You know what they say: when it rains, it pours. I haven’t been to a conference in months – last August’s Play Make Learn Conference and, before that, MuseWeb in April. Next week, however, I am set to attend two! (All remote, of course).
The first is the MuseumNext Digital Learning Summit. I am excited as it’s my first time presenting there. MuseumNext’s are highly curated, short, single-track affairs. It was an honor just to be selected. You might recall I wrote about MusuemNext this past February, exploring how I worked with others to use ClubHouse for building a meta-converastion around the event.
This time I will be presenting “The Revolution Has Been Digitized: MicroRangers, Youth Programs, and a Toolkit for the Future of Museums“. Inspired by a chapter in my upcoming book to be published in 2022 by the American Alliance of Museums/Rowman & Littlefield, it explores what I call the Six Tools for Digital Design: user research, rapid prototyping, public piloting, iterative design, youth collaboration, and teaming up.
To highlight real instances of each tool in practice, I apply the toolkit to a case study: the MicroRangers game we developed at the American Museum of Natural History.
MuseumNext’s pivot during the pandemic involves requiring all presentations to be a combination of a 20-minute pre-recorded video plus a 10-minute live Q&A. That means I had to film a 20-minute video of myself, by myself, in my home, and keep it interesting. No easy task! I think it’s going to be informative, a lot of fun, and perhaps leave a few heads scratching with the thought “How’d he do that?”
The second conference this week that I will be presenting at will be MCN. I have been attending and presenting at MCN since 2015, as it’s one of my favorite Museum+Digital conferences. Their pandemic pivot has been to run their current remote conference over 5 weeks (ouch!). What makes it work is each day has its own theme with multiple tracks.
This Thursday I am co-chairing the Experience Design & Immersive Technologies track with Robin White Owen and Sam Minelli. We will welcome attendees to the 4 hour mini-event, introduce the six sessions (on topics like “The Promise and Perils of Gestural Interaction,” “Climate Change and the Digital Experience,” and “Literary Tools in Experience Design.”), then lead a conversation about all we just learned.
If you’re interested and free, come join us. Keep in mind, paying to attend means you can watch presentations afterwards, on your own time, as often as you like! If you come by, be sure to say “Hi!” to me in the chat.
