Andy Polaine: Welcome to Power of Ten, a podcast about design

operating at many levels zooming out from thoughtful detail

through to organisational transformation, head on to

changes in society and the world. My name is Andy Polaine.

I'm a service design and innovation consultant, coach,

trainer and writer.

My guest today is sept chan chief experience officer at Acme

the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne. He

champions human centred design approaches across the museum.

And prior to Acme he led the digital renewal transformation

of the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, and

the powerhouse Museum's pioneering work in open access,

mass collaboration and digital experience during the 2000s is

also adjunct professor at the School of Media and

Communications in the College of Design and social context at

RMIT. In Melbourne, Seb, welcome to the show.

Seb Chan: Hi. Really great to be here.

Andy Polaine: You've had quite a journey from Australia to New

York and back again, and some pretty major public galleries

and museums. Tell us a little bit about your we think it was

sort of back in the music scene in Australia.

Seb Chan: Yeah, I mean, I kind of fell into museums and the

cultural sector, sort of at the end of the 1990s. And I was

really doing a lot of work, and play in music, running events

and clubs and parties and DJing. And really part of the, I guess

that hybrid of the like, the electronic music scene instead

Sydney, and the emergent web, people making things on the web,

and, you know, all that sort of Buzz before the.com crash in

Sydney. And I guess for me, you know, I fell into museums, much

as a lot of people of my era fell into technology and design

by being in the right place with the right, right, people just

had a particular moment where the web as a medium was

something that was not fully commercial. But there was ways

to make a living from it. And I think coming into the Powerhouse

Museum through the IT side, in fact, really on the off kind of

chance of applying for a job, I ended up bringing together a lot

of the skills and thinking that I brought up, you know, when I

look back on it, I kind of approached museums as I used to

approach DJing as a practice. So it's sort of like this notion

of, for me, the ideal Museum is one that introduces people to

ideas, culture, experiences, media items, that they didn't

think they would be interested in much as a really good DJ does

an amazing set that gets people to dance and move and socialise

to music they have never heard and don't know. And so it's that

sort of contextual piece around, can you for me, it's been about,

can you design spaces that bring people together around ideas and

cultural objects that they are not familiar with, and get them

vibing on? You know, I think that's been part of what I've

been trying to do in various ways. And Tech has intersected

with that.

Andy Polaine: So you wrote this piece a little while ago, said

like December, I think last year, said, looking backwards to

go forwards, you know, from words, talks in late 2020. And

you started with this slide that says this site best viewed at

resolution is greater than 640 by 480. And, you know, as you

went through it, I mean, partly I kind of felt reassured,

because I was reading through guy. Yeah, I remember that. I

remember that, because you're kind of talking about, you know,

how technology was introduced in museums in terms of why in

interactive art, and we might have the anti rom stuff that I

was involved in, in the early 90s. You know, putting that in a

museum, we certainly wasn't the first technology, you know,

there was stuff in the late 60s and 70s in museums. And I think

you quote, someone is talking about, you know, in the 1970s

saying, is this stuff going to be still playable in the in the

2000s? You know, and it was incredibly fraught, because, you

know, whose machine went in the museum? Was it, you know, did

the machine was it part of the artwork? Or was it just the CD

ROM in our case, and all that kind of stuff? And of course, it

runs at different speeds, and then the things break and all

that. Can you maybe I know, it's it's quite long article, it's

very worth reading. I'll put it in the show notes. But, you

know, what was the what was the kind of thinking behind that?

And what's the sort of through line of of that piece?

