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But it's not about what makes sense. It's about prestige, and about the ability to tell everyone "look at us, how forward we are!". This seems very clear to me, for instance, by the fact that the year 7 comp sci classes they teach in our local high school have what on their curriculum? Yep, that's right, you guessed it: AI. Because that's apparently the absolute basic CS that every student should start with these days.

Education is only one example, of course. But it's really creeping into everything. That museums have screen everywhere is no surprise. After all, flashing screen surely release more endorphins than non-interactive physical exhibits, so if you want to attract young folks, the pressure is on.

This is tripping my bullshit-o-meter. If it just failed "for reasons" how do you know it failed because there were too many boosters? Kinda sounds like the game explained that to them.

1. Money. Most museums have no money. They either run on donations, on subsidies, or at the whim of wealthy patrons. They are very costly to run, especially the big ones. They are often in prime real estate areas, many require tight climate control, many also require specialised lighting to protect art etc.

2. Curators often see "taking care" of the exhibits as more important than actually exhibiting them. Not to mention they're often art/history majors with very little clue about anything digital.

3. Because museums are often subsidised, many of them are required to go through public tender procedures to get anything done. Because this is a huge pain for everyone involved, the results are often shit, as it attracts a certain kind of company to do the work. One of the tenders my startup looked at involved not only supplying the hardware and software for an interactive exhibit, but also the lighting and reinforced glass casings for various items. This was not our cup of tea, and the tender would subtract points for using subcontractors...

Personally I'm not interested in museums that are just glass cases with stuff without any explanation. Maybe a little paper legend is sufficient, but I actually prefer a screen which offers more info in the form of adio or video in multiple languages.

Depending on the exhibit, 3D printed replicas can be great as well.

They are hard to do right though. I used to compete in combat robotics and the stresses put on museum exhibits is higher. I tell my new engineers that if their exhibit can be dropped into a gorilla enclosure and survive, they are about half way strong enough. Little makes up for raw experience in the art of building bomb proof exhibits, and many companies have failed before getting good. The amateur hour exhibits from the low bid newcomers that inevitably fail and/or need a lot of expensive maintenance has left a sour taste in a lot of museum’s mouths. A lot of those museums have knee jerk reactioned the opposite direction to touchscreen exhibits, only to see their ticket sales slowly drop. Thankfully, i’m seeing the pendulum of the industry swinging back towards physical interactives again.

Some context as a local though, the Franklin Institute’s special exhibit space rotates every couple of months and I imagine they’re put on by outside vendors who move the exhibit from venue to venue. The special exhibits for better or for worse more akin to Disney World or the pop culture museum in Seattle. I’ve been to a bunch of them and they’re usually quite good, but they don’t represent that tactile learning experience at all.

Many of us Philadelphians really lament that the place isn’t as well maintained as it should be. It was the field trip destination for so many kids and I’m sorry OP wasn’t able to recreate that same level of magic for their kids.

The last time we visited Chicago's museum of science, this was the only acceptable use of screens for me ( https://www.msichicago.org/explore/whats-here/exhibits/blue-... ). That was genuinely well done and awe-inspiring.

The rest of the stuff that is basically just a lame tablet app is a waste of my ( and my kids )time and, well, money.

That said, and I offer it merely as a defense, if the goal is to interest kids, you want to meet them where they are at. Apps is where they are at. Granted, thanks to parents, but still.

Like the Tank Museum in Bovington.

It reminds me of a Reddit thread about if someone should divorce their spouse because they significantly overdid it with smarthome tech. They (the other spouse) insisted that controlling everything with phones was "the future" and did things like drill out locks so they could only get in with a smartphone, and update the toilets so they would only flush from a smartphone.

It's too bad the content was deleted, but you can get the jist from reading the comments: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmITheAngel/comments/1lv1t0r/aita_f...

In the first 4 I had the most immersive experiences seeing memorabilia and artifacts from the Allies and Axis. Things like uniforms, cars, letters, tanks, jets, war trophies, and so on.

Everything was highly curated, and from the outside, the infrastructure was not so expensive to run. In terms of quality, the military museums of Romania, London, and Brussels are great.

Those places are to feel and have immersion.

