Please note that this is an archived event
MCG Spring 2014 event: Museums Get Mobile
Friday May 16 2014
The MCG’s Spring Meeting, Museums Get Mobile! #MGM14 was held at M Shed, Bristol on 16 May 2014.
- Event speaker Lindsey Green wrote up her presentation for the Guardian Culture Professionals network: Mobile in museums: design services, not websites
- Hidde de Vries has blogged his notes: Museums Get Mobile!
Presentation slides
- Andy Budd: Responsive design is easy
- Lindsey Green: Designing mobile services
- Léonie Watson: Everything you wanted to know about accessibility (but were afraid to ask) (2014)
- Andrew Lewis: Thinking Holistically about Mobile-Responsive Services
- Dan Goodwin: Collaborative Discovery: Commissioning a big web project when you’re not sure what you want
- Shelley Mannion: Learning from Mobile Experiences in Museums
Programme
Early tour of M Shed 9:45am – 10:30am led by Andy King and Lee Hutchinson. Meet in front of M Shed building at 9:40am, no need to book.
10.30-11.00 Registration with tea and coffee
11.00-11.15 Welcome
Chair’s Welcome (Mia Ridge, MCG) and venue welcome (Zak Mensah, Digital Manager Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives)
Sponsor Message: Bulent Osman, Managing Director, The App Garden: ‘Top 7 tips: Mobile Apps for Museums’
11.15-12.00 Opening Keynote: Andy Budd (Clearleft)
12.00-13.10 Designing for changing museum audiences.
- Ivan Teage, ‘Thinking mobile at the NHM’ – Introducing a number of case studies and research findings, Ivan traced the Natural History Museum’s journey into mobile, sharing lessons learned, and asking questions about the future role of mobile in the museum.
- Lindsey Green, ‘Designing mobile services’ – The truth is that mobile isn’t working for museums in the way we imagined. It’s not the silver bullet. We’ve made apps that haven’t been downloaded. We created handheld guides that don’t get used and the perennial question of can mobile deliver pre- and post- visits still hangs in the air. So it is time to right mobile off? Or, perhaps now is the right time to think about mobile in a different way. What do our visitors’ needs and behaviours show us about how they think and use our museums? How can we interpret these to design services that are truly transformative? What tools and processes can we use to make mobile a fully integrated part of the service offered by a museum? I’ll be taking a look at what happens when we stop designing a mobile products and start using mobile as tool in the design for a whole service.
- Léonie Watson, ‘Everything you wanted to know about accessibility (but were afraid to ask)’ – Accessibility can often seem daunting or even unachievable. Léonie Watson explains why that isn’t the case, and answers some of the important questions – what is accessibility, who does it benefit, where does it fit into the scheme of things, and what do we need to do to make it happen?
13.10-14.20 Lunch at birds of a feather tables.
Load up your plate and find a conversation to suit your interests, grouped by size or type of museum, technology, or other interests. Or take a tour of M Shed, led by Andy King and Lee Hutchinson. Meet at 13:15 and return at 2pm (we’ll hold back some lunch for you!)
14.20-15.30 Making responsive design a reality: content, technologies and commissioning web projects
- Andrew Lewis, ‘Thinking holistically about responsive displays’ – Andrew Lewis will present what the V&A has learnt about designing sites for different devices.
- Dan Goodwin, ‘Collaborative discovery: commissioning a big web project when you’re not sure what you want’ – It can be tricky to source an agency and commission them to work on big digital projects such as a responsive website build when you are not entirely sure what you want and need. The traditional model of RFPs and proposals can be restrictive and inefficient. I’ll describe how increasingly clients and agencies alike are finding a model where chunks of time and budget are reserved for collaborative discovery phases can prove more efficient, cost-effective and successful in the long term.
15.30-16.00 Tea and coffee
16.00-16.50 Closing Keynote: Shelley Mannion (British Museum)
Shelley will speak about the role mobile can and should play in museum development and audience engagement.
16.50-17.00 Wrap-up and close
About our event sponsor, The App Garden
The App Garden – Transforming Mobile Business
The event is sponsored by The App Garden and their Managing Director Bulent Osman will present his ‘Top 7 tips: Mobile Apps for Museums’.