Seb Chan: Yeah, look, I guess it pulled on a number of threads

that I think had started to look under gravel during the during

COVID. And I think this sort of period, particularly in the

museum sector, being somewhere somewhere between it and Not for

profit and government supported Senator, depending on what part

of the world you're in, the memory of museum practice really

lives on in the staff who I've retained. And over the last year

and a half, two years, we've had a lot of people leaving the

field, particularly in the US, and the UK and Europe less so in

Australia. And with them goes a huge amount of knowledge and a

huge amount of context that begins to explain some of the

reasons why that nonprofit technology or technology and

design in the not for profit space is so fraught, and I

think, I like to tie it back also to the way that museums now

need to be collecting and preserving things that, like

your CD ROM art, or, you know, we have here at Melbourne, the

archives of Stella, and we have a new commission, the works that

we've commissioned in the last couple of kind of years for

virtual reality works, AR works AI, generative documentaries

works that are that arrive on a on a lacy orange drive, that's

going to last five years. And that is the word. And that hard

kind of drive needs much more active preservation practices,

then a painting or sculpture. And so there's that digital

preservation piece, but then this practice piece, and so a

lot of the history of technologies in museums has been

poorly preserved. And also, a lot of the things that I and my

teams built at the powerhouse in the early 2000s have been lost,

or you know, running very old versions of Flash and the

original, the original files are gone, or director, these sorts

of things. But as soon as you get to social web, and all of

this sort of network culture piece, from the mid kind of

2000s onwards, even prison watch watch kind of you preserve is

even more fraught, because it's the social context that matters

more. And we're going through this around Video Game

Preservation at the moment as well. But you know, sort of lots

of things in it. And I guess, I'd seen a lot of people coming

back to address some of the fundamental challenges in museum

technology and not for profit technology, which is, how is it

maintained? And how do we grow things on top of the things

we've built, when most of the financing for it is project

based. So you'll get a grant for three years. And after three

years, the grant ends, and the project sort of leaves in this

sort of stasis, stasis, and then it sort of fades away, and all

the memory around that's lost, it's probably poorly documented,

all of those things. So the last decade of my team's work have

really been about in both New York and here in Melbourne, has

been about building different infrastructure. And I like to

sort of think about it as we tried to build gardens of

technology now to support an ecosystem, but builds in that

sense of it needs gardeners from the very, very beginning. So

it's not so maintenance is part of it by design. And I think

that plays out a lot in government tech to you know, I

think it's challenging, but it's museum space is weird, because

it's this hybrid of it's, it's not, you know, when people talk

about service kind of design in the museum and and users in the

museum, museum experience isn't a transactional experience,

which shouldn't be a transactional experience. So

some of the some of the practices that you might apply

from other design fields, or sub sort of disciplines don't neatly

match,

Andy Polaine: Well in a service design perspective, and I guess

the, the front stage is actually the most sort of ephemeral

thing, right? It's just a kind of your any any exhibit or an

exhibition is only a kind of a brief sort of poking through of

the backstage work that museums do. You know, I mean, and and

famous, the evenness of natural history museums, there are kind

of drawers of fossils that no one's seen. And you still get

these kinds of stories that come out of someone's kind of digging

around a drawer that hadn't been open for, you know, 50 years and

discovered something. Yeah, you know, it's interesting hearing

you speaking, for two reasons. One, there's like a kind of

museum ops. I don't know if that's a thing, but it sounds

like kind of part of what you're talking about. You know, it's

museum ops, has it been coined that phrase in that way already?

Seb Chan: To a degree, yeah. And I think what museum ops means

has also technologized for one of a better word that the museum

operations technology is just part of the infrastructure. Now,

it is the building.

Andy Polaine: Yeah, that's the thing you also read in your

article before any Medium post with us. technology used to be

optional in museums. And in fact, it used to be so optional.

It was a bit of a pain in the ass to even kind of get it in

writing. Basic stuff like that went to the power outlet or kind

of Network. Yeah, yeah, you know, but the regular listeners

will know that my heart was singing as you were talking

about gardens and ecosystems, because it's my, my big kind of

metaphor that I love. And the thing I often talk about with

services, and this is exactly this is the landscaped gardens,

that you're working on something or putting something together

that will outlive you. And it's a humbling thought, certainly

some of the stuff that even the tech, you know, some of the

stuff that you're you're working on now, you know, if the museum

is doing its job properly, it's going to be around for the next

50 or 100 years. And that's kind of, you know, impossible

timescale to imagine in the days of, you know, what is it kind of

yearly software, platform, os upgrades, and all the rest of

it? You know, and I remember a while ago, and it's actually

because someone was interested in was because I was sort of

slightly involved in this world, but also because someone was

interested in trying to get Auntie rom two rounds of art CD

ROM that kind of gets launched mine a group of us our careers,

I still keep an old laptop around, because I got an old Mac

laptop that runs RS eight, I think, and it's, it still runs

on there, and I can still plug it into a projector if it has

VGA, and otherwise can't run that anymore. But at some point,

those all those things have moving parts, and they will fall

apart. And I I don't know if this has yet been resolved. But

at the time, there was a big kind of debate around sort of

curation and preservation almost that those two kind of things in

in opposition to each other or intention in that you do you run

something on an emulator? And is that then the authentic real

experience? Because you're not really do you need to have an

old 644 80 monitor to watch it on, because that's actually how

it was experienced? And of course, then the other thing

with things like CD ROMs, as they ran differently on

everyone's machines anyway. So you know, what is the authentic

experiences of Walter Benjamin, I think coming in, is all that

stuff still an issue? Or is it of less so now?

Seb Chan: It's changing. I think, you know, when I was at

the Cooper Hewitt for the Smithsonian, my team and I

collected the data visualisation from bloom interactive

planetarium. So it was one of the first apps on kind of the

iPad, it was using the iPad as a visualizer, for your music

collection as a series of planetary systems. And it was a

beautiful metaphor for many things. But of course, by the

time we came around to collecting it for the design

museum, you know, this, this notion was, well, what is it it

doesn't run on the latest version of iOS. So it's already

defunct. And then we worked with Tom McCartan, and Ben to kind of

serve me and others who were part of limits kind of the time.

