Chair: Tim Schwartz, Alley Interactive, USA

M+W Happiness Bar: Make Your Website Faster and More Secure!
- Tim Schwartz, Alley Interactive, USA, Griffen Fargo, Alley, USA, Pattie Reaves, Alley, USA
Free help! The Happiness Bar is a volunteer-supported group of experts that can help you with your website. We’re here to code, clean, and fix up issues you have. For our inaugural year we will focus on making sites SECURE and FAST. All websites should be available via HTTPS – volunteers will help you get this with Let’s Encrypt, a free system for HTTPS certificates. Websites also need to be fast – using speed tests, our volunteers will identify easy wins and help you implement them on your website, making your site load and respond faster. It’s always the little housekeeping tasks that fall by the wayside, so please come to the bar and let us help you!

Meet the authors and get your own autographed copies of the latest publications by colleagues in the MW community!

• Ways of Hearing, by Damon Krukowski
• Museum Innovation and Social Entrepreneurship: A New Model for a Challenging Era, by Haitham Eid
• Your Museum Needs a Podcast: A Step-By-Step Guide to Podcasting on a Budget for Museums, History Organizations, and Cultural Nonprofits, by Hannah Hethmon
• The Routledge Handbook of Museums, Media and Communication, edited by Kirsten Drotner, Vince Dziekan, Ross Parry, Kim Christian Schrøder

Registration desk opens at 8:30 am Grand Ballroom Pre-function space on the 2nd floor Between the North Tower elevators and the hotel Lobby. The registration desk will be open until 3:00 pm.

Enjoy a light breakfast of pastries, coffee, and tea inside Exhibit Hall.

Chair: Kellian Adams, Green Door Labs, USA

Last chance to experience immersive and interactive experiences at the MWX Arcade in the exhibit hall, plus board games on science, art, and history themes for your museum!

STEAMlabs Modular Escape Room
- Kellian Adams, Green Door Labs, USA
Green Door Labs and TERC have worked with artist, Hilary Scott to create a playable prototype for a STEM-based, modular popup escape room that could be assembled in empty rooms in schools, libraries or museums.

VR Museum
- Kellian Adams, Green Door Labs, USA
Try VR experiences including Lake Baikal: The Science & Spirituality of Extreme Water by Michael White Owens.

Chair: Bill Meyer, Inquireables, USA

Illuminating Colonization Through Augmented Reality
- Seema Rao, Brilliant Idea Studio, USA
In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron asserted French museums and private collections needed to reconsider their ownership of African objects. Macron’s comments come as museums are increasingly being questioned about issues of colonialism and their collections. Colonialism underscores many aspects of museums, from the very foundations of these institutions. Decolonization is an exceptionally challenging problem facing museums today; many of the diversity and access problems stem from the field’s colonialist past. In this paper, we posit methods that technology can help decolonize museums and collections. Museum technologists can become active agents of decolonization in collections and transforming the future of the field.

The Design for Diversity Toolkit: Inclusive Information Systems in Museums
- Amanda Rust, Northeastern University Library, USA, Mattie Clear, Simmons University, USA
Museum systems for the acquisition and care of cultural objects reflect existing structures of oppression. Technology can further perpetuate these power differentials. Providing digital access to the history of marginalized communities requires genuine partnership, including technical and information systems that are responsive to diverse cultural needs. Design for Diversity, an IMLS-funded project, explores strategies for creating more inclusive systems. This talk highlights two resources that explore the details of creating inclusive systems: Stacey Berry’s Honoring the Dead and Sonoe Nakasone’s Comparing Curation Styles. By unpacking technical processes, we empower museum practitioners to recognize where they can make change.

The Kids Are Alright: Collaborating on College-Level "Museum Digital" Courses
- Sabrina Greupner, Ontario Science Centre, Canada
What role can museums play in developing the next generation of digital professionals? Explore how museums can collaborate in the development of courses at the university and college level, through an exploration of the Ontario Science Centre's work with local institutions to offer instruction in digital exhibition development. This lightning talk will highlight the concrete steps taken in curriculum development, from course conception to delivery, and will provide an overview of the rewards and challenges of working with students in an active museum setting. Photos and video of the process, both in-classroom and on-site in the museum, will supplement the talk.

