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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guests, all the links are in the show notes. Thanks for
listening, and see you next time.