Visualized Psychometry: A Possible Future for History Museums

Image from Uncanny X-men Vol 1, Issue 230 Art by Marc Silvestri.

Hypothesis

Curated content by subject matter experts mixed with user generated content contributed by engaged individuals is the best way to surface interesting interactions.

Background

Guided activities that crowd source information and offer more than just stuffy museum labels can bridge the gap between cultivating an audience versus a community. The recent PMA show, Philadelphia Assembled exemplified this type of social engagement within an artistic setting. Then there's Monument Lab and The Hidden City. Or event/projects like the Symphony for a Broken Orchestra that told the tale of broken musical instruments from Philly's public schools.

Telling stories about places and objects is captivating.

What if a museum like the Philadelphia History Museum tapped into this? What if there was a way to leverage the collection at PHM to invite visitors to share their personal knowledge/experience of a particular place or object in Philly? And based on the interests of each visitor, different objects from the collection would be displayed and specific filtered user generated content would be presented.

Inspiration

Psychometry + Klip Collective
One of my favorite X-Men as a kid was Longshot. He was a goofy character with weird powers including being able to know the history of an object by touching it.

Image from Uncanny X-men Vol 1, Issue 230 Art by Marc Silvestri.

Otherwise known as psychometry, the notion of objects having energy or power is an often explored theme in popular culture. Some of my favorites stories that follow the history of objects include films like: The Red Violin. Or Tv Shows like the 1980s, Friday the 13th series.

Likewise, places have their own sway and psychic histories. And as you can imagine, Philly has quite a few. Why not take curated and user generated stories and information around objects and places to create cutting edge visual projections like the fine work done by the Klip Collective.

Nightscape: A Light and Sound Experience at Longwood Gardens from Klip Collective on Vimeo.

Proposal

The most interactive portion of the PHM is the massive map of Philadelphia that visitors can walk upon. Visit Philly clearly agrees that this is the most interesting part of the museum as it is their main image to promote the space.

Imagine if visitors could go to a place on the map and with a wave of their hands search through images of objects related to that specific locale. What if they could upload a photo and anecdote of their grandfather at that location from 1935 to the museum app and within minutes see that image projected on the walls? Curators and participants would create a visualized index of objects related to a map of the city that visitors can literally run upon. The low-fi solution is an Xbox Kinect, if the user experience needs to be on a Minority Report level then we'll need the Klip Collective.

We could call the interactive exhibit Psychometric Philly and cultivate a dataset of tagged images and videos related to points on a map. Users could access the info by walking onto the map in the PHM or through the website. This would create a tailored user experience online and offline and be a pretty nifty model that other institutions could replicate.

Yes, I know it's (ahem)a longshot, but a guy can still dream.

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