I had a (now defunct) startup in this space some years ago. Maybe I can help shed some light on why things are the way they are.

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.

There is an incredible pressure on a lot of public facing endeavors to include digital, no matter whether it makes any sense at all or not. Take education, for instance - if it weren't such an important topic, it would be almost comical to observe how our schools are trying to jump through hoops to cram more IT into the classroom. (I wish the people responsible would take a look at Scandinavia though, where they are years ahead in that respect and have already begun taking digital devices out of the classrooms again.)

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.

> 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.

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.

One of my longstanding peeves is that art museums are treated as serious places for grown-ups but science museums and zoos are treated as places for kids.

I'll take this opportunity to suggest some great places I've found.

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.

I totally agree with the authors point. The Franklin Institute at its core is a place that teaches science through tactile experience and the special exhibits don’t reflect that.

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.

My biggest gripe is that art museums, especially modern art museums, play documentary/clips from documentary that last anywhere from 2 minutes to 30 minutes. Those films are not accessible anywhere else.

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.

I will admit that the author's post strikes a chord.

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.

As a parent, I agree 100% with the sentiments expressed by the author.

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).

If you have a change to visit the Tokyo Science Museum, it's quite good in this respect - it has a lot of interactive displays, many of which are very hands on, and some are application based - focused on how the science concepts are used in industry (with some occasional corporate tie-ins, which weren't too over the top). It's fairly kid focused, as others have mentioned - most of your competition for seeing the exhibits will be school student groups.

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

It's not a museum, unless there's a dark room with a bunch of mostly empty chairs lined up in front of a projection screen showing a slide show or documentary (or really both at the same time) with an overly enthusiastic narration covering the history of the subject.

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.

I was an exhibit designer there in the early 2010s (the last exhibit I worked on was "Your Brain"); we had an incredible in-house design team that did all of the design and interactive prototyping, but unfortunately everyone was let go in ~2016 in favor of outsourcing much of the design work.

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.

> And where it looks like the budget has been going are the screen rooms. They occupy the huge central spaces on the main floor of the museum, and I’m sure a lot of time, money, and passion went into these things. But it’s misguided.

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...

I have personally made several interactive displays/exhibits for work. Yeah there are plenty of poorly made ones out there, but speaking from experience a good one truly does turns a museum into something a child is excited to visit. There is a reason why children's museums are made the way they are. Even children that are interested in learning, want to play. A great digital experience at a museum does wonders to bridge the gap between a regular museum and a children's museum. If a child has fun at a museum they are going to want to go back. If they keep having fun and keep wanting to go back, eventually they are going to start paying attention to substance of the museum. I agree great physical experiences are missing from many museums, but I'll happily continue to trick children into wanting to learn any way I can

> I believe museums exist to present the real thing for the visitor to experience with their own senses. Here’s the sculpture — the actual piece of stone, two thousand years old, Greek sculptor unknown — now go ahead and form your impressions.

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.

What I don't understand is why science museums aren't more geared toward adults. For me, it's hard to tell the difference between a children's museum and a science museum.

I generally agree with the thesis of the blog post.

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...

The Franklin Institute was in dire straits during COVID (as many similar institutions were), but has by all accounts recovered nicely financially. It felt pretty dumpy the last few times I've been there, with broken exhibits and the aforementioned screen-based exhibits. Hopefully they'll loosen those purse-strings eventually and put some money into the more expensive but much more tactile physical exhibits that had always been one of their big strengths.

Absolute irony: Pittsburgh has a privately-owned museum of computers (actually in New Kensington, a suburb). A HUGE amount of big old boxes. PDPs, Cray, some early home computers and printers. Some have been actively used by the owner/maintainer, so we know they work.

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.

It’s not just museums. Schools today also face the challenge of limiting screens in favor of hands-on activities.

I work in a museum, so I'll add in a couple of cents. Seth isn't entirely wrong here: museums are good opportunities for hands-on activities and to see things in a real sensory way that you can't in other places. "I believe museums exist to present the real thing for the visitor to experience with their own senses" rings really true to me.

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.

My favourite museums are those that are a huge pile of old shit with some labels telling you what you are looking at. This whole "hundreds of screens with some odd artifact inbetween" style is just boring.

