These are tough time for museums, but often that's when the really innovative ideas happen – That was the flavour of the day at the Museum Computer Group annual conference, that @Gavssandwiches Mallory and I attended last week. There was an abundance of ideas and energy bouncing around the Imperial War Museum where it was held, which was the perfect venue for it not least because we could leave the conference space to be inspired by real users of a museum, alive in their native habitat. 

Silvia and I have just got back from Philadelphia, where we were lucky enough to attend this year’s instalment of Museums and the Web. The conference brings together hundreds of technologists and museum professionals, to spend three days discussing how digitality can be used to improve museums all round the world. There were a lot of very big minds presenting their ideas, but here’s a whirlwind tour of my choice cuts:

User testing sessions mark the first point of contact that our software and designs have with the people who will ultimately be using them. Showing the product to fresh pairs or eyes invariably exposes issues that were invisible to the people working on it, allowing them to be identified and fixed before the final build.

“And the award for the best Offline: Kiosk, Installation or On-Site Application goes to” …you could cut the tension with a knife… “Cogapp and their interactives for the Great North Museum!” Cue cries of joy, surges of adrenalin, and all round jubilation.

On Thursday 19 November we were proud to take home a British Interactive Media Association Award from the ceremony at Camden’s KOKO. Having started way back in the digital olden days of 1984, the BIMAs are one of the oldest and most renowned awards of their kind - so it goes without saying that our shiny new trophy is standing with pride amidst its brethren in the office. Its also by far the most dangerous trophy we’ve received - made of stainless steel and slightly reminiscent of a Klingon bat'leth.

Some of us here at Cogapp were lucky enough to get tickets to Friday’s sold out dConstruct conference, just down the road from us in Brighton. It was an extremely inspiring day…

Adam Greenfield kick-started the morning with a detailed and compelling study of the role that ubiquitous computing is/can/will play(ing) in large cities (there’s no avoiding a capricious use of tenses when discussing the near-future). His talk was fuelled by the fact that, as of last year, most human beings on planet Earth live in cities. This comes at a time when we’re in the process of shifting from a state of having hundreds of people per computer to hundreds of computers per person, so it stands to reason that the laws and trends that have governed cities of the analogue past will not be relevant for modern/future times.

Information, argues Greenfield, is becoming ‘persistent’ - offered to us at every waking moment, whether it is desired or not. When surrounded by statistics on every object and person in our vicinity, people begin to cluster into groups of common identity, avoiding encounters that do not seem desirable in advance. Ubiquitous computing is likely to usher in mind-boggling efficiency and agency over our environment, but we are at risk of losing a textural, unplanned, helpless quality that has previously made cities such ‘centres for human vitality and creativity’.

Greenfield’s thorough account of possible urban conditions of the near future felt neither pessimistic nor naively utopian, but underlined our need to be fiercely conscientious and adaptable. A couple of chaps from Stamen Design talked us through the creative process for some of their celebrated data visualisations, ranging from busy, data-rich apps like Historical Hurricane Maps and Oakland Crimespotting...

The virtual drum kit that won this month's Codeo challenge looks like it might have to be installed somewhere in the Cogapp office on a more permanent basis, considering how much fun we're having with it. Enjoyable as it is to flail away on the Wii's invisible instruments, the fun we're having also highlights how little flailing our working day normally contains.