<\/p>\n <\/p>\n On entering the museum, along with your ticket you are given a long black matt pen and a receipt with an individual visit code. The pen has two ends: one end comprises a large stylus for designing and the other, a button with a luminous cross \u2013 the NFC reader.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n On your journey around the museum you are encouraged to interact with everything using your pen \u2013 designing everything from wallpaper in the Immersion Room to houses to chairs and tables on large 4K resolution touchscreen tables on each floor \u2013 akin to a scene from Iron Man. All the exhibits\u00a0have captions\u00a0which\u00a0also display black crosses, which when you connect your NFC reader to the cross, vibrates and stores the exhibit, along with\u00a0all of your designs, in an online portal, accessible through\u00a0the internet with your unique visitor code.\u00a0The pen carries more weight than the typical museum app and travels well beyond the museum\u2019s physical boundaries. Aside from the technical aspects, the pen is a uniquely designed, site-specific work of art in itself \u2013 a conductor of creativity.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n We spoke to Micah Walter, Director of Digital and Emerging Media at Cooper Hewitt<\/strong> for more information.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n AZ: What is the main difference between the NFC reader and a standard museum app?<\/strong><\/p>\n MW: <\/strong>So the NFC reader isn\u2019t on a screen, which makes a big difference. It\u2019s tactile and you hold it from the minute you get your admission. It\u2019s a hands-on experience \u2013 every viewer is given permission to play within the museum walls. Also, I think one significant difference is that the NFC reader is not like an app \u2013 you have to understand why you need to download the app, whereas you are directly given the pen to play with.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n AZ: How do you think the pen has changed the way the public interact with the museum?<\/strong><\/p>\n MW: <\/strong>Well I think there are two main points \u2013 the first we touched on before in terms of the interactive and playful element, but it also gives visitors the benefit of recall, where you can actually save a moment in time. We sometimes refer to the device as \u2018an elaborate bookmark\u2019 \u2013 you can always remember and recall that you were here.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The amazing thing about the personal collections you save is that they are stored online forever – you can access them whenever you want. There is a lot of time spent by the public saving notes in their phone or book where they are missing out on physically being in the museum \u2013 and then the notes don\u2019t really make sense when you get home.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n AZ: To your knowledge is there anything similar in any other museums?<\/strong><\/p>\n MW: <\/strong>There are a few similar things across the world \u2013 we took inspiration from the Museum of Old and New Art in Tasmania, Australia. [They have an iPod style gadget that tracks individual movements and collects works you\u2019re standing next to around the gallery and then emails it back to you after your visit.]<\/p>\n <\/p>\n A lot of galleries have beacon points accessed through an app or online. We have bigger ideas for the pen that we would like to incorporate into the wider Smithsonian in Washington.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n AZ: What kind of feedback have you had?<\/strong><\/p>\n MW: <\/strong>It has all been very positive. I mean it\u2019s easy to measure the success by looking at the data from the pens. For example, I can see that 40% of our visitors follow up on their personal collections from the museum visit after leaving. And on our public stats page online<\/a> you can see that in total so far over 4 million items have been \u2018collected\u2019 which averages around 40 items per visitor.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Have you ever found yourself wracking your brain<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":7180,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7178"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7178"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7178\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7180"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7178"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7178"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7178"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"sabin-pen-banner-e1457482967222\"](\"http:\/\/artzealous.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/sabin-pen-banner-e1457482967222-300x150.png\" "\\"Photo")
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