In Berlin, there are only a few screens, but they have only some sort of "small billboards" in a version in German and some rough translation to English. Most of the time it is a picture of someone and some legend only.

However in Berlin and Munich, they have something, in my opinion, better than museums that we call as Documentation Centers. In Berlin there is the _Das Dokumentationszentrum Topographie des Terrors_ (Topography of Terrors), and for me the best documentation center is in Munich, called _NS-Dokumentationszentrum München_, which gets into the roots of the regime via the whole buildupand actual documents from leadership, political party meeting minutes, political discussions, and so on.

Incidentally, the building is featured near the end of the Shin Godzilla movie.

Kid sized interactive art museum. A place I wish were around when I was grade school age.

I wouldn't mind so much if it was available for those who wanted it but in my experience it tends to be central and noisy - difficult to avoid if that's not what you're after.

The Corning Glass Museum is free (!!) and has both great art and great science, several interactive exhibits, and lots of information about glass and its history and application.

Interactive art exhibits like Otherworld! (and Meowwolf maybe? I have not been to it, but I hear it is a similar idea) It has a whole storyline, various rooms with different 'exhibits'. Classic physical art, puppets, electronics, a space invaders arcade game that is broken but then you realize you can climb under the arcade game and through a tunnel into a room where you can play _for real_ while space invaders drop from the ceiling, etc.

There are a lot of these neat things around.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-vmSDgnlbg

Feels like there's a lot of attempts to integrate smartphones into the parks too, like through activities that involve using a mobile app instead of a physical prop or console.

To be fair, that's what I remember children's museums being like in the 1980s as well. A significant number of exhibits would be temporarily out of order on any given day.

I don't think screens are responsible for that. Maintaining physical exhibits that can survive constant physical contact with kids is hard.

I did enjoy walking around the enormous steam loco in the basement. That one room, where they seem to have stuffed all the old 'museum' stuff was the highlight of my visit.

The best science museum I've been to in years is in Glasgow. Walking across the I-beam compared to the sheet (or was it a bar?) of steel actually taught my kids something.

I would be very willing to watch them in full, but like most other visitors, I have limited time, especially when visiting a new museum in a different city. If you say observing a painting/sculpture in person is different from looking at a picture, fine, whatever, but making these videos only available in museums is sad.

It costs approximately $2,000 to frame a 36" piece of art to museum standards. A similarly sized LCD screen, on the other hand...

Art wasn't supposed to be a "by the square foot" kind of thing yet here we are.

If it wasn't for kids, nobody would go to most museums (non-famous ones especially)

Kids are simply the demographic, because every parent is looking for activities to entertain the kids every day.

Interactive non-screen based exhibits that are designed for kids are the best, but if you can't have that for cost/know-how reasons interactive multi-media exhibits are a good second on the "it did a good job entertaining my kid" spectrum.

Actually learning anything is a secondary demand from the consumer when it comes to museums unfortunately. Entertaining the kids is number one, bonus points if it also managed to entertain the parents.

It's literally all they can afford.

As an example, one exhibition I found pure joy in that doesn’t involve screens is the Museum of Illusions. It's hands-on, mind-bending, and utterly delightful.

But even judging digital exhibits on their own merits, I have yet to see one in a museum (or similar location) that was actually "wow" or that really captured my kids' attention or sparked any discussion (like other "real" stuff we saw). Most were, as my 9 year old would say, "mid" (==crappy in genAlpha speak). Very blah. Very low effort, and sometimes didn't even work properly. Think of your typical crappy software experience that just barely works.

The places that do have physical hands-on exhibits do catch my kids' attention, and we return multiple times. For example, one has a lab where you can do chemistry experiments (which they rotate) -- 100x better than doing some digital simulation (which 1) is very quickly boring, and 2) I'll just do it at home and we can close the museum (sad).

I don't see anything intrinsically worse about having a bunch of screens do the doing rather than a handful of mechanical thingamajig that would have done the doing in the previous generation of museums. What matters is the experience.

And maybe (just a suggestion), if that's not what you want, don't take them to a science museum.

Might I suggest, a natural history museum instead, where they can personally experience row upon row of awkwardly lumpen stuffed mammals collected in the 1860s, or entire rooms full of glass cases containing "minerals" (which seemed to me, as a child, to be nothing more than a fancy word for "rock").