And the Smithsonian actually, the software was watch watch was

acquired. And then we open kind of sourced the software with

Bloom to release it for preservation purposes. And in

that process, it was really about saying what we were

collecting wasn't the instance of it as an app from 2010. It

was the idea. And the idea of interactive data visualisation,

as a nested series of solar system, planet and Moon with

orbits that have differing lengths, could be ported to

other contexts. And that's what was interesting about it. So the

software preservation piece was about preserving the GitHub

repository. And then that would then be in the future ported. So

two years ago, now, one and a half, two years ago, a software

developer in Sydney discovered this of all places, and ported

it to the latest version of iOS, because it was open source. And

now that's part of the preservation has been lived

through the open sourcing of that. The flip side of that is

we're involved in two Australian Research Council linkage

projects in in Melbourne now with Swinburne University, and

others. One of them is on preserving video games,

Australian via games of the 1990. So that era just before

mass scale networked video games play so these were still

solitary pieces a bit like the ante rom works. So emulation and

emulation as a service, so can we provide access to these games

for research purposes, and experiential purposes with

emulation? How much fidelity do they have to the in quotes the

originals? But also then what is the what's been the influence

and cultural practices around those and the second one is

around Australian media archives. So the archives of

Deluxe media out in Sydney experimental and that there's

amazing Australian media that that is sitting in these

different collections, private and public collections that

needs ways different ways of accessing them and the

technology to access them is almost as fragile as the works

themselves. And it does raise that question of what is the

work and what is the purpose of the work. So I think we started

in the field to move away from the notion of buy up all the

Sony Trinitron monitors while you could because this is only

the authentic work, if it's running on a Trinitron monitor,

we've moved away from that and hardware preservation to is a

fool's errand. At the end of the time, there will be a time where

a Commodore 64 just will not work anymore, that they're very

stable. And people, you know, people make music from the sedge

chips. But really, you know, do you really need the original one

there. But there are some things about the interfaces that I

think interesting, I think, Nick Montfort from MIT did this

really interesting piece on the Commodore 64. And that's he came

and spoke at the power house. And, you know, when I was there,

when we were doing an exhibition on the 1980s, and Nick came out,

and he was saying, There's something very specific about

the Commodore 64 physical keyboard, that is different in

kind of the emulator. So you had those little characters on the

keyboard that you hold down the Commodore key? Was that expect

them to Yeah, yeah. And you got those little things. And you

don't see those when you use the keyboard of any other computer

on an emulator. So there are some of those graphical tricks

that you can't easily see how they are done. And I think

that's that that really, for me spoke to what are the

specificities of the physical things versus what is done in

software? And I think that's so teasing out the affordances of

the originals, is something that people who are curating and

preserving this sort of stuff is starting to really look at. So

what are the specific? The specificity of the mediums, I

guess? Yeah. So the CC core is a medium and interface, not just,

it's a platform. It's more than that.

Andy Polaine: Yeah. I mean, we had this thing, you know, what

is it? I guess I was thinking was a bank to you know, those

art pieces? I think it's is it boy, so who did the kind of

artists breath in a balloon as a piece of Oh, yeah.

Seb Chan: Oh, what's a lots of conceptual art to like, like,

what is the work?

Andy Polaine: So yeah, that's a conceptual Yeah, yeah. And so

you ended up kind of looking at the piece of work. And it's

obviously it's now a kind of dried up old latex balloon in a

kind of glass vitrine, and there's no artists breath left

in there anywhere stuff. And there's a conceptual art books.

And I wonder if there's a, I guess, there's a sort of

similarity, then, which was really looking at is the idea,

you know, and it's kind of not terribly interesting, looking at

the original, I think the thing for talking, as you know, as

somebody who's involved in making an art piece back then.

