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.

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

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.

> 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...

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).

My favorite museum experience ever was at Chicago's Museum of Science and Industry in the early 00's where they had this whole room that was just wood blocks, a little plastic tub running like a creek, a few little water-directing mechanisms and a couple water guns. No goal, I dont think it was even teaching anything, it was just me and 8 other kids. When I first got there some kid was telling everybody how to use everything and what little project he was working on and how they could help, basically like a little foreman. I helped and had fun with everybody for maybe 15 minutes until he had to leave and by then I had been there longest and just naturally ended up taking over as "foreman" until it was my turn to go and I told another kid everything that was left to do. It's a very important dynamic you experience a lot in life, and that exhibit taught me it naturally in half an hour. It's such a shame to see how many of these learning museums are now basically having these kids just walk from point to point and read and maybe play something that would have been bad as a flash game. The Seattle one (forget the name) I went to last year had a decent number of physical exhibits (which I still enjoyed as an adult) but none of them had any social element. Ironically, the screen games were all very poorly maintained.

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.