User Experience and the Social Scholar: Uncovering Art Historians' Perceptions, Attitudes, Biases, and Fears Surrounding Social Media
- Betsy Werner Brand, J. Paul Getty Museum, USA
At museums and art institutions, reaching your target audience on social media can be tricky. Even when your defined audience is broad or well researched, the socialsphere is rife with content and clutter competing for attention. But when your target audience is significantly more niche, and under-researched, developing a successful outreach strategy becomes more challenging (particularly when senior staff questions if your target audience is on social media at all!). This lightning talk explores the results of a two-year research project conducted by the Getty Research Institute Web Team into understanding our audience of art history and visual culture scholars, and provides a nuanced and thorough picture of their relationship to social

Let your nerd flags fly with #ArchivesHashtagParty
- Jeannie Chen, National Archives, USA, Hilary Parkinson, National Archives, USA
How can fun be an integral part of a successful social media strategy? The #ArchivesHashtagParty is a successful social media campaign that has convened hundreds of cultural organizations each month since summer 2017. We’ll consider the role of fun in reaching and connecting with audiences (and how to overcome internal challenges to campaigns that aren’t “serious”). We’ll share what we’ve learned about delighting people, forging emotional connections, and crafting an irresistible call to action without a budget. Finally, we’ll explore how museums and archives can empower each other through social media, because #SquadGoals.

Revisiting web content strategy: The right content, for the right audience, found easily
- Ariana French, American Museum of Natural History, USA
What's the point of a museum's website? What purpose does it serve? Is it different from the purpose it *should* serve? How can websites and content strategies evolve over time, aligned to visitor behaviors? This lightning talk will be a case study of the evolving content strategies guiding the overhaul of AMNH.org, the website for the American Museum of Natural History. AMNH.org is changing to achieve a singular goal: "The right content, for the right audience, found easily." Using a "what we know" and "what we don't know" set of strategies, website content and architecture will be aligned to audience-specific needs in incremental updates. This lightning talk will cover the approach used to build a new web content strategy for AMNH.org.

The Museum Collection as Storytelling Hub
- Jesse Bennett, AREA 17, USA
As the virtual front-door to one of the world’s great canonical art collections, the Art Institute of Chicago website sees more than 3 million unique visitors per year. These visitors have the unique opportunity to see something even visitors to the physical museum can’t—the 98% of the collection that isn’t on view at any given time. Last year, AREA 17 partnered with the Institute to create the definitive collection experience. In this Lightning Talk, join the product director from the Art Institute of Chicago site redesign as he provides an insightful overview of how they created a collection-centric storytelling hub that unlocked the interpretive power of museum curators and provided users unsurpassed insights on their favorite works.

Six Imaginary Museums
- Ian Wojtowicz, Miscellaneous Projects, Canada
This brief presentation introduces six fictional museum archetypes — a glimpse into some possible futures for the way we shape museums. The designs range from extrapolations of current trends, to impossible configurations of learning environments that would be at home in science fiction films. This process of imagining strange, new designs has a long tradition in art, literature and architecture. More recently, this technique has earned the moniker of "design fiction." This lightning talk will give a nod to Borges’ libraries, and the architectural works of Boullée, Piranesi, Fuller and Superstudio and others as it presents sketches for how museums might look in the near distant future.

Everything is on Fire: How to Advocate for the Arts with Your Elected Officials
- Claire Blechman, Peabody Essex Museum, USA
#MuseumsAreNotNeutral and in 2019 we cannot pretend we are “above” what’s happening in Washington, in our statehouses, or on our streets. We have to actively advocate for our values, our budgets, and our people. This includes advocating with elected officials at all levels of government, to make sure they properly fund our arts agencies, and enact laws and policies that keep our nation a place where arts and artists can flourish. This lightning talk will cover best practices from AAM’s Museum Advocacy Days on Capitol Hill, including how to: get your representative's attention with a constituent meeting, formulate your “asks,” and maintain a good relationship after the meeting. With a few good tools, everyone can be an effective advocate!