Same thing at Science World, luckily they have a lot of tangible artifacts, but a ton of computers/displays. Last time I went (<6mo ago) a bunch of displays/stations in the most-hyped exhibit were non-functional due to hardware faults. :\

Before reading the article, I was going to talk about my very disappointing visit to the Franklin Institute a few months ago. Then I read the article and discovered that it's about the disappointment of visiting the Franklin Institute. My strongest impression of that museum is that it mostly consists of corporate sponsorship displays and a few neglected lessons in how things actually work.

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.

A museum here plays an inaudible voice recording on a 30 min loop with the speaker persistently building on previous context. It was like browsing an unfamiliar code base.

Old enough to remember when most museums and art galleries were absolutely free.

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

On the other hand, an app for your phone, or digital display placed by an artifact, it a bar code: could have as much detail as possible, with more and more in depth lessons that you can investigate depending on your own level of curiosity. (Or age.) A fantastic museum of the world - natural and human history in Ottawa, was great. But imagine, they have a diorama depicting a historical scene... Then there is a display counter in front where you can read what's going on in the diorama. Also a few selected elements from the display, shown behind that glass, but visible up close for us to admire. What is the description of a brass ring, in the display: "A brass ring."! We can see that! WTF? But we want to know: where was it found, what was it's purpose, why is this down here not something else. What era is it from? You could dig deeper: how was it made? Who made it? Where? With what technology? Brass? How did they blend the raw materials? Who wore it? Etc etc etc. A little electronic display could have that, It a link for everyone to follow - bar code for example we could scan. It could even link to a Wikipedia page, whatever. But, something! More than: "A brass ring"

If you want to take your kid to a museum then...go to a museum. The Franklin Institute, which they went to, is not a museum. I have the Liberty Science Center near me, which is also not a museum. They have interactive exhibits, planeteriums, and yes, screens. All this is by design, and it is great.

> I remember running through the gigantic model heart with other kids.

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

It's rampant in art museums as well.

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.

When I was in 5th grade (I think?) we went to the nation's capitol as a field trip. My mom volunteered to be a chaperone, as a result over the following years, we would go back. We would go into every museum, if you get a room at the right hotel (I forget which one we stayed at back to back) you can walk to any and all the museums, you can spend all day in several different museums. I highly recommend anyone to take such a trip if you've never been to DC. The city is full of so much history that we all have been taught, its something else to see it in person.

I used to love visiting museums to press buttons and turn dials as a kid. That's the funnest part. Anything in a museum that's just a screen is usually dumb.

I admit to not being a museum head myself. Now that I'm a parent though, I've gone to them all, multiple times. Before that, I'd not gone to any of them unless they're world famous.

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.

Agree a lot of “museums” are turning into less of cool items and more of a lot of text and visuals and electronic displays. I could just do that at home and skip the inconvenience, cost, and exposure.

I’m inclined to believe that this happens because there are strong incentives to being able to add to your resume “Directed digital modernization of Museum of Note”.

Why bother with hardware when you can just use software?

I think a lot of the time, museums really want to be "immersive" and give kids (and adults) something interactive. The problem is that "interactive" defaults to a touchscreen because it's easy to implement and maintain and looks flashy, even if it doesn't actually teach anything or spark curiosity the way a hands-on exhibit does. Honestly though, I think these kids do want to interact with the real world but lack the chance to. Screens are seductive and safe, but nothing beats the thrill of making something move with your own hands and actually seeing the physics happen.

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.

And the wonderful hands-on physical stuff that I loved as a kid? Jammed into out-of-the-way spaces in the Sir Isaac’s Loft and Air Show rooms. These rooms are terrific, and I was delighted to see they were absolutely packed with kids playing with stuff.

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...

It's disappointing to see but it feels as if to keep a futuristic theme and to provide almost an "edutainment" environment that a museum feels as though it must implement screens to keep up with the times. I think this might almost be comparable to how places like McDonalds that had themed play areas for kids have been wiped away. We aren't really designing many places where kids can be kids and when we do, we try to put more screens in there to connect with a younger technology savvy generation?

In the UK it comes off the back of "decolonize this" and "imperialism bad that".

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...

French have a weird passion for screens in museums.

Well, video-art.

This is just complaining that the SF Exploratorium is not in your city.

>poked at one of these [design a rocket apps] 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.

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.

the exploratorium in san francisco has also been dumbed down.

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