Figure 1.

A museum user designs their own wallpaper on a computer as it is simultaneously projected onto the wall
in front of them at the new Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. Image courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt,
Smithsonian Design Museum.
 Volume 58 Number 3 July 2015

DIGITAL

Strategies against Architecture: Interactive Media and

Transformative Technology at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian
Design Museum1
SEBASTIAN CHAN AND AARON COPE

Abstract After being closed for three years, the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum reopened at
the end of 2014 a transformed museum in a renovated heritage building: Andrew Carnegie’s former home
on the Upper East Side of New York City. New galleries, a collection that was being rapidly digitized, a new
brand, and a desire for new audiences drove the museum to rethink and reposition its role as a design
museum. At the core of the new museum is a digital platform, built in-house, that connects collection- and
patron-management systems to in-gallery and online experiences. These have allowed the museum to
redesign everything from object labels and vitrines to the fundamentals of the “visitor experience.” This
paper explores in detail the process, the decisions made—and resulting tradeoffs—during each stage of the
process. In so doing, it reveals the challenges of collaborating with internal and external capacities,
operating internationally with online collaboration tools, and rapid prototyping.

“Sometimes you have to create teakwood. The collection, however, is an

belief.”
—Jack Schulze, 2013
Since 1976, the Smithsonian’s Cooper
Hewitt museum in New York has been housed
in one of the most glorious mansions from the
city’s most glorious age of wealth and extrava-
gance, the 1902 home of Andrew Carnegie.
And the problem has always been: It’s the wrong
kind of glory. . . The mansion was given to the
Smithsonian by the Carnegie Corporation, the
charitable organization established by the steel
magnate, to house a collection of objects that
has never quite seemed at home amidst the opu-
lence and grandeur of the neo Georgian stone
and brick pile on Fifth Avenue. The mansion is
locked in a particular past, full of wood paneling,
stained glass, carved ceilings and even a
themed room full of ornately detailed Indian
ongoing study in design evolution, spanning
centuries, but fundamentally preoccupied with
ideas of innovation and contemporary problem
solving.
—Phillip Kennicott, Washington Post, 2014.
Kennicott (2014) opens his review of the
new Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design
Museum (Cooper Hewitt, henceforth) by zero-
ing in on the core problem that Cooper Hewitt’s
reimagining has tried to resolve—the odd mar-
riage of a building (Andrew Carnegie’s home), a
collection (originally housed at the Cooper
Union), and an increasingly outwardly and
future-focused mission. In this paper we explore
the story behind the technology and interactive
digital media that became part of an organiza-
tional transformation that has helped the
museum reinvent itself.

Sebastian Chan (seb@freshandnew.org) is Director of Digital & Emerging Media at the Cooper Hewitt,
Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York City. Aaron Cope (aaron@aaronland.net) is Senior Engineer at the
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, in New York City.

Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope 353

CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
BACKGROUND
No discussion of a museum’s technology,
digital, or ‘experience’ makeover can be had
without first addressing its physical context.
Andrew Carnegie’s private residence creates a
certain type of “threshold fear” (Gurian, 2005)
that for Cooper Hewitt has needed to be over-
come through a combination of architectural
and social interventions. Unlike the “threshold
fear” invoked by the grand architectures of nine-
teenth- (and early twentieth-) century public
buildings, Carnegie’s residence, with its high
fence, was purpose-built to keep people out. As
a museum, its low visitation (for a museum in
New York) was recognized. A 2007 internal
Smithsonian review of the museum’s long-term
viability led to a building expansion; this was
intended to counter the museum’s reputation
“[as] a sleepy institution hampered by its setting
in the ornate turn-of-the-century Carnegie
Mansion” (Pogrebin, 2007).
It was hypothesized that an expanded
Cooper Hewitt would not only have more exhi-
bition space and more flexibility to show differ-
ent sizes and types of objects, but that its
visitorship would change. A new Cooper
Hewitt would, if done right, be able to draw
broader, more diverse audiences, have them
spend more time on campus, and come back
more often as repeat visitors.
Fundraising for a major renovation began
in the mid-2000s; by the time of the museum’s
closure in mid-2011, a significant war-chest had
been raised. By the endof the first phase, the
main campus had been closed, the permanent
collection was moved to offsite storage in New
Jersey, and staff offices were relocated into the
townhouses beside the Carnegie Mansion.
With progress already underway to restore
the historic features of the mansion, fundraising
turned to the “exhibitions” and, ultimately, “the
354
experience.” What was initially conceived of as a
two-year, $64 million renovation (Smithsonian,
2011) grew into a three-year, $91 million pro-
ject (Cooper Hewitt, 2014). This enabled a
much broader reimagining of the museum, with
an optimistic intention that it would reopen
during 2014.
STARTING OUT DIGITAL
Cooper Hewitt’s Digital & Emerging
Media (D&EM) department was formed as an
independent department at the end of 2011
upon the hiring of a Director of Digital &
Emerging Media (Sebastian Chan). Over the
next seven months, the team expanded, its
capacities rapidly grew, and Cooper Hewitt
Labs emerged as an “online entity.” As a result,
the museum’s digital presence began to rapidly
expand. By late 2012, the museum’s textual col-
lection catalogue records had been released
under a Creative Commons Zero license, allow-
ing full rights for anyone to use, reproduce or
modify this work for any purpose. A public
alpha version of the Cooper Hewitt’s online col-
lection was released online and work was under-
way to decommission most of the museum’s
“unnecessary” digital projects (such as microsites
and one-off apps) in order to create space to
think and work on a new future (Chan, 2013).
Shortly after the “Museums and the Web”
2012 conference, David Walsh, Director of
Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art
(MONA) was invited to speak to the Cooper
Hewitt’s leadership and curatorial staff. Walsh
spoke provocatively of how he had abandoned
object labels at MONA, and of the process that
led to his funding of the Art Processors and the
development of their mobile guide to the
museum, The O (Lijinzaad 2012). Although
the Cooper Hewitt did not end up implement-
ing their own version of The O, Walsh’s talk to
Digital: Strategies against Architecture