The App Garden transforms the way organisations conduct business through multiple mobile channels by developing custom-built mobile app software solutions across the enterprise for selected industries. See more at http://theappgarden.co.uk/.
About Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives
Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives is home to over 1.75 million objects and has seven core locations. The service has embarked on a ‘user needs’ journey that will see digital central to our present and future offering. Join us.
About our keynote speaker, Andy Budd
User Experience Designer and CEO of Clearleft, Andy is a best selling tech author, curates the dConstruct and UX London conferences and helped set-up The Brighton Digital Festival. Andy created Silverback, a low cost usability testing application for the Mac, and co-founded Fontdeck, a web typography start-up. Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences like The Web 2.0 Expo, An Event Apart and SXSW. In May 2010, Wired Magazine named Andy one of the top 100 most influential people in the UK digital sector, much to the pride of his mother and the surprise of everybody else.
About our keynote speaker, Shelley Mannion
Shelley is Senior Content Producer at The British Museum. She has lived and worked in several countries, most recently Switzerland, where she spent two years researching social media for museums through a grant from the Rubin Foundation. Shelley is a creative, lateral thinker and passionate user, visitor and learner advocate who is committed to helping people of all ages make meaningful, transformative connections with art and culture through technology.
Speaker and chair bios
ANDY BUDD, Founder and managing director of Clearleft – User Experience Designer and CEO of Clearleft, Andy is a best-selling tech author, curates the dConstruct and UX London conferences and helped set-up The Brighton Digital Festival. Andy created Silverback and co-founded Fontdeck. Andy is a regular speaker at international conferences and was named one of the most influential people in the UK digital sector by Wired Magazine.
LEONIE WATSON, Consultant in Digital Accessibility – After many years as Director of Accessibility at Nomensa, Léonie is now a Senior Accessibility Engineer with The Paciello Group (TPG) and owner of LJ Watson Consulting. Amongst other things she is Chair of the British Computer Association of the Blind (BCAB), writes for .Net magazine, and is a member of the W3C HTML Working Group and HTML Accessibility Task Force.
IVAN TEAGE, Digital Development Manager at Natural History Museum – Ivan has a wide range of experience in technology and management roles, with a focus on delivering technology that is understandable and useful for customers and end-users. Working at the Natural History Museum for over 3 years, Ivan has led change in digital thinking, completing several major mobile projects and analysis reports.
LINDSEY GREEN, Frankly, Green & Webb – Lindsey is a partner at Frankly, Green and Webb focusing on design research, service design and participation. Her experience at FGW includes projects with the Van Gogh Museum, Lincoln Castle, Natural History Museum of Utah and National Gallery.
ANDREW LEWIS, Digital Content Delivery Manager at Victoria and Albert Museum – Andrew is an information scientist with 23 years’ experience in information and cultural services. In his current role for the V&A, Andrew is responsible for the strategy for development of the technology and platforms that deliver digital content to the V&A website and on mobile.
DAN GOODWIN, UX Lead at fffunction – Dan is a user experience designer working at fffunction, a design agency in the South West of the UK. With a background of fifteen years experience in agency and in-house software and web development, he is an all-rounder with strong technical and people skills in addition to user experience. He loves user research and bringing users and empathy for them into every step of a project. Dan loves the sea and gets in it or near it whenever he gets the chance. He likes good coffee, good beer, and good and bad flapjacks.
MIA RIDGE, Chair of the Museums Computer Group – Mia is currently researching a PhD in digital humanities, focusing on crowdsourcing, digitisation and the geo-location of historical materials. Formerly Lead Web Developer at the Science Museum/NMSI, Mia has worked internationally as a business analyst, digital consultant and web programmer in the cultural heritage and commercial sectors. Her edited volume, Crowdsourcing Our Cultural Heritage will be published in October by Ashgate.
ZAK MENSAH, Digital Manager at Bristol Museums and Gallery – Zak helps people to use technology across Bristol Museums, Galleries & Archives. From websites, digital strategy, in-house skills development to worrying about opening digital files in 100 years’ time.
ALISON BEAN, Digital Development Manager at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama – Alison is a culture and heritage sector professional who has been active online since 1995, and working with digital media on a professional basis since 2002. For almost five years she was Web Officer at The British Postal Museum &. Alison is currently leading on the development of Central’s digital strategy and project managing the development of its new responsive website.