Personally, I have great sympathy for science museums, most of which came to be in the 1970s, back when "multimedia" was something powerfully unique and special, and have since had real challenges re-inventing themselves in a world where "multimedia" is about as impressive as a toaster. (Yes, I mean you, Ontario Science Center).

And great admiration for those curators who work hard to successfully re-invent museums in the 21st century. And respect for those curators who conduct brave experiments that sometimes fall short of expectations.

I, personally, love the Royal Ontario Museum, which managed to transform its shelves full of rocks into a curated multimedia "experience" that walks children through the geological history of the planet earth using lots of buttons to push (almost all of which control screens), and an "elevator" that "descends" 600 feet underground into the heart of a mine. And this, children, is what granite looks like! Whumpf. 4 ton granite boulder!! And I'm pretty sure that was even a shelf with a leftover hunk of carbonaceous deoderantite in there somewhere, although I am uncertain on that particular point, because I was distracted by the pure genius of a museum display consisting of a 4 ton granite boulder that children could climb on. All performed while completely resisting the urge to re-invent their "Room full of Dinosaur Bones as a Temple to Science" experience. A first-class museum experience that has withstood the test of time. And they even managed to a preserve a hall full of awkwardly lumpen stuffed mammals, which serve as a reminder to visitors that museums are constantly evolving things. A display that has a button and a screen that explains that the museum has multiple warehouses full of lumpen stuffed mammals all collected in the 1860s, all of which have to be meticulously conserved for generations of future scientists despite the 1860s awfulness of it all, and that this diorama of a stuffed caribou surrounded by a snarling pack of stuffed wolves, as stuffed groundhogs look on is a vision of what a museum should be that was enormously successful in its time.

The truth is that the traveling exhibits (Body Worlds, Harry Potter, etc.) make a lot more money for them and do not require the ongoing maintenance burden. They have a reduced ability to design the exhibits as precisely as they used to and the physical stuff takes a tremendous amount of work and expertise to do well.

That said, the museum is run by people who care deeply about science education and the proliferation of touch screens is something they are sensitive to. The type of content has a lot to do with it (a physics exhibit has no excuse not to be 99% physical interactives), as does the fact that they tailor exhibits to many different styles of learning so that there's something for everyone.

But one kinda-counterpoint was my experience in Amsterdam at Micropia [0]. Museum containing many small things including fungi, bacteria, ants etc etc.

Some stuff you didn't want to actually touch with hands really anyway...

Yes they had magnifying glasses but many exhibits were simply using the screen to show the image from a microscope. And they let you control the microscope to focus, zoom in and out, etc.

Left an impression on me as being a museum that did digital right.

[0]https://www.artis.nl/en/artis-micropia

That said: iPads and screens do have their place and it really depends on how well they're implemented.

First up: "But these physical exhibits require maintenance, and I was dismayed to see that several are in bad repair; some of them weren’t even working anymore, some seemed worn out, or didn’t seem well-designed to begin with."

This is probably the key reason why there are so many screens in this particular museum: he answers his own question. Physical items, especially things with motion, will degrade with time and use, and maintenance can get really expensive. Physical models like a human heart aren't something that you can generally buy off the rack: museums and similar institutions will work with a company to produce something like that (I'm guessing fiberglass?) These are things that can run thousands and thousands of dollars to repair or outright replace.

But here's the other thing with a physical static or interactive display: once they're in, they're in. You can't really update them without actually replacing the entire thing.

Here's an example: at the museum where I work, we have a section about the Civil War: it had some uniforms, weapons, and a whole bunch of other items that told the story as it related to our mission. The panel that outlined everything stretched across the room -- it was about 20 feet long. When we pulled everything out to update it, we had to replace that entire panel. It was a good fix, because the room hadn't been updated in like 15-20 years, but if we had wanted to pull out any one item, we'd still have to replace the entire panel. That sort of thing can be an impediment to updates, because it requires a lot of work. We ended up putting in three panels, which will allow us to switch out objects more easily.

We also put in an interactive with an iPad that allows visitors to explore a painting in the exhibit in a lot more depth.

We've done a handful of these sorts of interactives, and as I noted up above, the experience really depends on the audience and how well it's presented. In our case, we aim for ours to be usable for a wider range, which means that we have to keep things fairly simple, so adults and children can use them.