the museum’s staff helped shift some of the
internal thinking about the way “things should
be.” Instead, it allowed the museum to start to
consider what “could be.”
Diller, Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R) were
selected to be exhibition architects, and Local
Projects as media designers. Cooper Hewitt was
able to present the two teams with The O as an
option and give both firms the scope and per-
mission to push the museum further. When
Cooper Hewitt Director Bill Moggridge unex-
pectedly died in August 2012, the museum
committed to continuing his vision (see Lustig
2011) by opening as a, what Parry (2013) ter-
med, “post-digital” museum. When launching
the new Cooper Hewitt collection online earlier
that year, Chan (2012) wrote, “we need to not
just be ‘on the web’ but we need to be ‘of the
web.’” This philosophy became increasingly
important in working with DS+R and Local
Projects throughout the concept phase, and
later in assessing and improving the designs.
Basic Principles for Technology in the
Galleries
The D&EM team established a series of
unwritten technology principles for the new
galleries and experience. These were reinforced
throughout the concept design stages and then
encoded into practice during development. At
the heart of these was a commitment to ensure
two contrasting demands:
1. whatever was designed for the galleries
would give visitors a reason to visit physi-
cally rather than only digitally
but also,
2. that nothing would be artificially held
back, content-wise, from the web.
Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope
Volume 58 Number 3 July 2015
Technology, too, had to help and encour-
age the visitor against the architectural imposi-
tions of the historic building—which instills a
sense that the visitor should, when crossing the
threshold, be quiet, not touch anything, and
adopt a reverent frame of mind.
Complementing a strategic plan that envi-
sioned the transformation of the museum into a
“design resource,” as well as an increasing will-
ingness to provide more open access to the col-
lection, five design concepts for media and
technology in the galleries were developed:
1. Give visitors explicit permission to play.
Play was seen as an important way of
addressing “threshold” issues and archi-
tecture. Focusing on the experience of
crossing the threshold to enter the Car-
negie Mansion provided an opportunity
to upend expectations. Very early on in
the design process, then-Director Bill
Moggridge enthused about the idea of
concierges greeting visitors at the door,
warmly welcoming them into the build-
ing and setting them at ease. Technologi-
cal interventions—even symbolic ones—
were expected to support this need to
change every visitor’s perception of how
they were “allowed to behave” in the
mansion.
2. Make interactive experiences social and
multi-player; allow people to learn by
watching others. Cooper Hewitt, even in
its expanded form, is a physically small
museum. It has 16,000 square feet of gal-
lery space, which is configured as a series
of domestic spaces (except for the open-
plan third floor, which was converted
from offices and library as part of the ren-
ovation). If interactive experiences were
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CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
to support a transformed audience profile
with more families and social groups vis-
iting together, the museum would need
experiences that worked well with multi-
ple users and provided points of social
interaction. Immediately this suggested
an “app-free” approach (since using an
app is most-often a solitary rather than
social activity)—even though Cooper
Hewitt had been an early adopter of an
iPod Touch media guide (2010) and iPad
App (2011) in previous special exhibi-
tions.
3. Ensure a “look up” experience. Again,
because of the domestic spaces and nar-
row doorways of the Carnegie Mansion,
it was not desirable to encourage visitors
to be constantly referring to their mobile
devices. There was a strong consensus
amongst the staff and designers that the
museum should provide a compelling-
enough experience that the visitors would
to only want to use their mobile devices
to take photos.
4. Be ubiquitous, a “default” operating mode
for the institution. The biggest lesson the
design team took from MONA was that
for a technology experience to have the
best chance of transforming how visitors
interacted with the museum—as well as
how its staff considered it into the future
—that technology had to be ubiquitous.
An “optional guide,” an “optional app,”
even a “suggested mobile website” might
meet the needs of some visitors, but it
was unlikely to achieve the large-scale
change the design team wanted. Indeed,
the experience of deploying technological
add-ons previously at Cooper Hewitt
had been considered disappointing by
356
the museum; the iPad guide made for the
(pre-closure) blockbuster exhibition, Set
In Style, only had a 9% take up rate
(Longo 2011). Similarly, only having
interactive experiences in some galleries
threatened to relegate certain experiences
be seen as only for “younger audiences”—
something that is common in science
museums. By making technology ubiqui-
tous and distributing interactive experi-
ences to all galleries, it reinforced that
these experiences were intended for all
museum visitors, not just the young and
tech-savvy.
5. Work in conjunction with the web, and offer
a “persistence of visit.” The design team
was also insistent from the start that
whatever was designed had to acknowl-
edge that the web is constantly at the visi-
tor’s fingertips. Additionally, “post-visit
scrapbooks”—where visitors could keep a
record of what they’d seen in the museum
—were to be considered. The design
team was enamored with the post-visit
reports that were produced by visitors to
MONA on their “The O” platform, and
similar initiatives at other museums (for
example MOMA’s Audio+ (2013)). This
idea grew; the D&EM team began to
build out technological infrastructure
over the course of 2013. Upon so doing,
the desire to ensure that everything on
exhibition in the museum would also be
available online—without exception—
became technologically feasible. As the
museum’s curatorial staff began to final-
ize object lists for the opening exhibi-
tions, it became clear that—beyond the
technology layer—a new layer of policy
changes would be required to realize this
idea. New loan forms and new donor
Digital: Strategies against Architecture