And we, when we made Antion, one of the things we were spent a

lot of time on was trying to get more colour out of the range out

of the computer than we did. So for those kids who don't

remember, computers used to have you spent eight bit or 16 bit

yourself to 56 colours, or you have 1000s of colours. And we

used to make a thing called a clap to colour lookup table, so

that you could say, okay, out of all of those, you could change

the range of those colours, you still only had those kind of

1000s of colours, a lot of time working on that stuff. And

switching between eight and 16 bit. And because it was, you

know, all about some memory efficiencies, and all that kind

of stuff. And one of the, the upshots of that was when we

switched between Bitmap graphics and QuickTime movies, we had a

little deal called X objects in director that used to change the

colour depth of the monitor. And of course, the monitor used to

flash as we did it, that was, that was a bug. And so what we

did was decided what we're going to kind of lean into that we had

a kind of folder full of these little sound hits, stuff, we'd

got off got sound libraries, like enough orchestra stabs, or

kind of smashing sounds or explosions, whatever. So when it

made that noise, when it did the switch, the monitor colour

switch, it looked like it was intended, because we've made it

sound. And what I've noticed is it crashes emulators, because

they're not kind of set up to kind of think that way. So it's

this weird thing, which was a, an accident of the medium at the

time, or a limitation of the meeting at that time that we

turned into kind of part of the work only really to hide the

problem, that sort of then became actually part of the

experience, which now doesn't work anymore, you know, and I

don't know, you know, my, the me from back then that kind of 20

Something me would say, Oh, God, if it can run on a kind of

larger monitor in kind of billions of dollars to do it,

you know, that's exactly what we want. But the me now it's kind

of looks back on that stuff. And it's definitely is part of the

it's part of the work, right. It's part of the charm I was

gonna say, but that's a bit twitchy, but I actually think

it's part of the it's part of capturing what it was at the

time. I think that is a crucial bit.

Seb Chan: Yeah, instead of pointing at the limitations that

you were working with, C 64. And rest are interrupts and all, you

know, all those things. And I'd say music too. I mean, a lot of

these sort of things. I map back to you So I guess at my age too,

we look nostalgic ly back at, you know, the great raves of

years past? What what does it mean to recapture that? And how

does that performance and that experiential piece get imprinted

on memory? And how does how does it use it? I mean, what is the

Museum of a great nightclub? Like, you know, I mean, you

know, or Jamaican sound systems or whatever you want to do,

like, how do you capture that, but you cannot, it's the same as

capturing a theatre performance is something different when you

see it on a recording or stream and we've seen this in COVID to

the medium. There's a transformation. I think it's an

interesting one that is one of those things that I like to poke

at, you know, I think that's, that's one of the luxuries of

working in the museum space is that ability to play with all

this stuff, but also have a public you know, there's their

public interface, which is, it's very exciting.

Andy Polaine: I think, you know, there's a serious I think it's

an Apple TV thing I shoot from Mark Ronson called watch the

sound and he's sort of going, oh, yeah, it's really, really

good. And there's a bit where he's going a bit about

synthesisers, each one to like synthesisers, reverb,

distortion, and kind of different things, we started

with auto tune, which kind of slightly changed my opinion of

Otter too much. But the synthesiser one, of course, you

know, you get that thing, we've been pulling out this old synth,

and that they still use because they're just there. Because

exactly everything you say, it's got something about the sound of

it, and the controls of it. And it's you know, it literally is

the circuitry inside it plus the way you can control it with the

the particular physical interface of it, that is still

not matched by you know, obviously, there are digital

plugins that exactly kind of duplicate the sound, but kind of

don't duplicate the the sort of anomalies, I guess, or the

performing on it with a kind of physical thing. And I guess

there is kind of some similarities there. But I felt

that one of the, do you see it as part of the job of the museum

to bring that part forward? You said this thing about the you

know, the technology is like a kind of transformation? And

there's a transformation that goes on with the technology, the

sort of viewing technology transforms that kind of content?

Medium is the Message right? And is there is that part of the

museum's mandate? Do you see or to make that thing we will

consume so much media, we will consume so much stuff without

really thinking about how it is transformed through by the

whatever device we're looking at it on? Is it part of the kind of

goal of say, Acme to say, hey, you know, this, this process is

going on? You might not be, you know, aware of it, and this is

what it means.

Seb Chan: Yes, certainly, for me, it's very important. I mean,

you know, all the museums, but you know, I'm interested in the

notion of everything as as a as a designed object of experience

I'm, I'm very interested in, in the design of media. So. So

process of making is something that that the museum really

focuses on now. And I'm also very interested. And then this

has different plays out in different ways with different

exhibitions and how other people think about things. But I am

very interested personally in drawing attention to how how you

as a museum goer might be transformed by what you have

seen. And so you go and look at it or play it if it's a video

game, with a different eye and hand later on. So if if we do if

we show you a great video game that you play in an exhibition,

and you might know that video game, that might be your

favourite video game, I would really hope that you go back and

there's something we have done that's made you go, Oh, I didn't

really notice that the controller is a really huge part

of this. And this has been pointed out to me or whatever

sort of having a criticality to both production and consumption.