Cultivating the Genius of the Self-Made Artist: Working Self Made Artists & Arts Collectives to Increase Diversity and Community Engagement
- Mia Loving, Invisible Majority, USA
Through out the country museums struggle to engage the average the citizen and be truly reflective of the city they are housed. Particularly in Baltimore, the most funded museums are the least reflective of the population and demographics of Baltimore. This should be seen as a problem. Museums get a lot of City, State and Federal resources to be the culture bearers of our society and they should be fully reflective of that society. What does that mean? More artists from the cities these places are housed, more artists of color, more differently abled artists, more artists not formally trained.. more performances, more films and more educational opportunities.. more accessible ramps and ways to engage for families. The solution is simple and

Chair: Bruce Wyman, USD Design | MACH Consulting, USA

Recent apps – iOS and Android, touch tables, kiosks and bespoke hardware (as distinct from websites including mobile sites) – are critiqued by an expert panel of peer reviewers including Vicki Portway (NASM, USA), Robin White Owen (MediaCombo, USA), Ariel Schwartz (Philadelphia Museum of Art, USA), and Sandy Goldberg (SGScripts, USA) under the leadership of Bruce Wyman (USD Design | MACH Consulting, USA). Everyone learns from the process and takes away tips that can be applied to other apps.

Crowdsourcing Knowledge: Interactive Learning with Mapping Historic Skies
- Jessica BrodeFrank, University of London, USA, Samantha Blickhan, Zooniverse, USA
The Adler Planetarium is currently working on a collaboration between our collections and our Zooniverse/citizen-science teams to create our first attempt at an in-exhibit interactive to utilize crowdsourcing efforts. The hope is to use an interactive in our new "Night Sky" exhibit to allow our guests to identify and sort throughout 4,000 constellation maps to create a database of what each constellation has looked like throughout time and cultures. As we begin testing how to bring this sort of experience out of the Zooniverse website and into the galleries, we need help from our MW colleagues on how to evaluate our beta program and test out what guests might really want from a crowdsourcing interactive.

Crit of the Parks Canada National App
- Valérie Chartrand, Parks Canada, Canada
The Parks Canada Mobile App helps visitors plan their trip and enjoy their visit with fun and interactive content. The mobile app has detailed information on Parks Canada places, how to prepare for a visit, interactive maps to help plan a trip and fun photo features.

The Lubbock Lake Landmark Mobile App - App Crit
- Megan Reel, Museum of Texas Tech University, USA, Jessica Stepp, Museum of Texas Tech University, USA
The Lubbock Lake Landmark, an archaeological and natural history preserve/small museum, released an initial version of an iOS app in November 2018, that seeks to improve how it serves the needs of its visitors and enhance a small exhibit space. The new app featured wildlife guides, an interactive map, augmented reality (AR) models of collections items the users can view at home, and expanded gallery content specifically through the use of AR and additional audio content.

Yale Center for British Art App
- Anna Bozzuto, Yale Center for British Art, USA
The Yale Center for British Art mobile app offers users an in-depth guide to select works in the Center’s collection as well as detailed information about its landmark building, designed by Louis I. Kahn. The YCBA app features an interactive map, audio tours, and a digital calendar of events. The YCBA app publicly launched on January 25th, 2019 and was created in collaboration with the Yale University Art Gallery, which also has released an app for its collection and building. Both software platforms were developed by Cuseum.

With support from Unified Field and Cuseum, this new Community of Practice examines strategies and sustainable business models for museums and other cultural nonprofits that need to respond to evolving audience demands, while positioning themselves for the future.

The topics and research of the community are set by its members and will include new types of engagements, inclusivity, the developing role of museums in the smart city, museum incubators, new types of partnerships, sustainability, equitable staffing, and maintaining the organization’s purpose in the face of market-driven economics.