agreements were negotiated. By the time
objects began to arrive for installation at
the museum in 2014, all but a handful of
lenders had agreed to have a metadata
and image record of their object’s pres-
ence in the museum. This data was not
only to be online during the run of an
exhibition, but was to be part of the exhi-
bition’s online catalogue permanently.
Agreed Concept Designs
During the concept-design phase the
museum worked closely with Local Projects, a
media-design firm for museums and public
spaces. By the end of 2012, a range of core
designs for interactive media experiences had
been settled upon and the next phase would start
to implement them in parallel with exhibition
design work undertaken by Diller Scofidio +
Renfo, and Thinc Design.
Collection Browser
The Collection Browser was one of the first
core experiences to be settled on. The Browser
was intended to be a highly visible way of
exploring the breadth of the collection,
deployed across the whole museum (like Cleve-
land Museum of Art’s “Gallery One”)—rather
than in one singular location. Content for this
experience was to be drawn from the museum’s
collection. The interactive experience was to
allow for serendipitous discovery by visitors and
saving of content, access to related media, and
some means of exploring the processes through
which objects were designed and made.
Because of the different physical sizes of
the rooms in the museum, it was also deter-
mined early-on that this experience would need
to function successfully at a variety of different-
size screens with different resolutions, from the
Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope
Volume 58 Number 3 July 2015
large interactive tables in the museum right
down to visitor’s own mobile phones. Interac-
tive tables (at super-high “4K” resolutions for
those sizing 84 and 55 inches, and at “high-defi-
nition” 1080p for those sizing 32 inches) were
used. The larger tables (84- and 55-inch) were
to be operable for either of the longer edges; this
required a requiring a visual design for the inter-
face that could supported being used by multiple
people in a variety of orientations.
“Making” Apps
Local Projects felt strongly that Cooper
Hewitt, as a design museum, needed to have
some experiences for visitors to design and cre-
ate their own objects. Early versions of these
concepts included the ability to make and print
3D replicas of museum objects, and “test” vari-
ous designs. Neither of these made it through to
the final versions.
The final “making” apps, however, were
integrated into the Collection Browser experi-
ence. In these experiences, visitors can draw a
series of different 3D forms using a simple tool
kit. They can select different materials and
create a virtual chair, building, hat, vase, lamp
or freeform shape. These appear on relevant
backdrops and can be saved by visitors not only
as images but as full-3D models ready for
printing.
For an institution like Cooper Hewitt
which is primarily grounded in art-historical
approaches and training, these “making” experi-
ences were novel. It was also notoriously diffi-
cult to encourage social acceptance of them
among the museum staff. Local Projects’ initial
proposals were complex; during the build pro-
cess, they actively encouraged the museum staff
to “simplify.” Staff also had to keep in mind,
when developing these experiences, the need to
quickly engage and reward visitors—instead of
fully reproducing the functionality of profes-
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CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
Figure 2. The Pen. Image courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.
sional design tools (like Photoshop
3DSMax).
People Browser
Connected to the Collection Browser was a
concept for a “People Browser,” which would
enable visitors to explore the relationships
between the individuals responsible for the col-
lection: designers, artists or donors. It quickly
became clear that, with the limited curatorial
resources available, content for this browser
would be very difficult for to produce in struc-
tured formats. The final version focused on
donor relationships in the early-20th century—
drawing on research materials already produced
for opening print publications. In addition to
this focus, it also can easily present contempo-
rary designer relationships.
358
or Immersion Room
Cooper Hewitt has one of the most signifi-
cant collections of wallcoverings (i.e. wallpa-
pers) in North America. However, it has been
difficult to exhibit effectively. The wallcover-
ings were identified, even before the appoint-
ment of Local Projects, as a key potentially
digital experience. As the museum’s concept of
an “immersion room” for the wallcoverings col-
lection developed, Local Projects injected the
idea of “drawing your own;” this greatly invigo-
rated an otherwise-very collection-centric expe-
rience. Ultimately, the design team executed
this through projecting digital images con-
trolled by an interactive table (that could be used
by two people at once) onto a flat wall. This
design has proven to be a hit with visitors, and
has created a unique, “selfie-worthy” moment in
Digital: Strategies against Architecture

