Trip Report Take Away Museum

May 18, 2006, Koffiehuis Hotel Lloyd, Amsterdam
Notes by Lloyd Rutledge
Take Away Museum Website, Virtual Platform trip report

This workshop discussed technologies and interation paradigms for taking your museum experience away with you when you leave. Dick Rijken was the chair, with the Rijksmuseum's Peter Gorgels and CWI's Lynda Hardman and Alia Amin also participating. The mascot technology was RFID chips and several tables for reading them, with attached laptops. The idea here is that if objects (museum and otherwise) have RFIDs, and you can "take" the RFID chips with you, or have a system that remembers what you've encountered, then your museum (and life) experience and what you encounter is remembered

Dick Rijken

Dick gave an opening presentation. He mentioned a desired focus on stories, how museum objects tell them, and what stories come from users interacting with them. Me discussed the website 20e-eeuw.nl.

Ulla-Maaria Mutanen — Web 2.0 for cultural heritage

Ulla spoke primary about her project thinglink, which aims to give all works of art (with perhaps a focus on amateurs) one ID on the Web that everyone can refer to and annotate with. She mentioned her site hobbyprincess and the sites allconsuming.net and last.fm. I asked her about using the Semantic Web, particular with the issues of setting up URIs for objects (which is what at thinglink is) and the SW issues and solutions (and problems) around it.

Willem Velthoven, Symbolic Table, Mediamatic

Breakout Groups

For the rest of the day, we split into breakout groups. Each group came up with a scenario illustating the day's topics.

Peter and Alia's Group

Peter and Alia's group developed two scenarios: My Bird and Graffiti. In My Bird, each person can adopt a bird by attaching an RFID chip to it. Then that person can track the bird, and know everything about what the bird is up to. He or she can get a webcam view of the bird at any moment. He or she can also make friends with people as the bird's migration end-points. When the bird dies, we can place it on one of Mediamatic RFID tables like it's an alter, and it read the RFID chip and generate a multimedia presentation of the bird's life based on where it's been.

Graffiti lets people make pictures of their graffiti, annotate them and post them on the web. Annotations include place, time and creator of each graffiti. One concern is that authorities can use this to find where graffiti is and clean it. But this feature also lets people go to where the graffiti is and see it for real. This system stores all graffiti for all time.

My Group

We developed a scenario for finding people in common conceptual space. Everyone place in conceptual space is detected and recorded by tracking their personal RFIDs and the RFIDs of the objects they encounter. These objects are annotated with related concepts, which lets the system see what concepts each user is or has been near. If you are at the same concept as one of your friends, the system alerts you both, letting you coincidently encounter each other there. Perhaps both your mobile devices ring them with an explanation. This mirrors the happy coincidental encounters that occur in real space.

For example, if you're looking at a painting of flowers, and your friend is elsewhere at a flower show, the system alerts you both, saying that you are both simultaneously involved with flowers.

Lynda's Group

Lynda's group explored picking multiple museum artifects by taking cards with there RFIDs on them. You place your selection of RFIDs on a Mediamatic table, and the computer makes a hypermedia presentations that unifies these artworks in a coherent story. You can place different combinations on the table and move them around to change the stories.