More than a pretty picture: what visitor visuals say about your museum
- Amrita Gurney, CrowdRiff, Canada, Anne Botman, Canadian Museum of Nature, Canada
Museums are lifting their curtains — curating not just art and artifacts, but visitor-generated content too. These visual stories about a museum’s exhibits, culture, and visitor experiences help create a more welcoming digital front door to an organization. In this session we share how museums can best leverage visitor-created visuals to show, not tell, their visitors what they stand for, who their community is, and the people behind the institution.

Chair: Damon Krukowski, Independent, USA

Actually Submersive (Not Totally Immersive)
- Vince Dziekan, Monash University, Australia
Alejandro Iñárritu's "Carne y Arena" exemplifies the visual and narrative potential of virtual reality. However, the challenge of presenting VR artworks as in-gallery immersive experiences remains relatively uncharted territory. Inspired by my first-hand viewing encounter with its exhibition at Fondazione Prada, Milan, this paper explores what this work tells us about the respective ways that VR and museums function as "extra-dimensional" spaces in which cultural experiences are embedded, putting forward a proposition that it is, actually, the successful calibration of the viewing experience associated with VR cinema and curatorial design that underpins the realization of Iñárritu's creative vision and resulting "subversive" experience.

The Materiality of the Immaterial: Collecting Digital Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum
- Juhee Park, Victoria and Albert Museum, UK, Anouska Samms, Victoria and Albert Museum, UK
Museum practices were predominantly designed around physical objects. Through the exploration of digital objects, this paper will argue for additional notions of materiality to be further embedded within the V&A. Through the application of digital materiality, as utilised within media theory, the V&A’s acquisition of the iPhone 6 will be used to demonstrate that the V&A could collect the “seemingly immaterial” material affordances of digital objects. This paper will not only contribute to the museum’s collecting strategies but also have wider ramifications on documentation practices, conservation, and strategies around display.

Escaping the Traditional Learning Environment: Wigwam Escape
- Lauren Bennett, Institute for American Indian Studies, USA
How do we transform a night out with friends into an immersive and historical learning experience? Educational escape rooms reach new audiences and push the boundaries of the museum experience. This session offers insight into the creation, design and implementation of the Institute for American Indian Studies’ immersive teaching tool: Wigwam Escape.

Chair: Corey Timpson, Corey Timpson Design Inc., Canada

Being there: creating inclusive and accessible solutions for immersive digital experiences.
- Brigitte Beaulne-Syp, Virtual Museum of Canada, Canada, Sina Bahram, Prime Access Consulting, Inc., USA
"Fabienne Théoret, an Anishinabe from Lac-Simon, Québec, is talking to you in front of her house. She invites you to her grandfather’s birthday. On your desktop, you can click around her. On your mobile, you can use the accelerometer. Little kids run around you. Their laughter surrounds you….it’s as if you’re actually in the room with them." Described above is the uniquely engaging nature of la Biota Rouge vif’s “Hanging Out,” an upcoming online virtual exhibit centered around 25 spherical 360-degree videos. As we will discuss, the participatory nature of the 360-degree video format gives users an outstanding digital experience, accessible from desktop and on mobile, and creates the feeling of participating in a story, a space, or a lands

Designing a "no interface" audio walk

- Edith Terte, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark, Anders Sundnes Løvlie, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Audio-based locative media can be used to offer create audio guide-like experiences in public spaces. However, such experiences raise concerns that the mobile device may take too much of the user's attention, resulting in visitors focusing only on their mobile screens. This paper presents a design which follows the principle "the best interface is no interface," in order to facilitate "attentional balance" between digital content and physical surroundings. User tests demonstrate that the absence of a visual interface allows users to ignore their mobile screens and navigate simply using the audio while observing their surroundings.

Art in Rich-Prospect: Evaluating Next-Generation User Interfaces for Cultural Heritage
- Christopher Morse, University of Luxembourg, Luxembourg
The present study reports on the user experience (UX) of rich-prospect browsing, an emerging interface design trend for digital cultural heritage. Moreover, it describes the results of user testing for three different arts and culture collections that make use of rich-prospect. The study recruited 30 participants of varying ages, nationalities, and museum visiting habits to discuss their museum experiences and test three different applications: Coins, Curator Table, and Museum of the World. The results of the study provide insights into the user experience of a new browsing medium and reveal the information-seeking habits and patterns that occurred within these information environments.