every visit. Like the “making” apps, wallpaper
patterns designed by visitors can be saved and
taken home—not only as an image file, but also
as a scalable vector file for printing. In theory,
the visitor could use these files to create their
own self-designed wallpaper for their homes.
Mansion History
The museum conceived of the idea to tell
the story of the Carnegie Mansion through a
simple interactive experience. It was initially to
be mounted in two locations in the museum
(though currently is deployed in only one).
Using historical imagery, users would be able to
navigate a map and see the mansion as it once
was. Although augmented reality was briefly
considered, the uneven availability of historical
photographs for each floor and room ended up
taking this down a more-straightforward
“kiosk” path. Somewhat ironically for such rela-
tively simple content, this experience is not cur-
rently available online.
Process Lab “Make it Better” and “Wild
Ideas”
The Process Lab is the museum’s newest
space, where visitors can:
brainstorm design solutions through
hands-on and digital activities. The Process Lab
emphasizes how design is a way of thinking,
planning and problem solving, and provides a
foundation for the rest of the design concepts on
view in the museum (Cooper Hewitt 2015).
To support the analog activities in this
space, two different digital experiences were
developed. “Make It Better” is a digital sugges-
tion box that asks visitors to improve the design
of an existing everyday device to better serve the
needs of a particular user. These range from a
backpack to a subway turnstile. Visitors draw
Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope
Volume 58 Number 3 July 2015
and annotate their solutions, and can vote on
the proposals of others. “Wild Ideas,” still in
development, challenges visitors to unite the
properties of two radically different objects such
as a bicycle and an artichoke. It is intended to
work as a brainstorming trigger.
“The Pen”
Uniting all these interactive experiences
and galleries a device we call “The Pen.” Local
Projects’ final response to the museum’s chal-
lenge suggested the museum give every visitor a
“Pen.” This Pen, according to Diller Scofidio &
Renfro in their 2012 proposal slides, would be:
[part of a] system-wide platform, [be] your
ticket, your identity throughout the museum,
how you make purchases [in the shop], making
you an active visitor, getting you away from your
phone and closer to design (Local Projects in
Diller Scofidio & Renfro 2012).
This idea was immediately compelling for the
museum. However, it was also identified as a
high-risk item, which would require consider-
able investment. While Local Projects’ slide had
provided the initial vision for The Pen, it did lit-
tle to reveal the complexity of the infrastructure,
and the systems supporting it to make it work
seamlessly.
Starting The Pen
Once the decision had been made to move
forward with the concept of The Pen, the
museum pitched the idea to Bloomberg Philan-
thropies, and they became a key financial backer
through their Bloomberg Connects program.
Bloomberg Connects agreed to fund the entire
technology implementation—The Pen along
with the interactive media, associated hardware,
and the integration of a new ticketing system
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CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
and relevant front-of-house staff. Chan has
described this scale of investment as a remark-
able act of “venture philanthropy” (Chan 2015).
There was, then, a prolonged period where
the museum, DS+R and their audio-visual con-
sultants, Audio Visual & Controls, Inc.
(AV&C), explored the options for an off-the-
shelf stylus with a small radio (NFC or RFID)
chip inserted into it. The intention was to find a
stylus that had a unit cost of under five dollars,
and which could be easily modified. In its early
design phases, it was conceived that each set of
museum object labels would contain a small
computer (a Raspberry PI), that could read the
chips in the styluses when the visitor touched
the stylus to the label.
Reality Check
Unfortunately, by late 2013, a suitable sty-
lus could not be found. Those that were closest
to meeting our design criteria were could not be
easily modified to hold an inserted chip. Com-
plicating matters, the constraints of the historic
building meant that there would be some areas
of the museum unable to supply electricity to
computerized object labels. Powered object
labels, whilst offering much in terms of future
development (e.g. for potential for future e-ink
labels or a mesh network of sensors) were also
considered to be too risky for conservation rea-
sons. It also would commit the museum to a
fixed object-label infrastructure.
In late 2013 we switched tack to explore the
option for a Pen with an embedded reader—an
“active” Pen—moving the radio tags to the
object labels. Instead of the labels reading the
pen, the pen would now read the labels.
Although this approach incurred significant
additional development costs, it enabled the
museum to foster a technical and conceptual
model that allowed anything stored in the
museum’s collection management system to be
360
tagged and recorded. While only individual
objects were originally to be given these tags,
nothing would prevent the museum from allow-
ing visitors to “collect” designers, entire exhibi-
tions, or even architectural elements from the
building itself in the future by reading tags
placed around the museum with their Pen.
With exhibition development well under
way, and DS+R occupied with the building itself,
the museum needed to find a new way to move
forward. Using its board networks, the museum
approached Undercurrent, a New York strategy
firm to help manage the development process for
a new “active” Pen. Undercurrent’s Jordan
Husney had extensive experience with radio-tags
and readers, and understood how small-scale
manufacturing operates. Husney also brought
project management focus to the hardware ele-
ment of The Pen, elevating it to its own “special
project” status. Within the overall museum reno-
vation, this gave The Pen production project its
own dedicated meetings, time and resources.
In their research, AV&C found a Spanish
firm, Sistelnetworks, that had developed a
device which met most of the criteria needed for
a reader/stylus combination product. Sistelnet-
works’ vWand was already on the market and
had most of our required features, the only
things still to be refined were:
1. the requirement that the pen could store
data on it rather than requiring it to be
connected wirelessly at all times,
2. for The Pen’s reader to be always on
(rather than requiring a push-button,
and
3. an improved battery life.2
Although the museum was making pro-
gress, there were concerns about the aesthetics
Digital: Strategies against Architecture

