Vindication! I’ve spent over a decade of my life putting physical interactives into museums. I have preached (sold) many museums on the stance that they should put unique experiences into museums that can’t happen on an iPad at home, to varying degrees of success. The museums that have listened are the ones that continue to be wildly successful to this day.

They are hard to do right though. I used to compete in combat robotics and the stresses put on museum exhibits is higher. I tell my new engineers that if their exhibit can be dropped into a gorilla enclosure and survive, they are about half way strong enough. Little makes up for raw experience in the art of building bomb proof exhibits, and many companies have failed before getting good. The amateur hour exhibits from the low bid newcomers that inevitably fail and/or need a lot of expensive maintenance has left a sour taste in a lot of museum’s mouths. A lot of those museums have knee jerk reactioned the opposite direction to touchscreen exhibits, only to see their ticket sales slowly drop. Thankfully, i’m seeing the pendulum of the industry swinging back towards physical interactives again.

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sethpurcell 4 days ago | parent | next [-]

THANK YOU for fighting this fight. I hope the responses here might add some empirical weight to your arguments — some people apparently do care about this.

And I believe you on how hard the reliability/durability challenges must be in engineering these things — I've seen what the kids do to them.

BTW, I think the mechanisms themselves are no small part of the interest; kids don't just get to see whatever phenomenon is being demonstrated by the device, they get to poke at the thing that does it and try to figure out how it works, and that's a lot of fun for a curious kid; there are layers there.

	▲	necovek 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		It's amazing what adults do to things too. I believe it's actually easier to cope with what kids will do (banging it, trying every nook out etc), compared to many adults putting more force than needed on common mechanism or button or whatever as they figure it out. But ultimately, it's about wear and tear.

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eloisant 4 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think up until about 15 years ago, there was no such negativity against "screens", so it was genuinely seen as something modern to add them. With the added benefit of being more robust (no moving parts) and cheaper to change the content to keep it fresh.

Now that both adults and kids spend their days on screens, and are looking to limit their exposure, it suddenly makes less sense to have them in museums.

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jancsika 4 days ago | parent | prev [-]

> A lot of those museums have knee jerk reactioned the opposite direction to touchscreen exhibits, only to see their ticket sales slowly drop.

According to what you've written here something close to 100% of those touchscreen exhibits should be broken. Are they?

	▲	Aeolun 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I think they say that because screens are really easy to make bomb proof. You just lock them in a big metal case. Even more points if you interact with them through Kinect because you can now make the layer of hardened glass in front of them a full centimeter thick.