A talk to museum and gallery audience (MLA) in Leicester.

1. Orienteering Objects
James Boardwell, MuBu, 2010
Hello.
I’m James and I work at Rattle (www.rattlecentral.com) where we research, design and build
social technologies.

2. Assumption 1
Significance is ‘socially’ constructed and online
can be fleeting and ephemeral
We do lots of different things from designing strategies to engage audiences online for e.g.
around the BBCs History of the world, to designing new social recommendation services for
the BBC, mobile phone UX for INQ and then technical products such as a text mining engine.
We’re designing stuff for the social web, for a world of ubiquitous connectivity.

3. Thoughts on Stuff
I want to start off by questioning object ontology in the age of the Internet.
The internet asks some quite profound questions of what it means to be a museum or gallery
in an age of almost ubiquitous access to a unparalleled wealth of information.
There’s a lot of stuff about.
And whilst it’s only a tiny sample, museums and galleries have a lot of significant stuff.
Notice: significant. I think this is important, because significance is increasingly constructed
by other people rather than professional curators and in ways which are hard for museums to
do themselves.

4. Heuristic
Significance is ‘socially’ constructed and online
can be fleeting and ephemeral
Design Implication
Go to where your audience are
I’m going to give a bit of background to a project we did for Renaissance East Midlands,
called My Life as an Object, which basically looks to orientate engagement around objects for
the internet age.
The background is framed as three heuristics, three assumptions about the world we live in.
This is the first...

5. Heuristic
Objects enable effects... they enable collective
agency
Design Implication
Design experiences that show the effects!
This is the second assumption, basically giving some power to objects, to things, rather than
assuming it’s just us that has the power to effect change.

6. Bruno Latour told us this and the social study of science is very interesting in this area.
Objects can effect change as part of a network. They have the same power to effect change as
humans, as part of a network of associations. He talks about this most effectively when he
says that technology is Society made durable.

7. Heuristic
Different objects have different associations or
‘hooks’.
Design Implication
Find what is inherently engaging about the object.
Finally, we have the idea that different objects have different inherent ‘hooks’, different ways
to be interpreted which lend themselves to a particular design solution.

8. Go to where your audience are
3 types of online social activity
Then we come to the actual design of social stuff...
You need to design stuff for the spaces where people live online, and understand the social
dynamics of that space. Matt Locke is good on this: http://test.org.uk/2007/08/10/six-
spaces-of-social-media/

9. Social Network
* with apologies to Jez Burrows
Stroking, peer network driven

10. Object stuff, peer network significant but object key - look beyond network for significance

11. We Are Friction*
James Boardwell, We Love Technology, 2010
* with apologies to Jez Burrows
Lastly, discoverability where it is just the object that matters

12. Assumption 2
Non-human things enable effects...
The Penguin project We Tell Stories was interesting in this regard as it experimented with
different platforms... each of which had it’s own dynamic. For example one tells a story in
real time using twitter, whilst another uses Google Maps to play out a thriller narrative
around Kings Cross in London.

13. Design experiences that show the effects!
Mapping the outputs and associations

14. We love the way objects are starting to come alive and ‘speak’, through data they give out
which can take on a semantic, meaningful form if you frame it right. Botanicalls is an object
that tweets when you plant needs watering. It’s not sentient really, it’s quite dumb, but
despite that it’s really engaging.

15. There are a heap of objects twittering what they;re up to from the Lovell Telescope to Tower
Bridge. Exposing the data feeds of objects shouldn’t necessarily be that interesting but it has
potential to tell stories, to create narratives in an Internet of Things.

16. Find what is inherently engaging about the object.
Object Value

17. Assumption 1
Significance is ‘socially’ constructed and online
can be fleeting and ephemeral
What can we say about different objects?
On a generic level we can talk about value. It’s a brilliant lens on objects and a key ‘hook’ ...
everyone wants to know what something is ‘worth’ as that shows intrinsic value. We call this
the ecomm view. It’s one of the ideas we proposed to the British Museum around the BBC
History of the World programme. Imagine the British Museum as Argos. Things went quiet
after that.

18. The antiques roadshow is perhaps the key cultural symbol of this object as value.
“What is it worth?” is The Money Shot!

19. Love what the project Significant Objects is doing in using value to engage people around
objects. They have a simple hyposthysis: that a good story can change your perception of an
object, and hence its value to you. They test this by buying stuff off eBay, getting people to
give it a fictional story and then re-listing it. The results are extraordinary.
The power of narrative, the power of giving a voice to objects, even a fictional voice can be
profound.

20. My Life As An Object
So that was a brief potted history to the thinking behind a project we were commissioned to
do for Renaissance East Midlands.

21. Initially we were interested in a Psychogeography of Objects, how a sense of place could be
created from the objects in the collections. This led to us exploring how different objects
could have voices. What could you start to say about a place based on object voice? Who
speaks for the object? How do they speak? The scale and nature of the project meant that we
scaled this to something manageable and something that would provide the maximum
amount of learning for the time and money we had available.
The only condition in the brief was that we should use participatory media.

22. Raleigh Chopper. This is the first object we’re giving voice to through twitter, where the
narrative arcs from a birthday gift, to being an extension of the owners’ self, to being a cast
off in the shed (making way for the BMX) and thence into the museum as a collectible. All in
the course of a week. We’ll respond to replies, buzz and general feedback throughout the
week, so whilst the narrative is planned, it can be reflexive to the audience.
see twitter.com/yellowchopper

23. We Are Friction*
James Boardwell, We Love Technology, 2010

24. Tea at Englefield Green by Paul Sandby, one of the finest painters this country has produced.
This is the second piece and in many ways the most challenging. Painting is all about
interpretation. We wanted to take an object which is actually quite hard to ‘socialise’. How?
Treat it as any other image, cut it up and be irreverent with how we can interpret it. It helps
that very little is known about the painting, allowing us some framing (Englefield Green is a
place in Surrey, the painting dates roughly from 1800), but otherwise a blank sheet.
History of flickr being used for this purpose w short story groups. So we’re going to use flickr
to tell this story using tags, comments and notes.
See: http://www.flickr.com/photos/tea_at_englefield_green

25. Baby scales... from the 1930s Boots.
Industrial design.
Boots baby weighing scales (circa 1930).
What does this object do? It has a really profound significance. It tells you whether your baby
is ‘normal’. We’re taking a data stream of (hopefully) baby weights from one week in history
and will be encouraging people to put up the weights of themselves when born, the sons or
daughters or friends’ babies.
We’re creating a Facebook fan page of the object and have worked with the Nottingham
Hospitals Trust to get one weeks’ worth of baby weight data, which we’re going to ‘update’ in
real time on Facebook. In doing so we’ll be encouraging others’ to put in the weights of their
babies or friends babies or their own birth weight. People will be giving the object a voice
through the data it was designed to provide. Neat.
Check back here for the details:
http://www.mylifeasanobject.com/

26. James Boardwell, MuBu, 2010
rattlecentral.com
twitter.com/jamesb
My Life As An Object
mylifeasanobject.com
twitter.com/yellowchopper
Thank you for listening.