I had a number of different ideas for how my “Summer in Washington, DC” blog post was going to go:
A list of my favorite moments from The West Wing, how I went to places that Josh, Toby, Sam and CJ frequented and what this summer taught me about working with people in high-stress environments
A ranking and statistical analysis of my favorite museums and monuments, why they are the way they are, and their proximity to good ice cream
An ode to my AMC MoviePass and the weekly exploits of the “One Man Cinema Club”
A treatise on the Great Man Theory and how history is actually more often made by a) people other than men or b) by those we would not call “great”
People say that if you have two quarterbacks, you really don’t have one. The principle holds true for blogs: if you have four ideas, you really don’t have anything to say.
After this past weekend, my last weekend in our nation’s capital, I have something to say… and it is not the endlessly positive Conor blog post you were probably expecting.
I have spent the summer as a production intern for a museum design studio. As part of the production department, parts of my role have been content research and narrative development for different exhibits on their ways to museums around the country. Like many other studios in the industry, ours has shifted its focus from traditional museum media (re: films) to more innovative and interactive experiences aimed at, hopefully, bringing more people to museums. Folks have been decrying the “death of museums” for years and cited lower attendance and satisfaction at these once pinnacles of learning and humanity; however, you can find plenty of statistics and studies around the interwebs that argue the opposite.
And you can’t put anything on the internet that isn’t true. That’s the rule.
The TEA (Themed Entertainment Association for those of you new to the program) said that museum attendance has hovered pretty steadily at 108 million people a year for the past few years. And trust me, when you’re getting on the Metro around the National Mall on a Saturday afternoon, it feels like all 108 million of those people are trying to get on your car. Now before anyone tweets at me or calls me or starts citing thinks like population growth or other factors that muddy the waters, yes, I realize that the stats behind all of the trends are much more nuanced than one number over time, but that’s not my point.
My point is that the idea of a traditional museum is dying. *gasp*
Historians, designers, and everyone involved in the creative process behind museums have evolved from putting bones and fossils in glass cases with their scientific names to building virtual worlds (!) that allow guests to step in to what other countries of the world, eras, or even planets are like. You have AR guides taking you on your own personalized tour of galleries curated to your likes dislikes and stride length. You have mobile check-ins for traveling shows that make you feel more like you’re at Disneyland than you are learning about data visualization or wind patterns.
Don’t get me wrong; I love pushing the boundaries of experiences and coming up with cool ways to teach and inspire, but I fear that sometimes we push for the wrong reasons. New and exciting experiences drive revenue and bring in bigger crowds, but at what intrinsic cost?
At the end of the day, museums are built on story-telling.
The motto of the Great Man Theory is “the stories of great men” and the only word I agree with in there is “stories” because that’s what history is (please do not make me break the word down). Museums are supposed to be living history books, places that showcase the stories of our past, the triumphs and the tribulations that inspire us to right wrongs or carry on a legacy. Too often, we use technology to try and make those stories more palatable, more entertaining, or for lack of a better word, louder to get more attention. We think that these stories need help being told and we need to enhance them in some way in order for them to be validated and worth sharing. And when we do that, we sadly get further away from the emotional or truthful core of what the story meant in the first place.
These stories are not toddlers at a restaurant, they can speak for themselves.
The best example of this, to me, is one room at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. The museum has a great mix of artifacts and videos and other experiences to detail a tragic part of human history, but one room in particular makes you feel a way that few other museums can replicate.
You turn a corner and enter a room filled with shoes. Discolored to ash with a blue tint from the walls and ambient light, thousands of shoes pile up to line a single walkway near the end of the crowded gallery. A quote graces the walls explaining that the shoes were the lucky ones. It’s the simplest room in the entire building, but it is also the quietest and I did not see a single piece of technology leave a pocket in the 15 minutes I was there.
You stare blankly at the shoes in front of you, and possibly your own, realizing that you are really the lucky one. That you cannot even begin to imagine what it would have been like to be in those shoes. In that moment, the tragedy and the history become more emotional and present and real. You can close your eyes and picture it, smell it, hear it. You can feel it.
And even weeks, months, years later, you do not forget that feeling.
To me, that’s what these places are about. Evoking the emotion of history simply by letting people listen to what the physical history they encounter has to say to them. Virtual simulators and AR guides can tell you about these places, but they do not give you the mental space and freedom to truly be there and listen.
I believe there is a time and place for new and fun and exciting things to help teach and inspire and I really believe designers and studios have the best of intentions when crafting experiences to tell these stories. I think my colleagues this summer are extremely good at developing experiences that give the content room to breathe while still giving it a modern flair (aka my biggest takeaway from the summer), but I don’t think other studios are quite so skilled at it. And who loses in that deal? The stories.
Museums are about making history real (without Ben Stiller talking to a miniaturized Owen Wilson) and allowing people to connect to it in a meaningful way, something that is increasingly difficult when people strive to be connected to other things.
I hope that more and more people can go to places like the Holocaust Memorial Museum and that we can design more and more places like it, where something simple seems to stop guests in their tracks and take in the realness of what they are encountering. So, to the pundits and neigh-sayers, I do not think museums are dying and I don’t think they ever will. Sure, they’ll change and the buildings that say Smithsonian on them on Constitution or Independence Avenues will be much different when my great-grandchildren visit them, but they’ll still be there and they’ll still be telling our stories. Because as long as there are people on this planet, there will be stories to be told - all we will need to do is stop and listen to them.
