This paper seeks to answer the question: How can mobile apps encourage and support meaningful, face-to-face social interaction in museum spaces? Museums are increasingly focused on creating more engaging visitor experiences, in part by encouraging participation in dialogue and social interaction in the exhibit space. At the same time, we are embracing mobile technologies. At first glance, social interaction and mobile engagement might seem to be antithetical. Many popular museum mobile apps divert visitors from interacting with exhibits, objects, and each other, undermining social interaction and dialogue.

In surveying the top-rated museum apps in the iTunes store, as well as popular social apps outside the industry, we examine how apps both limit and nurture real-space social interaction. We identify key characteristics of mobile-supported social exchange, assessing which app features provide the best opportunities for fostering meaningful social interaction, both between visitors and other visitors, and between visitors and the museum. We explore specific social interactions conducive to the museum environment—game play, team work, polls, affinity-mapping, creating and sharing content, conversation prompts—and align them with mobile app features. We both analyze existing social engagement models with the greatest potential for contributing to mobile-museum projects, and identify opportunities to leverage those successful engagement models to create new types of mobile experiences.

You can read the paper on the Museums and the Web conference website.

6am - 7am:  Get up!
Melatonin production drops and the body gears up for the day. Blood pressure, heart rate, and metabolism are all on the rise.

7am - 8am:  Run
Lower body temperature makes the morning ideal for a good run.

8am - 12pm:  Solve
Tackle tasks that require an alert mind and strong problem-solving skills. 

12pm - 2pm:  Create
The body is flush with epinephrine, keeping you alert and responsive. Although fatigue may set in during the early afternoon, some studies suggest that a tired mind is actually conducive to creative solutions. 

2pm - 3pm:  Nap
While we recognize that many of us can’t actually snooze on the job, a little downtime at this point really helps you stay productive the rest of the day. 

3pm - 5pm:  Learn
Long-term memory is stronger later in the day. This is an ideal time to review material that you need to retain.

5pm - 6pm:  Go Home
The work day is done.  Head home and if you can get a little exercise on the way, all the better!

The site will focus on W3C accessibility guidelines to shape the fundamental building blocks of the site, onto which we will integrate interface and visual design elements, optimizing content and design to allow for maximum accessibility across a variety of technology platforms, surpassing typical accessibility standards and reaching everybody, anywhere.

Night Kitchen will be presenting a workshop at the Museums and the Web Conference in April 2013 on Designing for Everybody: Accessible, Responsive, Universal Design in Drupal.

Image courtesy of the National Museum of American History

Not only is Chen a good friend, but her father-in-law Dean Malissa recently collaborated with us for Mount Vernon’s Discover George Washington project, acting as the voice of George Washington.

Here’s what Chen has to say about her company:

THE STORY OF LATE GREATS

What started as a handmade birthday gift for her father-in-law (who is also the official George Washington portrayer at Mount Vernon) soon turned into LATE GREATS, Chen Reichert’s series of stuffy historical figures for budding buffs and longtime fans alike.

For more information visit www.lategreats.com.

My wife Bobbie and I visited my 93 year-old great aunt Margaret in St. Louis this summer and were inspired by her wonderful stories. One in particular, the story of the McAllister family coming to terms with the loss of their dear pet mouse Oswald, we found particularly heartfelt and, despite the subject matter, actually quite funny. So after several months of work, including a photo shoot at our home featuring a cast of our near and dear neighbors, much collaboration with a fantastic illustrator who works right here at Night Kitchen, and many hours of layout and design, we have finally finished. The self-published The Death and Burial of Oswald McAllister is now available through the website Blurb.com. To purchase a copy, or simply get a sneakpeak at what it’s all about, visit www.oswaldmcallister.com. If you like what you see, please pass the word along to anyone who you think would enjoy the book, young or old.

Client: Krannert Art Museum
Project: African Art iPad Interactives

Night Kitchen recently developed a suite of iPad interactive kiosks for the Krannert Art Museum at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in conjunction with the re-opening of their African art gallery. The iPads feature videos that combine historical and contemporary narratives in order to reveal a complex and nuanced history of African art objects appropriated and reinterpreted over time.

Client: Krannert Art Museum
Project: African Art iPad Interactives

Inspiration

The latest exhibition at the Krannert Art Museum, Encounters: The Arts of Africa, displays approximately 70 artworks from the museum’s collection. Most of these objects were not intended for display in a museum, but rather were meant to be performed or used in a wide range of social and cultural practices. The museum wanted to bring these objects to life through digital storytelling.

