It’s always a pleasure to evolve our work with museums, and especially a pleasure as museums evolve too. We’ve upgraded our longstanding Storykiosk installation at the California Museum for incorporation in the museum’s Unity Center, a large center in the museum focusing on the state’s diverse people, taking a stand against intolerance and hate. The Center, designed and developed by West Office with the Museum and...

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We’re excited to ship two new Portable Storykiosk Kits out this week — our next generation combination of hardware and software designed specifically for gathering video stories and testimonials in public places. We’ve developed these kits for a new hybrid model of museum exhibit, one that includes both a long term installation in the museum, and also a portable version that is easy to take out to community spaces beyond the...

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If you’re heading to ACM Interactivity, the national children’s museum conference this week, be sure to stop by our booth and check out the latest: our prototype  allowing visitors to create and share puppet shows between museums in different countries. The idea behind this: simple, fun moments of creative family expression go a long way toward building connections. I’ve been working on this with Vicky Cave, an exhibit...

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I’m quite excited to announce a new frontier in our community storytelling mission — the use of visitors’ own mobile devices to record stories. The Museum of Durham History incorporated our cloud-based tool to record stories of members of the Ar-Razzaq Islamic Center in Durham. Ar-Razzaq is one of the oldest Muslim communities in North Carolina, and a year long community-storytelling initiative culminated in an exhibit at the...

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How can museum exhibits foster empathy? This is a long overdue post of our session for the Association of Children’s Museums (ACM) Interactivity conference this last year. It’s a topic that is increasingly relevant in a polarized country (and world), where studies show an alarming decline in empathy the last three decades (the “empathy deficit”), and increases in stress and isolation. How can museums respond proactively...

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We’re excited to announce a new prototype we’ve developed: an Augmented Reality application where visitors’ stories become embedded throughout a community. People often ask: “What can you do with stories after you’ve recorded them in exhibits?” We’ve been happy to provide a number of ways that extend the reach of exhibits: 1) share them on the museum’s social media feed, 2) incorporate them in a...

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