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.

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 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.

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.

> 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).

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

The screen culture is forced upon by perception goals. I cringe when I look at large screens all over my office, which are there only to create a perception, with zero information or usefulness. Sort of jewellery for an establishment. A cheap way to look modern. But it consumes power and creates global warming for nothing.

It happens when you give a contract to someone to modernize the place. They throw a bunch of screens and meaningless sculptures (aka artwork), wierd-shaped structures, with random text in large font, around and fulfill the metrics for modern-ness. They just deliver on their customer's wish to see things to be quite different from earlier state. How that difference makes sense, doesn't matter. Delivery done, transaction completed.

We are chasing change. Change is seen as accomplishment. Big bosses keep shuffling their org very often. Not really to optimize, but to show that they did something, and to show their power. Weirdness also qualifies as a good thing, because it is a change. No wonder TV ads and content promote as much weirdness as allowed.

Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI) in the 1970s had a real submarine periscope you could use, a manned space capsule you could look into, a DC-3 airplane you could go into, and a variety of whirring/buzzing physical things to interact with. In the late 90s, I escorted a school group there and it was all screens. It had gone from being a destination worth driving across the state for to being an experience less interesting than a decent web site.