of The Pen. Since its electronics were already
being modified, we took the opportunity to
rethink the industrial design. The chair of the
Cooper Hewitt board, Beth Comstock, offered
the services of GE’s Design Council to work in
cooperation with Sistelnetworks to further
transform the vWand.
Working closely in a short series of design
sprints, the museum, GE, and Undercurrent
developed a design that, by June 2014, had coa-
lesced into a series of detailed CAD drawings
and design principles. These would continue to
inform the design of the interaction between
the device and the user—light patterns and hap-
tic feedback—and eventual socialization of The
Pen into the museum. The design sprints con-
firmed and expanded a series of guiding design
principles for The Pen itself. These were
summarized in Bove, Crow, and Husney (2014)
as:
1. Not a barrier to entry—it just works.
2. Extension of the content—the exhibi-
tions are the focus, not The Pen.
3. Belongs in the museum—The Pen expe-
rience is well designed, useful, and beau-
tiful.
4. Encourages discovery—The Pen unlocks
content about the exhibitions.
5. Part of an ecosystem—The Pen interac-
tion is part of the larger museum experi-
ence.
6. Context of use—Pen interaction and use
is location-dependent.
7. Direct manipulation—The Pen enables
new interactions with content.
Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope
Volume 58 Number 3 July 2015
These guiding design principles reinforced
many of the decisions that had already been
made, and also gave guidance to the new part-
ners on the project.
Following these design sprints, Sistelnet-
works was introduced to manufacturing broker
MakeSimply by Undercurrent. MakeSimply
specializes in taking small- to medium-scale
projects to manufacture using a distributed net-
work of factories in East Asia. In many ways,
one of the main innovations that enabled the
Cooper Hewitt to make The Pen was the exis-
tence of a global network of suppliers able to fill
short orders of under 5,000 units. MakeSimply,
working as a subcontractor to Sistelnetworks,
then took the GE drawings (gifted to Cooper
Hewitt), and went through a series of iterations,
wherein they produced “Design For Manufac-
ture” (DFM) technical drawings and factory
instructions.
It is important to stress the scale of changes
and alterations that the DFM process brought
to the final design of The Pen. As is the case in
product design, many of the initial design fea-
tures (e.g. materials and finishes) are changed as
the realities of manufacturing within a budget
become apparent. At Sistelnetworks, each
change required new rounds of antenna-testing
and modifications to adjust the battery life.
GE’s team, too, continued to work with the
museum throughout, offering input and feed-
back on design changes brought about during
the DFM process.
The Pen had quickly become a reality.
While the D&EM team continued to work
closely with Undercurrent, Sistelnetworks, GE
and MakeSimply, there was much more to do in
the way of its integration into the museum itself.
Ticketing, Privacy and Identity
One of the changes to Cooper-Hewitt
operations that The Pen has forced is a merging
361
Figures 3–4. Using the Pen in the new Cooper Hewitt. Photos courtesy of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design
Museum.