"My wife — a science writer who used to be the only staff writer covering space for New Scientist and before that, worked at NASA — poked at one of these with my son, added too many boosters to their launch vehicle, and were told it failed “for reasons” in a way she found totally unhelpful and pointless." That doesn't entirely surprise me, because she's an expert and is really knowledgeable in the field! But you have to make sure that you're calibrating for your audience: most of the people using that likely won't have her experience or knowledge, and digging deeper and deeper into detail might be lost on most of their audience. (Not having seen it, I can't tell for sure.) It is good to have that depth of knowledge be available, if you have audience members who do want to go further, but it could come down to limitations or be an exception that they didn't account for.

Digital interactives can also be swapped out quite a bit more quickly: if you have a new exhibit that you're putting in for a short amount of time, it might make more sense to have something that doesn't cost a lot if it's only going to run for months, rather than years. (Or if you find an error, there's new research, new updates, etc. -- a digital interface is easier to update than a static panel.)

On top of all that: cultural institutions are facing real crunches right now. There's a lot of uncertainty (and outright lack of support) from federal funding sources (which in turn impacts the willingness of private/state/NPO donors), and staff shortages that means everyone has fewer resources and fewer people to utilize them with. From where I sit, if we have to implement more digital content, we'll be able to repurpose the screens that we've already purchased to new exhibits and interactives.

Finally, there's nostalgia at play here: I have a ton of fond memories of visiting museums with interactives and huge displays, and I'm glad that I can take my kids to them as well. But I'm also happy to see that these museums aren't stuck in the past and the only thing that they're doing is rehabilitating old exhibits that are decades old or out of date: they still have some of those things, but they're also making sure to bring in new interactives, looking at new scholarship and best practices for museums (because museums aren't static organizations or fields!) to change as audiences change. Like it or not, there are a lot of people who use screens as a way to take in information: museums have to keep abreast of those trends, because if we don't deliver information to people in familiar and accessible ways, they probably won't come in.

Sometimes you can't even get to the displays, without first at least walking through the room.

Whenever I walk by the vaguely muffled sounds of someone watching a movie in another room, I get nostalgic for childhood visits to museums.

When I'm in a museum with ancient sculptures, ironically, I don't want to see them as-is. Instead, I want to walk into a room that attempts to emulate how the sculptures looked in the context that they were originally displayed in, often with original paint that's been lost over the millennia since they were made.

Even cooler would be a projector that could "turn on and off" what the sculpture looked with original paint and possibly other decorations that have long since decayed.

But there's no digital displays. There are screens - that are off.

The owner can barely make rent, even in that desolated section of real estate, so there's not going to be any snappy big screens or interactive software. But it's literally a museum of computers where no computers are computing.

I'd like to add that I feel frustrated when try out a screen at a museum and it not working (malfunctioning). I have been to NASA's Kennedy's Space Center (KSC) many times (like 5-6). Although they have got most of the exhibits working in good order, some of them are broken or not functioning well anymore. I still appreciate KSC (am an annual member), but I wish there is some philanthropist or the government fund to renovate these museums periodically...

This is one of the most memorable exhibits in TFI and thankfully still exists today.

the old palace of fine arts exploratorium had a working TESLA COIL !

This had pretty much ended by 1980, unfortunately, and now they are enormously expensive.

I'm really not sure what the problem is, given that these exhibits are there, popular and obviously accessible. Ok, the author has an issue with screens, but, hey, a lot of real science is done on screens today...

Frankly I'm fed up of it over here and it's a shame this is being replicated in countries built a lot more strongly on actual modern scientific progress.

There's plenty of affordable interactive exhibits (the cost of crayons and paper hasn't inflated that much since the 90s!), but there's this false b$ that interactive digital media or 3d VR wish-wash is what people want. This mostly comes from asking the wrong people, the great unwashed who you were never going to attract away from the latest Disney flop.

As is being played out en-masse within hollywood and the wider entertainment industry. Ask the people who were your strongest supporters and original fans what they liked about your thing and you'll cut through all the noise and know where your priorities should be. Stop tyring to please everyone and focus on doing what you do well, growth and expansion numbers are good for one place the valley, and lets look where that got social media...