And I think peeling back that layer of the otter and I think

that's very, for me being very important, both in the

Smithsonian context and power design. Museums design is a team

sport pilots a team activity, you know, blah, blah, blah,

blah, blah, all that stuff, but also now working in media that,

you know, the otter in film is, you know, it's like, I want to

deconstruct that I wanted like, Yeah, this is like everyone else

in the credits. That's what I that's what I love about you as

a viewer now, and I think that you as a viewer or you are a

participant so much in this particularly, particularly from

mobile Alondra onwards right so there's sort of sense of even

the mass you know, Disney Marvel Cinematic Universe is is a

massively designed experience and content and everything is

designed so that you as a viewer, or participant even

right down to like the you know, Little name drops the little,

what I would say a sample spotting sort of after credits

sequence, it's all there for you to be part of the making of the

bigger story, which is actually what that cinematic universe is,

has been designed to be. So I'm kind of really interested in

that sort of narrative design and peeling back that both from

a cultural sense, but also an economic and a sort of critical

sense to have like, what does that do to how narratives become

normalised and how politics gets transformed by how economics

gets transformed by it, and how also, we end up in a culture

where it's this sort of fan battle of opinions, which is

sort of plays out in politics in terrible ways now is seeing sort

of ridiculousness. And yes, it says sort of how all these

things fit together. So I'm really interested in it, sort of

from that sociological viewpoint, too, and sort of

political economy of media, putting that out on the table

more. And of course, you can't do a QA upfront that in an

exhibition ever, because it's sort of like, You're killing my

great things, I just want to come and enjoy this. Yes, you

will enjoy this. And by the way, you will, through great design

of an exhibition and the interactive experiences,

particularly start to leave that museum experience questioning

stuff. And we've designed that museum experience to be

extremely satisfying and entertaining, and a great family

day and great social moment. But you leave, we're leaving with

these spiky questions. Not so sure about us anymore. I want to

like this, like I use my lens, this thing we designed for the

visitor, I've collected these things, and I collected all the

things I loved. And now I go onto the website and log into

it. It's recommending me all these things I've never heard

of. And I've got to try one of those. For me, that is really

when the museum succeeds, because, you know, I sometimes

will often now talk about the best museums are curiosity

machines, so they're machines that generate more curiosity, so

that it's successful visit is when you are more curious at the

end of it, you haven't we haven't satisfied you're not

seated using data, you're not saying user needs should never

be satisfied in a museum shouldn't be generated. Yeah,

that's the sort of

Andy Polaine: thing. So you mentioned the lens. And

obviously, the Cooper Hewitt, what was it actually called, I

would think of it as it was called the pen. So there's a

there's a little service design, but I didn't do it anymore. But

you could do it as a kind of workshop brief to say, you know,

about libraries, mostly, but libraries and museums, actually,

which was, you know, we think of these places, you know, Acme is

one of them, and libraries and other have a place where some

stuff is kept in within four walls, and you go there to kind

of experience it. What happens if you think of it as a service

that breaks out of that kind of those four walls, which of

course, is what you did? So do you want to briefly kind of talk

about, I guess there's a there's an obvious three line from the

kind of the pen to the lens, but also maybe describe what they

are in case no one's heard of them. But also, you know, how's

it evolved? And and the last thing is, we can't avoid talking

about COVID. Right? Because obviously, those four walls

became inaccessible. Melbourne famously has had the longest

lockdown in the world, which you're out of now. I think.

Seb Chan: Yeah. Yeah. Well, yeah. Thank goodness.

Andy Polaine: So yeah, so what was the sort of origins of that?

And then how has it evolved in in Acme?