of all the different identity-related databases
within the museum. Like many museums,
before reopening, the Cooper Hewitt had sepa-
rate databases for members, donors, patrons,
benefactors and other groups. One consequence
of the way The Pen works is that everyone is con-
sidered to be a visitor, regardless of their finan- tionalities added as visitors began to use and
cial relationship with the museum. A visitor
might be a long-standing member. Over the
course of their history with the museum, they
might be a patron one year and not another.
One year they may forego their membership
entirely. Since the development of The Pen, all
THE PEN CAN ONLY BE SEEN AS SUCCESSFUL thing the museum can do is
INSOFAR AS IT ENABLES THE MUSEUM AND
ITS VISITORS TO DO MORE WITH OUR
COLLECTION.
of these roles are aspects of a single persistent
user account centered around multiple visits to
the museum.
Tessitura, an arts management software
package, is used to manage the museum’s ticket-
ing needs. It also maintains “constituent
records” that unite all members, donors, and vis-
itors under one system. The temptation to
require “user accounts” for all visitors—that
identified them by at least an email address—
was very strong. However the D&EM team
argued persistently for the system to default to
“anonymity.” Visitors—even museum members
—should be able to use the museum and its
technological augmentations without identifying
themselves if they wished. Thus, by default all
visits to the museum are anonymous. They are
identified only by a code—their “shortcode.”
Even in the case of online purchases, visits are
not automatically associated with user accounts.
Similarly all the objects or creations collected
during the course of a visit are private by default. present visitors the option to “save” their own
Once a visitor has paired their visit shortcode
Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope
Volume 58 Number 3 July 2015
with their Cooper Hewitt user account, those
items may be made public and “shared” using
the URL or any number of social tools.
The museum chose to design the simplest
possible system to launch the Pen, allowing the
system to be adapted and have additional func-
interact with it. We believe that visitors find
their own meaning. They use The Pen to import
the objects they collect or create not just in the
ninety minutes they (typically) spend in the gal-
leries, but also in the days, months and years that
follow their visit and on their own schedule. We
believe that the first and best
to provide better tools to help
visitors manage that recall.
There are many opportunities
that this simple idea makes
possible, but the first step is to ensure that we do
it well, both from the perspective of the visitor
and the operational demands it places on the
museum. Only then should we build on that
foundation.
The First Weeks
The museum opened to the public on
December 12, 2014. Manufacturing issues
delayed the arrival of The Pen; however, in
hindsight, this was an entirely desirable result.
The delays enabled the museum to figure out
how its new ticketing system worked, and
understand the visitor flows through the newly
designed spaces. The delays also meant that the
museum had a trial run of an inevitable future
where The Pen may need to “gracefully fail.”
In the first weeks of the opened museum,
all of the interactive media experiences were
operational. Their user interface simply did not
designs, and did not prompt them to connect
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CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
their Pens. Although there was some public dis-
appointment, it was muted; in some regards,
this built a greater anticipation of the deploy-
ment of The Pen. The press reviews of the rein-
vigorated museum were upbeat and positive
(Lange 2014; Kennicott 2014). Even without
The Pen, reviewers were impressed by the inter-
activity and the way in which it had been inter-
woven into the museum.
The Pen finally arrived and went live to the
public on March 10, 2015.
In following 75 days, pens were distributed
33,195 times with a take up rate of over ninety-
three percent (excluding the visitors who were
not eligible to be offered a pen: children under
6, and during the initial months, school groups
and visitors arriving during the museum’s Pay-
What-You-Wish Saturday evenings).
The take-up rate has been strong amongst
all age groups and demographics. Unlike a
mobile app, Cooper Hewitt front-of-house staff
have reported great interest among older visitors
who, presumably, find the simplicity of the Pen
more approachable than an app. Most surpris-
ing for museum, however, has been how those
33,195 pens have been used. Those pens have
collected objects 726,328 times, and been used
to save 29,219 visitor-made designs. Visitors
have collected over 3,600 distinct objects which,
considering that there are only approximately
700 objects on display in the galleries (and 4,000
available on the interactive tables), is a good
indication that the stated goal for the Collection
Browser to encourage “exploring the breadth of
the collection. . . across the whole museum” has
been successful.
The museum now has pseudo-anonymous
data on who collects which objects, and in what
sequence. This can easily be mapped against
their locations in the building. Our data
also gives us a good estimation of daily average
dwell times—calculated as the time between
364
pen distribution (at ticketing) and final dock (at
exit). Average dwell times now far exceed what
they were in the former museum—over 100
minutes (versus 45 minutes prior to 2011).
We are also tracking post-visit online usage; of
the 33,196 pens paired with tickets, so far, 8,108
(24%) have already returned to explore their col-
lections online, and 31% of these have made the
choice to establish Cooper Hewitt accounts.
Considerably more research is required
(along with more robust and statistically valid
methods of data analysis), but for the first time,
the Cooper Hewitt can begin to examine how
its visitors behave in its spaces. That knowledge
can be used use that to design better, more
impactful exhibitions and programs.
SUSTAINABILITY: NORMALIZING
“DIGITAL” IN THE MUSEUM SECTOR
A common question in the cultural heritage
sector is how projects like ours can be made
“sustainable” by an institution. In this sense,
“sustainability” is often understood as a smooth
march from a one-off innovation to a commod-
ity—ideally one which can be bought cheaper
from a third-party supplier. Most technology
eventually follows this arc. For example, disk
storage began as an expensive, bespoke product,
and now is offered as an almost-zero-cost ser-
vice. The same has gone for same for finance
systems, and collection management systems.
Even a museum website—in its most basic mar-
keting “brochureware” form—has gone from
requiring bespoke code and design, to being
available in a “good enough” template form
from zero-code providers like Squarespace in
less than ten years.
Exhibition technology and “visitor-facing
technology innovation” in museums are tradi-
tionally the preserve of third-party exhibition
design firms, and audio-visual integrators.
Digital: Strategies against Architecture