Narration

Night Kitchen Interactive created an iPad kiosk that features a variety of thematic visual narratives and videos. Night Kitchen produced four original videos to couple with others produced by scholars and the museum. Taken together, the media foreground contemporary artists’ voices, and explores the original contexts of historical artworks as well as their journeys out of Africa through the slave trade, and the European colonization of African communities.

Design

Each of the five iPads presents a unique set of stories that relate to nearby objects, enabling visitors to reflect on the object’s role as both a sacred or personal object, and as an object of display. Visitors can choose videos from an intuitive and visually rich interface to engage with the content that most interests them.

Interaction

The iPad interactives present visitors with an unobtrusive and intuitive experience while providing the museum with a reliable and accessible means for integrating multimedia into the exhibition. Designed to attract the museum’s diverse audience of students, faculty and members of the wider Urbana-Champaign area, the iPad interactives invite visitors to engage with the context for these objects, revealing the nuanced and global influences of these culturally-significant works of art.

Installation photos by Chris Brown and Jamie Nelson.

The responsive website will provide high definition live streaming and on-demand video performances filmed at the Curtis Institute of Music to audiences around the world, whether on a desktop computer, tablet, or mobile device. Visitors can browse new or upcoming performances and will also be able to personalize their experience by adding specific segments to a list of favorites. Curtis Performs will integrate the Kaltura online video platform within a Drupal interface to enable staff to provide audiences with information about recent, new and upcoming performances at Curtis.

Client: Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent
Project: iPad Interactives

The Philadelphia History Museum is showcasing the treasures from their permanent collection in their newest galleries alongside interactive media installations created by Night Kitchen Interactive.

Client: Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent
Project: iPad Interactives

Inspiration

The museum sought to connect Philadelphia’s notable past with the thriving community of the present by displaying historical treasures alongside contemporary objects and imagery, encompassing the city’s ongoing history. Exploratory collection interfaces, revealing interviews and passionate films weave throughout the exhibitions to connect and communicate with visitors of all ages and interests.

Narration

In The Ordinary, The Extraordinary and The Unknown, iPads installed throughout the gallery enable audiences to access details and related information about the objects on view, encouraging them to dive deeper into the compelling and sometimes controversial narratives of these historical artifacts. We also produced a series of video interviews with local brewers from Philadelphia’s acclaimed breweries for the museum’s exhibition Craft Brewing: It’s a Beer Revolution. Video excerpts accessible through an iPad are displayed behind the bar within the Made in Philadelphia gallery, showcasing the  commitment of local brewers to continue the city’s beer making heritage.

Design

For the museum’s permanent exhibition we created a visually-rich interface for exploring the stories of the artifacts on display. Drawing from the simplicity and accessibility of the iPad’s functionality, we developed an intuitive and affordable means for the museum to integrate multimedia interactives into their new exhibitions.

Interaction

We used the latest generation of iPads with high resolution displays that linked to large viewing monitors interspersed with the collection. Designed to contain a wealth of information and updateable through a wireless connection, the iPads provide a flexible solution for the museum for these and future exhibitions.

A unified look and feel will align the wealth of content on their existing site through a vibrant and intuitive interface to provide visitors with comprehensive and targeted information about the museum. In addition, the website will be responsive to the visitor’s device, whether desktop, tablet, or mobile, serving up the entire website to visitors at home and on-the-go. The refreshed web presence will leverage social media tools to increase community engagement with a more diverse global audience, and will speak more effectively to families and children to showcase the museum as a family-friendly destination and compel visitors to experience it first-hand.

When developing custom Drupal sites for our clients we try to leverage as much of the standard Drupal building blocks as possible. While we also "give back" to the Drupal community by participating in user forums and submitting patches for existing modules, we have found very little of our custom module code that provides a benefit to other users.

A recent project has challenged us to create a website that will use mobile-first and responsive-design techniques. We identified a need to tailor small areas of the site specifically for tablet users and mobile users, and while we have used existing modules for similar needs in the past, they were not a good fit for this particular project.

We developed our own solution to the problem, and have adapted it as a generic module and released it to the Drupal community. We hope that Mobile Detect will aid other developers who have similar needs in their mobile first and responsive design approaches.