Seb Chan: Sure. So look, in 2011, I've moved to New York to

work with Bill Moggridge. She was then director, director of

the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum and Bill's sort of

notion was, here's a museum in an Upper East Side Mansion House

in New York. It's part of the Smithsonian, how can it be a

National Design Museum? And we're working with local

projects, then a fledgling design studio in New York and

Jake Barton, the principle of local projects was like, Well,

look, you're really interested in this sort of sense of people

taking objects home with what the designers use a pen. Let's

give everybody a pen. And this was sort of a great idea. But

the concept was brilliant. It was amazing. It was at that

moment that all their Kickstarter projects that were

booming, were physical things. So everyone's like, Oh, I can go

and manufacture stuff. And of course, 99% of those

Kickstarters got financed, but then couldn't actually deliver

turns out

Andy Polaine: vertical finds too much. Manufacturing is really

Seb Chan: hard. So, you know, local projects, great idea. They

worked on all the interactive elements of the museum and the

screen based stuff and my team with a bunch of other people

from GE and others worked on like talk this notion of like

getting it manufactured and we worked with a firm in Spain to

design a stylus, which actually was 100 years chips that they

were actually using in an RF For i d want the day we're using in

hospitals to collect patient details from rich, rich fat. So

we took that circuit board and with the product designers from

GE, who the GMO of GE was on the board, and she was like, you can

have two days of our product designed to go with this

beautiful slick thing. It eventually got made very, very

hard battery operated all of those things. And it became this

service kind of design challenge of like, okay, so you're going

to have this wand in the museum, what does it do? How is it

communicated to a visitor that it does, what it does, and how

actually, the really important part of it was, I come to this

old mansion house on the Upper East Side, and I'm given this

want. And just that notion is so was so counter intuitive that it

broke through, you know, it was like, yeah, like you're a 70

year old, you've come to Andrew Carnegie's old house as a

historic house, you discover it to design a different Museum,

and you're given a wand, and you're like, go do things. It's

amazing. If you're 17, at 17, if you're a 17 year old kid, you're

like, Wow, this is amazing, too. It's not my phone. So if there

was something about the physical design of it, that was really

seductive. And it was really on brand for the new museum as a

active Design Museum. It wasn't just a Museum of Decorative

Arts. And it was a museum that you did design out. And I think

that was really, it just a beautiful mix of things coming

together at the right sort of moment. Bloomberg Philanthropies

supported all of that, which was really, you know, again, it was

about pitching this bold idea, some prototypes and X executing

on it in a in a service kind of design way, rather than just a

singular product. People could take home the things that they

saw, it opened the collection up to many, many, many more people.

So coming here to Melbourne. Yeah, we're working with a

museum now that the exhibitions are about things that you have

at home, it's not like a Design Museum, where there are unique

things that you probably don't have at home, but you're

interested in, we have things that you can go and watch on

Netflix later, or play on your PlayStation later, or, you know,

ask someone else about so that they're things that already

exist in a universe in our cultural universe anyway, on the

internet. So the lens also was a nice metaphor to again, sort of

the name of the thing describes what it does a lens allows you

to look look closer at the things you're interested in. So

that's a great thing for a museum to give a visitor. And of

course, you know, we worked with one of the local universities,

Swinburne University, to make it recyclable. So the challenge

with the pen was we had 3000 made and they were battery ran

and you borrowed it. Yeah, the lens, you get you keep, or you

take it home, is recyclable. It's recyclable. It's

biodegradable, it's beautiful. And that's the sort of secret

sauce here because it's, it's a souvenir as well. So even if you

use it to collect things, and you never log into it, and it

sits on your fridge, it's a beautiful object from the museum

that's on your fridge. That's a talking point. But like, what's

that? Oh, it's this lens, I went to this museum of media in

Melbourne. That was really amazing. So we learned a lot

through those processes. And I think it's that sort of sense

of, again, as the smartphone has become so much implicated in the

rest of our lives and our work, you know, the sort of sense of

the museum as a space that might physically offer, you know, some

sometimes use the notion from game kind of studies of the

magic circle, if you step inside of the magic circle of the game.

What is the superpowers you get? And the lens gives you these

superpowers that you don't get on your phone? Of course, you

could do it on your phone? Of course, you could use your of

course you could. But I would always say you wouldn't, because

through user research is that, you know, you might scan one or

two QR codes and then someone will send you a great tic tock

and you out of your QR code. Yeah, that's

the magic circle. Right? Yeah. So it's sort of that that that

philosophy, and it's been, it's been really successful. You

know, I think we've been open for about 150 days now. Yeah.

Between lockdowns and all the rest. People have collected more

than two and a half million things in the museum. Like Like,

like, That's ridiculous.

Andy Polaine: I feel like you should probably unpack what you

mean by collect stuff and take it home. Because I know we've

been talking about and I know what you're talking about, but

maybe just how does that what's the mechanics of that?

Seb Chan: So what's happening there is that they are using the

lens as an identifier as they move through the physical space

and then touching museum labels and other sensors.

Andy Polaine: And what's the what is the lens look like? It's

because I can see it on the circle a

Seb Chan: little bit like a CD ROM, or a DVD. But also it's

it's modelled on in size. It's also modelled on that. So

donation of ViewMaster reels that has that nice visual

language to it, and you touch it on the museum labels and other

centres around the museum. And what that's doing is obviously

creating a database record that connects your unique identifier

which is anonymized, we don't know it's you specifically until

you register it, you don't have to do. And as you move through,

you are building up a diary of things you have touched, which

are the things you are interested in. And as you get to

the end of the exhibition, there's an experience called the

constellation, which is explicitly about using the

things that you have found, collected, to connect you to

1000s of other things that aren't machine generated, but

have been curated by our curators. So you might have

collected the Mad Max car, and our curators go well, we've

connected that to the ring, the Japanese horror film The ring,

and we've connected the ring to this great video game that you

haven't heard of yet. And you can also collect those two. And

so it's a sort of building this media library that you become

personally acquainted with through your physical actions.

And that was another thing we learned from the pen experience

was the sort of memory piece that when you're physically

doing something with more of your body to collect things, you

remember it better. It's like writing notes by hand. And it's

that physical memory piece that sort of, again, pushing back for

museum of screen culture, it's kind of interesting that we're

using a not a not screen to do that collecting. And again,

it's, you know, points at the materiality of media, and yeah,

all those sort of nice briefs you can do on this sort of

stuff.