Firms such as those Cooper Hewitt partnered
with—Local Projects, AV&C, Diller Scofidio
+ Renfo (DS+R)—offer design-and-build ser-
vices, and often offer “service and support” con-
tracts for 12-18 months after deployment.
However, it is important to recognize the prob-
lems with this model when it comes to services-
based projects like The Pen and its “museum-
wide” system:
• Support contracts are typically for projects
whose value diminishes over time (because
on-going development of a project stops at
launch). Thus, the cost of that contract, in
effect, increases year over year with fewer
and fewer returns for the museum.
• With support contracts, very often no
institutional knowledge about the project
or how it might serve as a platform for
future projects is gained. Sometimes the
only tangible skill an institution learns, or
passes on, is how to manage contracts for
service providers.
• A support contract is only valid for past
work. Any additional changes or improve-
ments incur additional non-trivial costs,
because third-party contractors not only
need to complete the work, but require
time to familiarize themselves with a pre-
existing code base.
• Support contracts represent money that
leaves the institution and never comes back.
These overall costs are likely to be much
more than it would cost to hire and maintain
permanent creative technical staff. This is par-
ticularly evident when intangibles like the over-
all improvement in institutional knowledge,
and the ability to build on the value created by
past work are factored in.
As a sector, we have spent a couple of dec-
ades making excuses for why “digital” can’t be
Sebastian Chan and Aaron Cope
Volume 58 Number 3 July 2015
made central to staffing requirements. The
results of these staffing decisions have been dee-
ply unsatisfactory. The shift to a “post-digital”
museum where “digital [is] being naturalized
within museums’ visions and articulations of
themselves” (Parry 2013) will require a signifi-
cant realignment of priorities, and an invest-
ment in people. The museum sector is not alone
in this. Private media organizations and tech
companies face the same challenge. Despite
“digital people” being in high demand, they
should not be considered an “overpriced indul-
gence” but rather than an integral part of the
already multidisciplinary teams required to run
a cultural institution.
The flow of digital talent from private com-
panies to new types of public service organiza-
tions—such as the Government Digital Service
(UK), 18F (inside GSA) and US Digital Service
—proves that there are ways, beyond salaries, to
attract and retain the specialist staff required to
build the types of products and services required
to transform museums. In fact, we argue that
museums (and other cultural institutions) offer
significant intrinsic benefits and social capital—
that other types of non-profits and public sector
agencies lack—that are natural talent attractors.
The barriers to changing the museum workforce
in this way are not primarily financial but inter-
nal and structural. And more, they are kept in
place by a strong institutional inertia.
WHAT’S NEXT?
If the Cooper Hewitt has succeeded in
challenging the expectations or requirements of
a museum’s digital footprint, it is important to
recognize that this is not simply about The Pen.
That the museum was able to design and manu-
facture its own bespoke hardware may be an
impressive accomplishment, but The Pen can
only be seen as successful insofar as it enables
365
CURATOR THE MUSEUM JOURNAL
the museum and its visitors to do more with our
collection. And despite the torrent of publicity
it has brought, The Pen was not just intended as
a marketing device for the re-opening but a
means to change the museum’s relationship
with its visitors.
Product design and hardware manufactur-
ing are not a museum’s core competency; we
would not have succeeded without the generos-
ity and efforts of our partners. The Pen was a
