that voice would have on that expressive form. In fact, voice was an extraneous intruder. Chaplin understood that this novelty would not benefit his own poetic at all. This is how I feel. Those in my field, I believe they should share the same attitude, understand this mediation role and understand where we need to surrender more or less. Because at the end of the day, they outsourced to us the narrative of science, the narrative of knowledge. Therefore, we have an important role to cope with, and we must be aware of it. We know where we come from and the next door is before us. It’s very difficult to understand the right thing to do. We ask ourselves this for each project. During every project, we try to be consistent, careful to carefully study every subject, and find the right way to communicate them. We don’t know if this is the right way. Tomorrow morning, with the next project, we’ll come to the table to think about it. Thank you. (Applause)