Andy Polaine: The physicality thing is a kind of interesting

bit of the magic, I think, because as I understand it, with

the pen used to connect to collect it, and then you got to,

you've got to code right, when you went back. And you, you got

to put it into the website. Yeah. Yeah, and I'm assuming,

you know, while there was a piece, I did work with Brendan

doors on something. And it was, I have to be a bit careful about

what I talked about here, it was this way to kind of collect like

a kind of Diary of a patient, patient suffering with a kind of

cancer. And it was kind of this whole thing we kind of built.

And it we kind of collected some of their kind of feelings and

thinking about it. And it was interesting, this idea of kind

of doing research into people's lives, but at the same time

turning into something that's actually, you know, a really

difficult moment, but it's also kind of a beautiful thing. And

one of the things that Bryn did was then you ended up with this

kind of deist, because what made me think of it, but just on the

screen, right, and that was sort of all your stuff, we took all

the sort of, you could sketch and things and all the line

marks and then his text you wrote, you end up with this kind

of spiral. And then he said why he then printed these out and

had like a kind of little sort of podium that you could then

put these things on these discs, and you could take them off the

shelf, they were the size of a minute, I'm doing this on

screen, of course, no one's gonna hit see this, they were

bigger than an LP, you know, they were kind of about the size

of a hubcap was something that you would take them off of the

shelf, put them on this thing, and it would play that person's

record. And of course, all it was is an RFID in the back of

the disc, triggering the kind of thing but there was some kind of

magic there that even though you know how it works, this sense of

my stuff is contained in this physical item, you know, even

though it's just, you know, a code that's triggering, you

know, in the database, and there is definitely something still, I

think, quite neat. You talked about the magic circle, you

know, there is something quite kind of magical about those

kinds of physical digital crossovers, which I guess is

kind of the centre of everything you're doing really in the

museum.

Seb Chan: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's very important, I think, think

that. And we see that also with, you know, even the way that

people print photo books of their digital photos, people

like that sort of has this very strong cultural urge to make

physical things and physical things as memory devices is

1000s of years old. And that's that's really, that's what we're

working with rather than against and I think it's that that sort

of sense of, how might you use that to also push out into a

broader network public as well and to push that piece further

so so you know. So people's experience with the Museum

extends far beyond their moment in the gallery itself. And the

gallery is almost a trigger for a cultural change around what

they're interested in, how they choose to watch what they watch

what they choose what to play, and It keeps them coming back to

this notion of the museum is. The museum has opinions, and the

museum is more than just a repository of stuff, because of

course, it's more than a repository of stuff. But it also

should be more, as I often say, it's more than a family day out

to if it's just a family day out. You're competing with every

public park, and every other thing in the city. And I think

it's different. Right?

Andy Polaine: Yeah. And you have a kind of different mandate as

well, I guess, as well, that there is the educational part.

Seb Chan: But educational without capital? Yeah, no, I hit

Andy Polaine: that the index finger raised kind of kind of

education. So how did COVID You know, affect your world? I mean,

not your personally but your the world of museums, and

presumably, you're kind of plugged into a kind of wider

community as well. And you talked about in a museum, some

museums had digital strategies, some kind of didn't some, at

least most of them now, but you know, they've gone from, here's

a webpage with what's on to here's a webpage with what's on

and you can buy tickets to something more complex, in some

cases, and sometimes knights are gonna stay that way. So, yeah,

how to COVID then affect all of that did it sort of,

Seb Chan: I think it accelerated a lot of things like like, it

accelerated a lot of things that were already there that were

both, perhaps positive trends. So it's this move towards

figuring out what digital meant in a museum got gotten massively

accelerated, like digital transformation in every other

sector. The other thing that accelerated though was also a

reckoning with all the other problems in museums, you know,

colonialism, representation, staff, structures, all of those

things. So there's been a big shift. And I think, particularly

in the US, we've seen a big push, finally, towards the

unionisation of workers in museums, like some really

significant changes, which we've seen in other sectors too. And

just a reckoning of like, what are they for? Like, what is the

museum for I think, for the, you know, certainly through my

career in museums, museums have become, you know, for up until

maybe 2015 2017, sort of civic, places that renewed cities. So

we'll build a new museum, because that's going to attract

the creative class and all that sort of, you know, and cultural

tourism and blah, blah, blah. But that sort of didn't address

what the museum could be for. It was like, well, the museum as a

could be something more, and I think the the period of COVID

certainly create a lot of reflection within the sector

about who are museums for and what value do they deliver, what

value should they deliver? And those things, I think, a really

healthy that, as I said, at the start, you know, I think we have

lost a lot of amazing people from the field, who in the great

resignation in the US have gone? Look, this is just not, you

know, change is too slow,

Andy Polaine: because that also swept through the cultural

sector as well,

Seb Chan: definitely, definitely serve certainly the sense that

change is too slow and too hard. And I think, you know, we've,

when I left New York at the end of 2015, you know, I was writing

about what I'd realised there. And one of the big things I

realised, when working with American museums and inside

American museums was the financial structure that makes

them operate is not representative of the

communities who come to. So the person walking in the door is

not the people financing the museum. So I've previously

worked in Australia, where museums are financed

predominantly by the state. So there is at least some sense of

the citizenry have having a responsibility to this sense of

a public. If an American museum, it's usually the board that

finances it, and philanthropists, and they are

not the people who visit so the users of the service are not the

funders of the service in any way. And sometimes they have

very counter motivation.