massive undertaking and nearly “broke” the
museum on any number of occasions. Where it
didn’t “break” the museum, the requirements
demanded by The Pen and Pen-related infras-
tructures impacted every layer of the museum’s
staff, its physical plant, its budgeting process
and its day-to-day operations. Whilst some of
this was predictable and could have, with time
and resourcing, been mitigated against, there
has also been a benefit in having the institution
grapple with the complexities of running a new
customer-facing infrastructure. Over time it
will—as it must—build new institutional mus-
cles to take on and adapt to its new form.
Likewise, the project introduced, and in
some cases exposed, new ways for the museum
to understand its technology infrastructure and
its relationships with third-party contractors
and vendors. Cooper Hewitt had been able to
make a significant public-facing change only by
making those vendors and internal Smithso-
nian-wide stakeholders believe in the scale and
ambition of this project. The museum was able
to prove it was genuine in its ambitions through
its prototyping and ongoing commitment. With
the right investment in staffing, this new plat-
form could conceivably be used to make viable
interactive applications (and just as importantly,
serve as an internal prototyping tool for testing
and validating future third-party work) for
another decade.
366
“At a time when so many museums seem
intent on new spaces for new design and new art
(like the Whitney, Upper East Side deserter),
it’s a relief that the Cooper Hewitt finally spent
the time and the money to make their 1902 Car-
negie Mansion sing. Rather than being a
straightjacket, the mansion’s ornate rooms and
halls now form a rich and idiosyncratic frame for
design objects of all ages.”
—Lange (2014)
“[The work] is an investment in a particular
idea of cultural democracy. It’s a view where
imperfect speech can always—and will always,
and should always—be augmented by further
speech. It trusts in the discourse over the perfec-
tion of the original work.”
—Meyer (2015) END
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This ambitious project is the work of many individu-
als, teams and organizations. It would not have been
possible without the generous donations and support
of Bloomberg Philanthropies, GE Design, Under-
current, and the Board of Trustees; the hard work of
Local Projects, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Sistelnet-
works, Tellart, and Makesimply; and the ongoing
hard work of colleagues, interns and volunteers inside
both Cooper Hewitt and the Smithsonian at large.
NOTES
1. The full version of this essay which contains con-
siderable additional technical information was
originally published in Chan and Cope (2015).
2. The vWand’s initial button-activated NFC scan-
ning technology and its lack of onboard memory
meant it would not be suitable for museum use at
this phase, since it was designed to be constantly
paired with one device (a tablet) rather than as a
device that could pair on-the-fly with many
Digital: Strategies against Architecture

objects around the museum. Working directly
with Sistelnetworks, we were quickly able to
receive a modified prototype that replaced Blue-
tooth pairing with onboard memory, an ‘always-
on’ NFC reader mode, and then work began in
earnest on getting bi-directional data transfer
over NFC. This latter functionality allows The
Pen to transfer its memory over NFC to a custom
made reader board designed by Sistelnetworks
that is embedded in the interactive tables and in
portable stations around the museum. An “al-
ways-on” NFC antenna also brought new chal-
lenges – notably power. Battery life is a limiting
factor almost all consumer microelectronics these
days and the Lithium Polymer (LiPo) solution of
the original vWand was tested in this new config-
uration and barely reached one (museum) day of
average usage.
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