Don’t just look at the bear, BE the bear

Digital play at the American Museum of Natural History

4 min readDec 20, 2016

I dropped by the American Museum of Natural History today to take a tour of their new app, Explorer. It’s a bring your own device situation, and you need an iPhone or Android (my colleague had a Microsoft phone poor thing) so we decided to share mine. Two issues, I was low on charge and the location services just wouldn’t work.

I managed to hook into the free wifi and download the app though, and I liked the promise of it! We all know how large and labyrinthine the museum is, so having a map in your hand that is location aware, and can point out interesting things around you sounds wonderful.

The app can aid as a way-finding device, and once you tell it what you’re interested in, it can direct you to those things.

With location services not working, there were a few other experiences to be had. We came across a kiosk that promoted the app nicely — featuring Kinect driven motion detection, you could embody the bear or the dinosaur for a few seconds, it was cute, cute, cute.

Here I am being the bear. I tried to wink, and it worked.

Unfortunately without the full experience, the app was a little like this sad display below.

I started on the Tree of Life quiz, which helps you to learn all about genetic lineages in the animal kingdom, and provides hints, that are clues on why certain animals might have more in common with others. Nails versus claws. Educational and fun I think. Everything was very nicely designed and the copy was punchy and engaging.

So a few takeaways for me:

BYO Device is fine when it works, but when it doesn’t, would your institution offer help desk support for the plethora of visitor phones? ‘BYOD support manager’ is one of the new emerging digital jobs for 2017 as the enterprise invests in the reality of workers using their own phones and the like at work. Where are museums on this? We’re always so understaffed and it can be hard to be as responsive as visitors would expect around digital troubleshooting.
Maintaining, charging and syncing devices to check out to visitors is a pain, but there are good solutions for managing this at ticketing/help desks, and I think having that option available for visitors is important. It’s not just about when things go wrong, it’s also for when my own phone might be losing charge, or full with all my photos and music.

I often reflect on how important it is to not distract visitors too much from the exhibits/objects, or overload them with information. Yes, we have these phones in our pockets and there’s a temptation to bring them into everything we do, but museums need to be careful in maintaining the balance between what’s a useful/entertaining additional digital layer, and what’s just going to get in the way. The last thing you want to do when you go to a museum is have your focus trained on your phone the whole time, right? In this instance, I think AMNH are onto a good experience here: using your phone to ‘be’ the bear, sounds like a fun thing to do in the gallery. But using your phone to get more static information about the bear? It’s fantastic content, but I think I’d enjoy diving into it at home.