Simple Tangible Interaction: An Illumination of Trajan’s Weapons Frieze and Open-source Models For Exhibition Development And Hands-on Storytelling
- Todd Berreth, North Carolina State University, USA
This how-to session and paper describes a haptic digital interactive museum installation at the Museum of the Imperial Forum in Rome. The project was entirely manufactured via "maker" technologies, a laser cutter and 3-D printer; its interactivity was implemented through hobbyist electronics, a low-cost micro-computer and simple scripting. This project led to a parallel effort to create a generic, open-source project, and a set of instructions on how to build a similar installation with other curatorial content, using the same technologies and techniques. It's a simple entry point to incorporating these modes into a user’s curatorial and storytelling practice. Such work offers a compelling model for open-source exhibition development.

Augmented Reality Authoring for Cultural Heritage Sites using the Sitsim AR Editor
- Gunnar Liestøl, University of Oslo, Norway, Tomas Stenarson, CodeGrind AB, Sweden
Introduction to easy AR–authoring for museums and CH sites using the free Sitsim AR Editor. AR applications are popular in museums and CH sites. High-quality AR–apps must be adapted to each museum’s and site’s characteristics, and technical challenges are demanding. With the Sitsim AR Editor, staff with basic knowledge of digital design and 3-D scanning will be able to put together complex applications. The how–to session will teach: • AR storytelling for museums and CH sites • How to import, position, scale and orient 3-D terrains and objects • Storytelling and content design with the Unity–based Sitsim AR Editor • Basics of creating indirect AR apps: importing links, global functions

Constructing a converged open-source museum platform.
- Tommy Wilson, Independent, USA
In this session, attendees will learn the basic building blocks of how to construct an open source museum platform which encompasses both the business and collections domains. Modeling from the system at The Fabric Workshop and Museum, a recognized leader in the field of contemporary arts, discussions will be held on choosing hardware platforms, granting that is available, and designing for commodity hardware. Then, the discussion will move into software and interoperability from the operating system level up to public facing systems.

How to Start a Podcast at Your Museum
- Hannah Hethmon, H. Hethmon Consulting, USA, Ian Elsner, Museum Archipelago, USA
Want to explore the booming medium of podcasting at your museum? This session will cover the minimum skills, knowledge, and costs needed to produce a podcast in-house. Podcasters and museum professionals Hannah Hethmon and Ian Elsner will go step-by-step through every aspect of podcast production, including developing a concept, equipment needed, recording and editing, and marketing. Participants will leave with an understanding of everything that goes into podcasting and the knowledge needed to start their own. During the session, the speakers will provide the opportunity for participants to handle and compare the equipment needed to start podcasting.

Chair: Sina Bahram, Prime Access Consulting, Inc., USA

Help us build an accessibility and inclusive design knowledge base for our field. Corey Timpson and Sina Bahram team up for an hour of documented questions and answers. Bring your accessibility and inclusive design queries and solutions – from Firefox to fire exits, from visual description to visual design – and help us build a knowledge base of best practices for the community by the community. Through our work we encounter complex scenarios that demand complex and nuanced solutions, and yet we also encounter common issues that saturate the cultural landscape. Symptoms require treatment, but sustainability and advancement field-wide will only come from informing ourselves at the cause level.

Chair: Rich Cherry, Museum Operations, USA

The Good, the Bad, the Ugly? Thoughts about museums, media and their consumers
- Harald Kraemer, School of Creative Media, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong S.A.R.
Since the 1990s, multimedia technology has had a growing impact on communication and education in museums. Museums have spent enormous effort in the production of multimedia applications for kiosk systems, audio guides, portables, silver discs, websites, apps, etc. In the face of the growing loss of the products of our digital cultural heritage, the question remains how we can ensure that future generations will have access to the hypermedia applications created by museums.