Andy Polaine: Yeah, we were just seeing that in the with the

Science Museum in the UK, where they are sponsored one of the

big sponsors a shell. And there was a pair of work, because we

don't we don't agree with you gagging us because there's like

a gagging order from the from the well a gagging order this

written into the sponsorship contract tract is nothing that

can disparages our industry. So you know, science museum can't

be critical of a fossil fuel company. That's a problem.

Seb Chan: It's a huge problem. And I think those are there are

so many of those that don't get to the level of public awareness

throughout every museum that doesn't have a strong connection

with their, with their publics. And I think that's the piece

that, you know, a lot of this sort of human centred work that

my teams have worked on for many years now has been about

reorienting and renegotiating a social contract with the

visitor. So you know, both the pen and the lens, you know, in

many ways, it's about time I think you should expect the

museum to give you something more than a great day. I mean,

if you come to this museum now, you should, you know, if you're,

if you're a parent, you should, you should expect us to

recommend you amazing VR games for your kids to play or

yourself to play, in fact, and you should expect us to have

some opinions about great television series, or terrible

ones that you might watch, ironically, and why would you do

that? Or you know, how things are made? Or whatever, you know,

like, it's sort of that social contract piece at the heart of

that design philosophy for want of a better word, you know, sort

of? It's, yeah, it's, it's,

Andy Polaine: I think, I can imagine a lot of people

listening, despite all of the kinds of pains and all the

troubles, you just were just describing just now, it's a,

it's also kind of really nice design space to work in, because

of that kind of sense of purpose or that philosophy, you know, I

cannot imagine it at least makes the difficulties in the hard

work feel worthwhile. It's very,

Seb Chan: very rewarding. And I think, you know, it's, it's such

a privilege and a luxury really, to be able to work in the sort

of work that I get to do because it's always changing, and it

isn't purely transactional. I think it's that sense of being

able to push beyond transactions and to be able to poke at some

of those things around friction, you know, a lot of what we're

trying to do is introducing friction into services, rather

than designing it our services. So it's sort of pushing back on

some of the things that, you know, when I often speak to

product kind of designers or, you know, others who are like,

well, we're trying to work, how did you shave milliseconds off

this? Or how did you make this a very smooth process? It's like,

Well, we did this, but then we brought in this great friction,

because the friction is what makes it memorable. And we make

the friction, delightful friction, I guess that sort of

trying to create texture and Spike Enos, you know, I

Andy Polaine: think it's, it's the DJ, there's a level

intentionality of kind of like, I'm going to kind of shape the

the cadence and the energy and respond to that of the audit.

Exactly. Hello, we're coming Well, up to time. And we haven't

even talked about NF Ts, which I'm kind of glad about, as you

know, the show's named after their grandchild seems film

power of 10. It's all about the relative size of things in the

universe. So the final question is what one small thing either

exists and is kind of overlooked and underappreciated or could be

redesigned. That would have an outsized or does have an

outsized effect on the world?

Seb Chan: I mean, I would have to say it would be Sam, I think

we under appreciate the impact of sound in space, we all feel

and experience it, but we don't understand it. In its

physiological, emotional and memory sense. And I think

there's a lot in design of sound in space sort of service and

product that we, we just don't hear. And I think museums also

just museums struggle with sound, we never get it right.

And it's the one thing I'm determined, gotta figure out.

Well, that

Andy Polaine: was the big problem when all those meteorite

installations enter the museum and there was this cacophony,

and that was like, oh, yeah, that was part of the art. And

yeah, and then the web happened. And as you for those of us who

were in the sort of CD ROM, sort of multimedia days, and then

moved over to the Web is suddenly went silent. Because

the bandwidth wasn't there.

Seb Chan: It went silent for so long. Yes, yeah. Well, look,

Andy Polaine: thank you so much for being my guest on power of

10. Where can people find you online?

Seb Chan: They can find me at fresh and kind of gnu.org. And

that has links to all the other things, private, public,

professional,

Andy Polaine: I'll put it all in the show notes. Well, good luck

with all the rest of it. And thank you so much for being my

guest.

Seb Chan: Thanks heaps. It's been great fun.

Andy Polaine: As I'm sure you're aware, you've been listening to

power of 10. My name is Andy Polaine. You can find me at a

perlane on Twitter, or perlane.com, where you can find

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touch. If you have any comments, feedback or suggestions for

guests, all the links are in the show notes. Thanks for

listening, and see you next time.