Why I Love TAP
Posted in Design, Technology on 08. Jun, 2010
I hate kiosks. I’ve said it before. A sad leftover of late-20th Century museum design. Get some technology and put it in a box. Keep it sealed like one of the exhibits.
Technology now is flexible, mobile and information hasn’t been a strictly linear experience in years. There is nothing a kiosk (ie. a central information terminal) can do that’s better than my phone or my laptop. I sit and casually watch television, hitting into Google people, places or history and can do quick data mine for surrounding information.
It is painfully tricky to do this in museums. Mainly because of the general lack of space to sit or available WiFi. Museums that have this can be a godsend, especially if you feel you don’t have to buy a coffee first.
So I love museum mobile apps. I like to have a little control over getting more information. That’s why I like Augmented Reality so much. But AR is still a few steps too far from that plateau of productivity.
So then there’s TAP. Good old wireless networks, no fiddly barcodes and I can get a bunch of curated content that I can pick through. Properly curated too.
TAP is a content management system. And it’s Open Source.
You can have this in your own museum. Here’s five reasons why. They should have added a sixth: Made by a Museum. The Indianapolis Museum of Art is becoming the game-changer to the future of museums. It may be one of the first to become a resistant museum tribe (1. Localise production. 2. Virtualise everything else).
This hasn’t got anything like enough exposure over here in the UK, where Culture doesn’t have a… culture of early adoption of innovative technology. TAP can go, and you have mobile tours in your museum.
Shame its iPhone/iPod only. But the exciting part is that the IMA is looking to keep on developing this. There’s no end to the potential of a good UI and an easy-to-learn system behind it.
“1. Localise production. 2. Virtualise everything else”
Yes!!!
Not to sound crass but, pricing, installation effort, complexity to upkeep? Do you have a sense of what it takes?
That Localise/Virtualise is straight from John Robb. I take it as more of a goal than a policy just to refrain from massive revolutionary overhaul.
Unless you mean TAP?
Yup, I meant TAP.
Well, it runs on Drupal and is all free to download. My experience of Drupal is that it’s as difficult as any other CMS.
http://code.google.com/p/tap-tours/wiki/CMSInstallation
It doesn’t seem too hard to install.
Creating the iPhone app side of things seems a bit tricker but there’s still a good set of guides. I would say I could do it and I’m not a app programmer. You would need the Apple Developers account for $99 to make it available.
Is the fact that so many fantastic innovative museum things are occurring on an exceptionally expensive pieces of kit a form of social inclusion?
There’s a world of freelance iphone app developers out there. A simple implementation could cost in the hundreds rather than thousands of pounds.
Thanks for the details, Pete.
My pleasure